What constitutes a “reach” school?

Ouch. DD1 goes to school at the top of the list (1st NY Times article) that is, I guess, least economically diverse (bottom 60% at 6.1%)???

The school has been getting bashed the past several years for allegedly being need-aware in its admissions selections. It has a relatively low % of students on Pell Grants and they came up with a goal of, I think, closer to 20% Pell Grant recipients over the next several years.

My definition of a reach school (and I hate referencing ranking lists) is generally any school in the top 20 (maybe even top 25) of the USNWR. No matter if you have a 4.0 GPA and 1600 SAT/36 ACT, class val/sal, etc, you have a very good chance of being rejected at any of those schools. All those schools are a reach for any HS student. Those schools can fill another entering class with kids they rejected and still have a class of kids with tippy top stats.
 
I just received an email from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute that reminded me of a story relevant to this discussion. First, though, my daughter was accepted at RPI last year but I just received an email congratulating her on her acceptance to RPI this year. Go figure.
Anyway, in terms of "reach" levels and selectivity, my daughter and I visited RPI during our Spring college tour and sat down with the Math Chair to discuss their program. I asked him what made his program different from MIT or Harvey Mudd, both of which my daughter had applied to. His response was that if she got into MIT, she HAD to accept it. I was impressed by his honesty. He then went on to place RPI at the selective level of a Rice, Cornell, or Georgia Tech (but still below Harvey Mudd interestingly).
 
As Pima would say, I'm not playing "Debbie [Danny?] Downer" here... I'm not telling people that they should Abandon Hope; I'm simply calculating the odds using publicly-available, consistent, solid data so that people have realistic expectations. I think that realism, combined with aiming high, is consistent with the ethos of these ServiceAcademyForums advice boards.

So to be clear, "Reach" is not the same as "impossible." Of course each ivy-plus school admits a small % of "unhooked" ie non-wealthy, non-URM, non-recruited athlete students each year. This % ranges from slightly above 10% at Brown, Penn and Columbia to close to 20% at Princeton. But even so, of the ~19,000 students accepted each year by the 12 ivy-plus schools, only about 3,000 are "unhooked."

Now, compare that with about 40,000 (out of 50,000 total) National Merit Semifinalists who are unhooked, and you see that your chances as an unhooked applicant - even if you are a National merit Semifinalist - are less than one in ten (3,000/40,000).

Of course, if you are an NM Semifinalist who has a hook - ie one of the remaining 10,000 - your chances of being admitted to at least one of the ivy-plus schools will be close to 100% (ca. 16,000 spots for "hooked" applicants but only 10,000 NM Semifinalists who have a "hook.").

So, bottom line, by all means aim for the stars, but make sure you apply to at least 10 schools and include mainly Match schools and at least 2 Safety schools.
 
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thibaud said:
So to be clear, "Reach" is not the same as "impossible." Of course each ivy-plus school admits a small % of "unhooked" ie non-wealthy, non-URM, non-recruited athlete students each year. This % ranges from slightly above 10% at Brown, Penn and Columbia to close to 20% at Princeton. But even so, of the ~19,000 students accepted each year by the 12 ivy-plus schools, only about 3,000 are "unhooked."
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Those are interesting numbers. Do you happen to have a link for this data?
 
GoCubbies said:
Ouch. DD1 goes to school at the top of the list (1st NY Times article) that is, I guess, least economically diverse (bottom 60% at 6.1%)???

The school has been getting bashed the past several years for allegedly being need-aware in its admissions selections. It has a relatively low % of students on Pell Grants and they came up with a goal of, I think, closer to 20% Pell Grant recipients over the next several years.

My definition of a reach school (and I hate referencing ranking lists) is generally any school in the top 20 (maybe even top 25) of the USNWR. No matter if you have a 4.0 GPA and 1600 SAT/36 ACT, class val/sal, etc, you have a very good chance of being rejected at any of those schools. All those schools are a reach for any HS student. Those schools can fill another entering class with kids they rejected and still have a class of kids with tippy top stats.
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All the admissions committees are "need-aware."

The numbers make it clear that their admissions processes are, to use the jargon of their data scientist consultants who advise them on their admissions strategies,"optimizing for revenue." This is necessary given their business model, in which operating expenses are funded primarily out of tuition.

At many private universities, as much as 80% of operating expenses are funded by tuition, so they have no choice but to satisfy their overall revenue hurdle by meeting some threshold % of admits who are paying full freight.

