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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]As the parent of a sophomore the thing I find concerning reading all these posts is that the system seems so capricious with a hefty dose of luck involved. My kid will probably be fairly high stats and I think is going to want to ED to a school ranked around 25. That may work out or not, and we get that and that other top schools are a lottery. What freaks me out a little is the stories of kids not getting into the safeties it’s been recommended they fall in love with either because of yield protection or increases in applications. It seems like some kids can fall betwixt and between. Hopefully applying to enough schools will lessen that risk however 1) it may be hard to “fall in love” with multiple safeties and 2) it does seem like all of that is just compounding the problem with kids feeling they need to apply to 15 plus schools to spread the risk. [/quote]

Part of the phenomenon that I think I'm seeing is that particular schools that have been safeties all of a sudden get incredibly "hot."  So you may have 1/3 of the graduating class applying to the same school as a safety.  At some point, there is simply a limit to how many students are going to be admitted from any one school to Pitt, or UVM, or UCSB, or UICU.  The parents and the college counselor are looking at Naviance and seeing a sea of green checkmarks, but they aren't taking into account that there are literally 5X as many students applying in this cycle then 3-4 years ago.  And because schools tend to get "hot" not just at one school but regionally/throughout similar school districts with similar student bodies, it becomes even harder to stand out.  And so acceptances plummet.

You could kind of see this happening in real time over last summer and early fall, and you could also see the acceptances and merit aid at those schools dropping precipitously.  My DC is at a private school, but just looking at Naviance, and to give one example, the number of students applying to Pitt more than tripled between 2018 and 2022, to the point where more than 1/3 of the class applied there.  The number of acceptances remained about the same, but it means that it completely changed category-wise.  UCSB applications more than doubled in the past five years, and UVM application numbers were also markedly up.

In trying to figure out whether a school that was previously a safety remains a safety (and a match a match, reach a reach), you need to look not just at historic admissions rates but also at sheer volume of applications and trends over time.  That's the only way to assess whether the historic admissions data can be a reliable indicator of DC's chances.

FWIW, all of my kids' safeties were at small schools, but there just weren't a lot of kids from DC's school applying to them and there weren't any more this year than in past years, with our DC as often the only applicant or one of only 1-2.  In our case, the historic #s were extremely predictive of admissions outcomes, although we had a couple of nice surprises from reach schools also.

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Bump.  Nobody wants to hear this, but it's true.[/quote]

ITA. Thinking more about this,  some ideas for "safety" universities that aren't as hot as Pitt, UVM, etc but which are great (and fun) schools:

Indiana--Bloomington
UMass Amherst
Delaware
Auburn

and SLACs:

Clark
Lawrence
St. Olaf
Muhlenberg
Wooster
Wheaton (MA)

[/quote]

PP here - and this is hilarious.  Don't disagree, but Auburn and Indiana University Bloomingdale already probably doubled applications this year - they are in the class of the schools that I think exploded - and if I had to guess, Auburn and UMass-Amherst did too.  My DC's school is very small so the Naviance #s aren't that insightful (although still hugely helpful).  Just saying that the "safety" schools are already not these ones.

For the small schools, those all seem like great schools.  I don't know if those application #s are up, but you couldn't go wrong with a kid going there.  At least based on my kids' application cycle, they are still in line with historic norms.  And with all the small SLACs, I'd urge you to look closely at the endowment and financial stability trajectory.[/quote]

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