How many reaches, targets and safeties?

[Anonymous]

If your school limits (or strongly encourages) no more than 12 applications, did you apply to 3 reaches, 3 targets and 3 safeties? If you have 2 safeties you really love, has anyone loaded up on reaches? My DC is thinking 2 safeties, 2 targets, 8 reaches? Private school is discouraging this approach and saying it can really hurt the kid’s mental health to get a lot of rejections.

[Anonymous]

We did 1 reach, 6 targets, 4 safeties. Build your list from safeties up. Not from reaches down.

[Anonymous]

If you divide them equally wouldn’t it be 4,4,4 and not 3,3,3?

I think some of this is going to depend on how safe the safeties are and how much your kid likes them. If your kid has a safety that’s guaranteed entry and a top choice or notifies early and is a top choice then they can stop with a small number of safeties. If they are meh on their safeties or they have schools that they are going to be very disappointed to end up with one, or if their safeties are really likelies and not guaranteed then they need to keep looking and build that safety list.

[Anonymous]

Other than applying to at least two safety schools, the rest depends upon the student's particulate interests in light of individual school's offerings.

[Anonymous]

Don't overload on safeties, just be sure your kid really likes and would attend the designated safeties if all goes wrong with targets and reaches.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:If you divide them equally wouldn’t it be 4,4,4 and not 3,3,3?

I think some of this is going to depend on how safe the safeties are and how much your kid likes them. If your kid has a safety that’s guaranteed entry and a top choice or notifies early and is a top choice then they can stop with a small number of safeties. If they are meh on their safeties or they have schools that they are going to be very disappointed to end up with one, or if their safeties are really likelies and not guaranteed then they need to keep looking and build that safety list.

Yes, sorry. School strongly recommends 9 schools (3, 3, 3), but will allow up to 12 (recommends 4, 4, 4).

[Anonymous]

You do you.

[Anonymous]

I think if the kid has two safeties they love, has the stamina to apply to a lot of reaches, and the stomach to be rejected from them all, they should go for it. Ladies who work in college admissions are not the swing for the fences type of people. They just don’t get it.

[Anonymous]

My kid applied to many safeties….
Pick 1-3 that your kid would actually attend.
Pick reaches carefully (not shotgunning, but reading through what they are looking for in applicants to see if there is a fit.) I’d even read through the Supp essay questions now. You can kind of tell what kind of kid they are looking for by the types of questions they ask. For schools where there is a natural fit, essays will be much easier, and frankly are just stronger applicants.

[Anonymous]

Independent school CCO are concerned for the acceptance of the class as a whole, rather than your particular child. Of course they recommend a safety and target heavy list.

[Anonymous]

For those reaches start working on an application narrative and mapping out what your kid might want to cover as early as June.

Spend several months framing it, editing it. With so few reaches you are going to want them to be absolutely tight spotless and powerful.

[Anonymous]

The second our kid got into a target, the safety schools lost their luster. DC was annoyed at the effort taken to apply to multiple safeties. But our parental reasoning was, if our DC didn't get into targets for some reason, we wanted there to be a choice of where to go. Easy for us to say as public school parents with unlimited # of apps. To answer your Q, our kid had roughly 3 reaches, 6 targets, 2 safeties, *and* 2 other applications to large public systems (eg UCs/Cal States) that provided a range of all 3.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:If you divide them equally wouldn’t it be 4,4,4 and not 3,3,3?

I think some of this is going to depend on how safe the safeties are and how much your kid likes them. If your kid has a safety that’s guaranteed entry and a top choice or notifies early and is a top choice then they can stop with a small number of safeties. If they are meh on their safeties or they have schools that they are going to be very disappointed to end up with one, or if their safeties are really likelies and not guaranteed then they need to keep looking and build that safety list.

This. There are also nuances when kids are choosing among their options. For example for a safety schools, did they get offered a spot in the honors program, or offered really great merit or acceptance to a certain major that they don’t have with a target or reach? For my kids, both really strong students, those were the types of things that might tip them to choose a safety vs target school.

Also, what are you willing to pay and is it school dependent? If you are willing to pay full cost, usually ED is at least considered. If you aren’t able or willing to pay full cost, it wouldn’t make sense to apply to mostly reach schools unless you knew your family would qualify for a lot of need base aid and you could make those number works.

[Anonymous]

And make sure they are true safeties, esp if looking for engineering or business.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:If you divide them equally wouldn’t it be 4,4,4 and not 3,3,3?

I think some of this is going to depend on how safe the safeties are and how much your kid likes them. If your kid has a safety that’s guaranteed entry and a top choice or notifies early and is a top choice then they can stop with a small number of safeties. If they are meh on their safeties or they have schools that they are going to be very disappointed to end up with one, or if their safeties are really likelies and not guaranteed then they need to keep looking and build that safety list.

This. There are also nuances when kids are choosing among their options. For example for a safety schools, did they get offered a spot in the honors program, or offered really great merit or acceptance to a certain major that they don’t have with a target or reach? For my kids, both really strong students, those were the types of things that might tip them to choose a safety vs target school.

Also, what are you willing to pay and is it school dependent? If you are willing to pay full cost, usually ED is at least considered. If you aren’t able or willing to pay full cost, it wouldn’t make sense to apply to mostly reach schools unless you knew your family would qualify for a lot of need base aid and you could make those number works.

+1 for my kids they only applied to one reach each, both in-state public Us. Otherwise, it was targets or safeties, looking for schools the liked that could fit our budget. Also, neither liked the reaches enough to ED to them.