I am flummoxed and crying out from the wilderness. Here is the situation. Assume a student with a 3.9ish unweighted GPA, max number of APs permitted by the high school, 32-33ish ACT and decent but non earth shattering extra curriculars - lots of school and community theater, four years in jazz band, four year marching band kid with one year as a section leader, keyclub for four years with 2 as president, a couple other school clubs but not in leadership positions. This same hypothetical kid wants to go to a small (<7,500) school away from home and is at this point mostly interested in the "classic" liberal arts schools of a couple thousand kids or less. We have seen several, and there is a pretty nice "first cut" list going on. That part of the search is not the problem. The problem is that all of the schools on the "first cut" list, and on the still to visit list have acceptance rates at or below say 25%.
I understand that the general advice is that a safety school is a school where you can "be sure of admission and that you know you can afford". Well. In our world that pretty much means a larger (>10,000) state school, which is not somewhere this hypothetical kid would be happy. So looking at the list of schools this hypothetical kid likes, there are a good few where her stats are at or above the 75% line on the most recent common data set. So I wonder, could that be a safety school (for her) even with admit rates at 20% or so? It seems nuts, and hence my quandry. So there is the question. How do you define a safety? Is it based on the admitted stats of the preceding class? Is it dependent on the overall admit rate? Any thoughts would be appreciated.
One fly in the ointment. The high school, while academically rigorous is located in fly over country so there is not a huge amount of naviance data out there for the schools we are looking at.
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