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Are Carnegie Mellon, Emory, WUSTL and Georgetown enough removed from top tier schools like Ivies, Stanford, Northwestern, MIT, Caltech, etc to ever justify being "safeties"? Princeton Review lists Carnegie Mellon and Emory as safeties for me... and WUSTL and Georgetown aren't as prestigious as ivies, so i was wondering if they were safeties too. I know WUSTL is terrified of being a safety, so they want you to demonstrate interest, which i obviously would if were to apply there.

By Redgrail (Redgrail) on Sunday, August 31, 2003 - 05:24 pm: Edit

Top tier? All of the universities you listed are top tier.

However, this is all matter of preference. I, for one, would take G-town over NWestern anyday. In fact, I'd probably take G-town over Ivies because of SFS.

Once you get to this level of schools, it is, as I said, merely a matter of preference.

By Spiffybrownboy (Spiffybrownboy) on Sunday, August 31, 2003 - 08:09 pm: Edit

The Princeton Review is awfully generous with its counselor-o-matic thingamajigger. The results it gives can be good, or they can be bad. The good: it can sometimes get you around to looking at the lesser-known schools that offer great educations and it can lift your spirits by giving you some great schools in the safety and match categories. The bad: it may give you too much hope and give you a false perception of college admissions. While a 1600, 4.0 student is a wonderful candidate for WUSTL, Georgetown, etc, he/she still cannot call those schools safeties (regardless of what counselor-o-matic says). All those schools are highly selective, and even if you show them you have an interest in attending, they may reject you. For truer safeties... look to schools in the lower top tier (Penn State, Lehigh, things of that sort).

By Thedad (Thedad) on Sunday, August 31, 2003 - 08:42 pm: Edit

Redgrail's entire post is dead on, imo.

Spiffy, my sense is that the Counselor-O-Matic is something that was done a few years ago and hasn't been updated since. Given the trends, results are going to be distorted in terms of the current realities.

By Rocksolid4 (Rocksolid4) on Sunday, August 31, 2003 - 09:42 pm: Edit

that's what i suspected... Sorta hoped otherwise but so much for that, I guess.
Thanks.

By Anotherdad (Anotherdad) on Tuesday, September 02, 2003 - 05:55 pm: Edit

I view your list of "safeties" as anything but. Each of those schools is top tier with specific programs every bit as good as in a pure ivy, and depending on your interests you could make any of them your #1 choice with no embarrasment. Also, all are selective enough to be able to pick and choose among their pools of fully qualified candidates.
Up until this year, I thought that it was possible to effectively handicap admission odds based on stats. I do not think so anymore -- any of the top 25 or so schools can take whomever they want based on the total package.