The line about "need-blind" is a polite fib.
 
unkown1961 said:
thibaud said:
So to be clear, "Reach" is not the same as "impossible." Of course each ivy-plus school admits a small % of "unhooked" ie non-wealthy, non-URM, non-recruited athlete students each year. This % ranges from slightly above 10% at Brown, Penn and Columbia to close to 20% at Princeton. But even so, of the ~19,000 students accepted each year by the 12 ivy-plus schools, only about 3,000 are "unhooked."
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Those are interesting numbers. Do you happen to have a link for this data?
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Go to each university's Admitted Students Profile and scrape the %s for:
a) Students Receiving Financial Aid (1 minus this number yields the % who are full freight - the low is IIRC 38% at Princeton, with most universities coming in between 45% and 55% full freight
b) URMs (nb adjust for domestic/US students only... this ranges from about 28% at Brown and Dartmouth to as much as 34% at Columbia and Harvard)
c) Legacy (ca. 10-13% - nb. need to de-duplicate for full-freight and for URMs, so probably closer to 5%)
d) Recruited Athletes (ca. 8-10% but again, de-duplicate ep for URMs and you end up with about 4%)

Adding the above "hooked" gives you
- lower bound (Princeton) = 38% + 28% + 5% + 4% = 75% hooked
- upper bound (Columbia, Harvard) = 45% + 34% + 5% + 4% = 88% hooked

The next tier of (slightly) less-selective but still elite private universities have roughly the same percentage of unhooked, but tilt even more heavily toward full-freight/wealthy students and have fewer URMs and recruited athletes.

Nb. as a sanity check, you can reference the work of Piketty and Saez regarding the % of students at each college who are drawn from the wealthiest 1% of the population. The NY Times printed the complete list for ca. 200 selective universities and colleges, including flagship public universities and liberal arts colleges as well as private universities, a few years ago.

If anything, there's been even more consolidation since then as colleges' and universities' operating costs continue to climb at 2x the inflation rate. Remember, they are optimizing for not only quality or merit but also tuition revenue.
 
Just to be clear (maybe this just muddies the water), DS is not going to an elite (expensive) school (i.e. a college other than our in-state public institution of higher learning) without an ROTC scholarship (because merit scholarships don't seem to generally be awarded at that many selective universities - I view ROTC as a merit scholarship but it comes with a payback). We can find a way to pay for room-and-board expenses, if we need to. DS is going to have to list his five schools on his NROTC application (that's my understanding -right?) and it would suck if his 1, 2, and 3 picks were not places he has much of a prayer of getting accepted in. Of course, if you don't try you have no chance (we get that). No guarantees he will be awarded NROTC or AFROTC scholarships (understanding that AFROTC follows the student and is not tied to the school but the school has to offer AFROTC).
 
Best to have a mix: 2-4 Reach schools, 2 Safety schools, and 4-6 Match schools.
 
ders_dad said:
Just to be clear (maybe this just muddies the water), DS is not going to an elite (expensive) school (i.e. a college other than our in-state public institution of higher learning) without an ROTC scholarship (because merit scholarships don't seem to generally be awarded at that many selective universities - I view ROTC as a merit scholarship but it comes with a payback). We can find a way to pay for room-and-board expenses, if we need to. DS is going to have to list his five schools on his NROTC application (that's my understanding -right?) and it would suck if his 1, 2, and 3 picks were not places he has much of a prayer of getting accepted in. Of course, if you don't try you have no chance (we get that). No guarantees he will be awarded NROTC or AFROTC scholarships (understanding that AFROTC follows the student and is not tied to the school but the school has to offer AFROTC).
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I think you'll be surprised by the financial aid offered by some of the elite schools, like MIT, Harvard, Yale and Princeton. For instance, per Princeton's website, "Students admitted to the Class of 2021 who applied for aid with family incomes up to $160,000 typically pay no tuition."
 
ders_dad said:
Just to be clear (maybe this just muddies the water), DS is not going to an elite (expensive) school (i.e. a college other than our in-state public institution of higher learning) without an ROTC scholarship (because merit scholarships don't seem to generally be awarded at that many selective universities - I view ROTC as a merit scholarship but it comes with a payback). We can find a way to pay for room-and-board expenses, if we need to. DS is going to have to list his five schools on his NROTC application (that's my understanding -right?) and it would suck if his 1, 2, and 3 picks were not places he has much of a prayer of getting accepted in. Of course, if you don't try you have no chance (we get that). No guarantees he will be awarded NROTC or AFROTC scholarships (understanding that AFROTC follows the student and is not tied to the school but the school has to offer AFROTC).
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one of the top 3 for NROTC has to be an in state school so you should be ok there
 
I would suggest it's not just the school itself but a particular program that may be a "reach." My DS has pretty good stats (I think), at least compared to the profile of University of Colorado. He got admitted to the school as an out-of-state candidate, but only pre-engineering, not directly in. No offense to U of C, only going by the profiles, but we did not consider it a "reach." So...as mentioned above; good idea to have backup "reach" AND "safety" schools.
 
