Who cares, it’s only my “safety school”!
Arrrgghhhh! This comment strikes fear and terror in Joe College and he hears it every year from students across the country. This is a bad way to think about your safety school . . . very, very bad.
Okay let’s back up for a minute. Exactly what is a safety school and why is this comment so upsetting to Joe? When deciding exactly which colleges they will apply to, most high school seniors separate their choices into three different categories. The first is the “reach” category. These are schools where you have little chance of being accepted. Perhaps you are at the bottom of the acceptable range for those colleges. Perhaps the college simply has so many applicants and such a low admissions rate that there’s only a small chance you’ll be admitted regardless of how well qualified you might be. The next category is schools for which your application will fall right smack in the middle of their qualified applicants. In today’s competitive environment an applicant might not be accepted at all of these schools but has a good statistical chance of success with at least one. The final category is the “safety school”. This is a college where your qualifications place you in a position of being highly desired among its applicant pool.
Often overlooked, the safety school deserves much more attention than it usually receives. Most students who attend their safety school end up spending their entire college career at that school. Many go off to campus freshman year with the idea that, “this was my safety school; I’ll transfer as soon as I can”. Generally that just doesn’t happen. The vast majority of students who intend to transfer from a safety school . . . never do. This isn’t bad news. The most common reason cited by students who intended to transfer but decided against it, is that they were pleasantly surprised by how much they enjoyed attending their safety school! So if there’s a chance that you’re going to spend four years of your life at your safety school, shouldn’t you be serious about making a good choice?
One of the most common mistakes high school seniors make when applying to college is thinking that their choice of safety school isn’t important. Since they don’t believe they’ll actually have to enroll at their safety school, they don’t bother to make the choice carefully. The intense competition for admission at all colleges recently means that more and more students find themselves with just one acceptance letter. Frequently that letter is from the applicant’s safety choice.
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