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[quote=Anonymous]Safeties are almost never top schools. If the student can't be reasonably certain of admission, it's not a safety.

It's time consuming, but the best way to find schools that could be safeties (and might offer merit aid) is to look at the data from the Common Data Set. This website publishes the data for most colleges:

http://nces.ed.gov/collegenavigator/

There is a search engine on the left of this page that allows you to narrow down by location, etc. Or you can search for specific colleges. Once you have a specific college in mind, you want to look at their admissions stats. Look especially at the SAT scores at the 75th percentile. To identify schools where a student might have a decent shot at merit aid, look for schools where his SAT scores would be above that 75th percentile mark. The admissions data will also tell you what share of male and female applicants were admitted which gives an idea of how likely one is to be admitted.

What's not on this website, but is reported by colleges on the common data set, is whether or not they give merit aid. For that info, you can google "common data set" and the name of specific colleges; almost all colleges have the common data set somewhere on their websites.

This is another great website that can help you find colleges:

http://diycollegerankings.com/

This website has a spreadsheet with scads of info on every college taken from a number of different sources. You can buy the spreadsheet for $42, but the website also gives away some of the info for free in various posts.

http://diycollegerankings.com/diy-college-rankings-college-search-spreadsheet-2/

I also like this website:

http://www.thecollegesolution.com/[/quote]

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