Thank you all. These are informative responses!

It's not a safety if your kid wouldn't happily attend, or if it's not affordable for your family, so you'll need to find small safeties with reasonable tuition or good merit or need based aid, if the latter applies.

Public liberal arts colleges can be a great choice for safeties, both instate (look at St. Mary's, Salisbury or Mary Washington depending on your state) or in states with lower tuition (Shepherd, Truman State, Minnesota - Morris, Evergreen, just to name a few). Or look at private schools that are a half step down from a match, where he/she's more likely to get Merit aid. LAC's are there for students at all levels, from places like Amherst that are reaches for everyone, to lovely little schools like Ohio Wesleyan or Saint Lawrence or Susquehanna that will offer to merit aid to a strong but not super start students, to places that do a great job of supporting every kind of learner, like Mount Ida, which just offered a very nice merit award to a friend of mine's daughter, a lovely girl and very hard worker with low scores due to learning disabilities.

Since admissions at LACs is more of a crap shoot, it probably helps to have a few schools with rolling or early admissions on the list. That way you can get the "safety" question take care of before submitting the rest of the applications.

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/

I think safeties are harder to define at top schools. Probably why the guidance counselors don't like the term.

We looked at naviance as well as admit rates. Applied EA to a solid safety which DC would be happy to attend (Michigan) which takes the pressure off the rest of the apps. If your DC is in the top quartile of stats, and shows some interest in the school, it's probably a good bet. According to our naviance there have been some kids with very high stats denied at schools that probably were their safeties.

1/2 meant $13,000 represented 1/2 of the out-of-state tuition

19:16 again. Just to emphasize how random it may be, I'll share this. Another student from DC class was accepted at the same out-of-state U. He had higher SATs, invited into the honors program, given no merit aid vs my DC who was not accepted into honors, had a higher gpa and was given 1/2 $13,000/yr merit aid. They saw something in her application. Maybe it was the timing of her application, or who read it. We'll never know. You can bet that other family wasn't too happy.

Your DC may get merit aid from her preferred school, but you just can't ever count on it. My DC got into 7 schools (only 1 was private) and merit aid varied from 0 to $15,000/yr. We would have never been able to anticipate the merit aid, the final costs, before decisions came in. Sooo a financial safety means you can afford to pay the full amount of room & board each year for 4 years. This is without counting on financial aid, or scholarships, or merit aid. I'd get to know (and love) an instate public - even if ultimately you prefer and suspect your DC will attend a smaller private - just in case.

If you're in VA, you're in luck.
To identify safeties, we looked at the kid's school's Naviance scatter gram. If the college accepted most others with stats the same as your kid, it's a safety.

I started the other thread about how many and which schools DC should visit. Since many people recommended coming up with safeties, can you help me understand how you identify them? What percentile for GPA and standardized tests does DC need to be in for a school to be a safety? If a student is too far above the median, might he be rejected because the college knows it's only his safety? As for identifying schools we know we can afford, DC would really do better (we think) at a smaller college, and it appears the small colleges are all much more expensive than the large OOS universities (like 50-60k for tuition plus room and board). I don't think DC is going to have the test scores to get substantial merit aid from a SLAC. I would love to be wrong, but my understanding is that such aid goes to the 2200+ kids that the SLACs are trying to woo from the top schools.