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unkown1961 said:
jaglvr said:
kinnem said:
Man, that's a lot of application fees.
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DS had 13 applications[emoji15]
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Same here - spread the risk. And, we figured that with the money we saved via the ROTC scholarships...
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My DS "only" applied to 7, which I thought was a lot to manage, but I will say that about half of them offered application fee waivers for various reasons (parent ever in the military, or literature sent saying we'd really like you to apply, so here's a fee waiver, etc..) so that's something to look for if you are looking to cast a wide net.
 
ders_dad said:
DS is going to have to list his five schools on his NROTC application (that's my understanding -right?) and it would suck if his 1, 2, and 3 picks were not places he has much of a prayer of getting accepted in. Of course, if you don't try you have no chance (we get that).
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By all means, apply to a few ivies. AFROTC's HSSP people seem to be keen to get more HSSP winners into MIT and Yale, so maybe you should be sure to list them if you're considering AFROTC as well as NROTC.

Just be aware of the realities of the numbers: Per the ACT website, in 2017 there were 14,186 students who scored a 35 or 36 on their ACT Composite. Over 13,000 of these students scored a 36 on Science, and 7,000+ got a perfect score on the Math portion of the ACT. Consider that, within Harvard-Yale-Princeton-Stanford-MIT, there are only about 1,200 spots each year for people who are unhooked (plus a few hundred more for people going to Cal Tech). So it is a certainty that HYPSM will reject somewhere around 10,000 people who have 35-36 ACTs and/or >1500 SATs.

Now, it may be the case that winning a Type 1 AFROTC is now the equivalent of a "hook" for ivy admissions at MIT and Yale; hard to judge in the absence of good data on the # of HSSP winners who applied to those schools.

In any case, aim high, but understand the realities and apply broadly.
 
I do not know about your HS, but our kids had a program called Naviance. In essence, the student places in their academic stats (SAT, cgpa, #IB/APs), from there the program will pull all of the students that applied before to that school. It shows it in dots (green, yellow and red) and where you show up compared to your peers from that particular HS.

Beware though, that unless the program has changed it does not place things that schools place strong weight on when it comes to admissions, such as, NMSF, Boys/Girls State, Model UN, 1st chair orchestra, Captain of LAX, Eagle Scout, etc. It really is looking at academic stats.

I would also remind anyone and everyone that AFROTC is the odd ROTC scholarship. 1460 is amazing if it is best sitting, but if you are saying they took it 7 times, and this is the best superscore, but the actual best sitting is 1280 than it is a whole different story. Basically your odds if you are well rounded went from a type 1 to a type 7.
~ All of the SAs also do superscore. It is just AFROTC that does best sitting.

As stated earlier some states do have a state law that says a certain % of admitted students must be from within state. For VA, I believe it is 25-30% can come from OOS. Use Va Tech as an example, or even UVA. They want to compete on a national exposure level, thus, they don't want all of their OOS students coming from the East coast. It could actually be easier to get accepted from KS to VA Tech than from PA or NC. This was also stated by an earlier poster, and I agree from what I have been told by other admission officers.
~ How do they get exposure in Boise ID for UVA besides their FB or BB teams? The hometown kid that gets accepted. Everyone from NY to NC on the east coast knows the WAHOOS aka UVA.

Finally, also remember a few things when it comes to a ROTC scholarship.
1. Scholarship recipients have 1 freebie year to leave ROTC. If they love the school, but hate the ROTC program, they are between a rock and a hard place if they need the scholarship to attend the school.
~~ They will have to stay in ROTC or take on a ton of debt to stay at the school.
2. You need to pass that DoDMERB exam
~~ There are too many threads here regarding vision or allergies, asthma or something that cause them to get a DQ and now wait on a waiver while they are forced to call the ball on which school.
3. AFROTC is the exception (scholarship is tied to the cadet, not the school). AROTC and NROTC are tied to the cadet and school. Some schools although maybe your safety may fill up fast. IOWs get that application in early. Do not wait until Dec. because they open up the applications in a few months and many will have them submitted by July.
 
One of my friends sons is a Yale grad and now and Admissions officer there and has essentially told me everything thibaud has posted above.
 
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I did check Naviance for our school. For some reason the Ivy plots are blocked “to protect student privacy”. That’s really weird because all other schools are not.

Spoke to DS tonight about this and he was a bit non-plused about the whole thing. This can be the problem with young people from inner cities and/or removed from the coasts - they don’t feel they “stack up”, even with great accomplishments. DS scored 33 on his first ACT sitting & 35 on his second. He’s a 2-sport athlete, Eagle Scout, works a job after school tutoring kids, etc. etc. He’ll be fine wherever he goes. He has to own his path. I just don’t want him to feel he has little chance for some things before the gun goes off.
 
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