When we talk about applying to colleges, we typically use three categories: Target, Reach, and Safety. A Target school is a school that you are pretty sure you can be accepted to. A Reach school is a college you’re not likely to be accepted to. And a Safety is one where you are quite sure you’ll be accepted—it’s a safe bet. The standard thinking is that it’s fine to apply to Reach schools, but you should focus on Target schools. And you should make sure you apply to a Safety or two, just in case.
According to this three-category framework, how do you know if a particular college is a Reach, Target, or Safety? One common way to determine is to use standardized test scores. If your SAT (or ACT) scores fall in the published mid-range of a college, then it’s a Target. If you’re in their top 25%, then it’s a Safety. Bottom 25% means it’s a Reach. Another way is to use the same method, but with your GPA. And one of the most popular ways is to use the Scattergram function in Naviance, which shows you how many people from your school got accepted to a college charting their test scores and GPA. There are also more anecdotal ways of determining, like talking to friends and family members who were accepted (or not) to the college, or extrapolating from a comment made by an admissions representative. There’s also the infamous “chance me” threads on forums like College Confidential. Knowing if a college is a Safety, Reach, or Target isn’t an exact science; you don’t really know until you apply and are accepted or denied. But it’s an exercise many students go through to put together a balanced college list.
One thing I’ve learned over the years working with students on admission is that, surprisingly, a less individualized approach is probably the better one. These guesses about whether a school is a Target, Reach, or Safety—they’re just guesses. They’re imprecise guesses that take up a lot of time and energy. I don’t think the time and energy are worth it.
What I do with my students isn’t radically different, at least on the surface. I still divide colleges into three categories, and the categories have to do with likelihood of acceptance. But I’ve let go of trying to draw lines for the three categories individually for every student. I use the same three “buckets” for everyone I work with. Trying to re-draw the lines for everyone is a waste of my time and a waste of the students’ time. I never look at scattergrams, and I never ask my students to look at them.
Here are the buckets I use.
Schools where you are highly confident you will be accepted. This is the category formerly known as Safety. For almost everyone I work with, I use a 50% admission rate or higher as the standard. I want everyone to apply to at least two colleges in this category. They are often, but not always, in-state public universities. These should be the first schools you choose. They are your top priority. Don’t make these a last-minute thought. Some of the unhappiest students I’ve known were the ones who didn’t put thought into their highly-confident schools and then were denied by everyone else. That’s a hard place to be, so take some time to find high-acceptance schools that are a good academic and cultural fit for you. Don’t daydream about other colleges until you’ve picked at least two from this bucket.
Here’s some good news: this bucket includes around 80% of colleges. Despite anything you’ve heard about how impossible it is to get into college, the vast majority of colleges accept more than half their applicants. It’s not a sacrifice to find schools that fit this category. You just have to decide to find these schools first, and then dedicate time and energy into finding them.
Schools where absolutely nobody should feel confident they’ll be accepted. Please hear this, and know I’m saying with the greatest amount of love and respect: if a college has an acceptance rate under 20%, you should assume you’re not going to be accepted. No matter how good a student you are, no matter how many impressive things you’ve done, no matter how strong a writer you are. These schools get so many applicants that they have to deny lots of strong, impressive students. Obviously some people do get accepted to these schools, and you very well could be one of them. But because the odds are so low, choose these schools last. Almost all of the ambitious and impressive students I’ve worked with think about these schools first. They’ve really internalized the idea of “Dream School,” and want to find the most perfect place for them. I understand that, but almost none of the most ambitious and impressive students I’ve worked with end up enrolling at one of these schools. (Even students who get accepted to one or more of these schools usually end up not enrolling at them.) Apply to as many of these schools as you want. Seriously, go for it! But don’t make them your highest priority.
Everything in between, with acceptance rates between 20% and 50%. After you’ve got your highly-confident schools picked out, this should be the next batch. And around half of your applications are going to be to these schools. It’s really the sweet spot. What I say to my clients about these schools is “I’d be pretty surprised if you got into all these colleges. But I’d also be pretty surprised if you got into none of them. What’s going to be fun is seeing which ones accept you, and I can’t predict that at all.” And I mean it: some of the happiest conversations I have with students in the spring is about their acceptances to these schools—and, usually, their choice of one of these schools to enroll. Because of all this, these schools should get most your time and attention. This is where most of the work is going to go, and where most of the payoff for that work is going to come from.
That’s it. Those are the three categories, the same for most of my students. Instead of Safety/Target/Reach, we have Probably/Maybe/Probably Not. And I tell everyone to use the overall acceptance rate—and ONLY the overall acceptance rate—to know which schools are in each category. We don't waste time trying to use other measurements, of either the school or the student, to try to figure out how to categorize colleges.
Are there exceptions? Are there students who should adjust the dividing lines for these buckets? Sure, absolutely. When I talk about “my students,” it’s not necessarily a representative group. As a teacher, I mostly dealt with students who were in multiple AP classes and had been identified as Gifted & Talented. As a private consultant, I work with families invested enough in this process that they’re willing to pay me to help them with it. So the lines I draw for the three “buckets'“ may not be the same for everyone.
If you haven’t taken many of the upper-level courses offered at your school, or if you’ve struggled with grades, or if external circumstances mean you missed a large portion of school or had a very rough patch of high school, you may want to bump the line for “schools where you are highly confident you will be accepted” up to 70% acceptance rates, or even 80% or 90%. That’s fine.
On the other end of things, I know plenty of counselors and consultants who use a 25% acceptance rate as their threshold for “schools where absolutely nobody should feel confident they’ll be accepted” instead of the 20% I use. That makes sense.
And occasionally I have students who skip the middle section altogether. After choosing one or two schools where they’re confident they’ll be accepted (usually because they have guaranteed acceptance somewhere), they spend all their time on a few more under-20% schools that really would be “dream schools” for them. They see no need to apply to a lot of colleges, and they focus on a small number of schools on each extreme. I love this approach, because it’s relatively low-stress, but it’s not a good approach for everyone.
Sometimes I have students with no interest in the super-selective schools and don’t apply to any of those. Again, this is fine.
But here’s the important part: whatever categories you realistically pick for yourself, you can do it once, quickly, and move on. It should be a general, 20 minute conversation. Decide a reasonable line for “highly confident,” with acceptance rates of at least 50%. Decide a reasonable line for “can’t be confident at all,” below somewhere in the 20% to 25% acceptance rate area. After that, use only the general acceptance rates for deciding which bucket a college belongs in, and make sure you’re keeping a reasonable, balanced list. Don’t spend 20 minutes or more on each individual school trying to guess how confident you are. That’s time that could go into writing a stronger essay, or being more active at school, or getting more time with your family, or getting more sleep. All of those other things are more important than scattergrams, I promise.
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