Safety, Target, & Reach Schools: How to Find the Right Ones
What’s Covered:
- What Are Reach, Target, and Safety Schools?
- Factors That Impact Your Chances
- Elements of a Balanced College List
Creating a school list is an important yet tricky step in the college application process. A strategically constructed school list weighs your desire to attend reach schools—the institutions you dream about going to—along with safety schools, institutions where you’re very likely to secure admission. Consequently, the ideal school list is balanced between reach, target, and safety schools, allowing you to shoot for the stars while also ensuring admission into at least one school.
What Are Reach, Target, and Safety Schools?
“Reach,” “safety,” and “target” are common terms used in college applications to describe the odds a student has of getting accepted at a particular institution. Understanding these terms, and which categories certain colleges fall into, is a critical step in the application process.
What Is a Reach School?
Reach schools are colleges where you have less than a 15% chance of admission (note: this is your personal chance of acceptance, not the school’s acceptance rate). Keep in mind that schools with less than a 10% acceptance rate are reaches for everyone.
Such schools are extremely competitive and even students with profiles that align with or exceed those of accepted students cannot be confident they’ll gain admission. A given school may also be a reach if your grades and test scores are below the averages of accepted students.
What Is a Target School?
A target school is a college where you personally have a 15-70% chance of admission. Within the target school category, we split these schools into hard targets (15-45% chance) and regular targets (45-70%) in our free chancing engine.
Unless the school is very selective, how your SAT/ACT score compares to the school’s middle 50% test scores is a decent indicator of whether a school is a target. The middle 50% is the range of scores between the 25th percentile and the 75th percentile of accepted students’ scores. There are no guarantees of getting into a target school, but you should feel good about your chances of admission into a target school—though hard targets are definitely a bit more iffy.
What Is a Safety School?
Safety schools are colleges where you have a greater than 70% chance of acceptance. Having test scores better than the 75th percentile of students is a good indicator that a college is a safety school. Having a strong chance of getting into a college is a major factor when choosing a safety school, but you should also feel excited about the school and should be content with attending if you’re accepted.
Factors That Impact Your Chances
Middle 50% test scores can suggest your odds at a particular institution, but the admissions process is far more complex than a single score and considers a variety of factors.
Grades and Test Scores
Grades and test scores play a considerable role in college admissions, making up over a third of what Top 250 colleges deem important. In addition to demonstrating a student’s effort, determination and aptitude, grades are also predictive of college performance. And it’s not just not the grades you get, but the kinds of courses you take—colleges are interested in academically rigorous students who have pursued challenging coursework, such as AP classes.
Test scores also play a key role in college admissions, as they can confirm a student’s grades and demonstrate preparedness for college. Test scores and grades are also used by highly selective schools that receive large numbers of applications to weed out weak candidates, though this has changed in recent years due to Covid test-optional policies.
Extracurricular Activities
Extracurricular activities are an important criterion colleges use when deciding who to accept; they can account for as much as a quarter of an admissions decision. Extracurricular activities give colleges perspective into who students are outside of the classroom and highlight a student’s passions and interests. Try to focus on a few activities and dedicate yourself to them, rather than lightly involving yourself in a lot of different activities.
Not all extracurricular activities are equal, however—the rarer and more impressive the activity, the greater sway it has with admissions officers. For example, winning a Jack Kent Cooke Young Artist Award is far more impactful than playing in your school’s marching band.
Essays
Essays can also make up to a quarter of admissions decisions. Essays provide students a chance to show off their writing skills, craft a narrative about themselves, and wow admissions officers—a winning essay is personal, demonstrates what makes you special, and will leave a college hoping to have you on campus.
In cases where an admissions decision is between two competing candidates who have roughly comparable profiles, a great essay is often the tiebreaker.
Letters of Recommendation and Interviews
Letters of recommendation and interviews play a smaller role than factors like test scores, grades, and extracurricular activities in admissions—accounting for just 10% of an admissions decision. Having a relationship with a teacher, advisor, or coach who knows you personally and will tout your strengths can give your application a boost.
Your college interview is another way to improve your prospects of admissions. Treat interviews seriously by preparing for them—prepare for common questions, know how to dress, ask the right questions yourself, and be sure to demonstrate a mature, college-ready attitude.
Other Factors: Financial Need, Intended Major, and Ethnicity
In addition to the primary metrics mentioned above, a handful of smaller factors also are considered in college admissions.
Financial Need: Depending on what schools you’re applying to, your financial need can factor into admissions decisions. Need-blind colleges do not consider financial need in admissions, but need-aware schools do. Hypothetically, at need-aware colleges, an admissions officer can use a student’s ability to pay to make a selection between two competitive candidates.
Intended Major: In general, your intended major will not play a significant role in admissions decisions, with the exception being students applying for competitive programs or different schools within a university. For example, the University of Washington has an acceptance rate around 50% for Washington residents, but the rate for direct admission into the computer science program is 25% for Washington residents (and just 2% for out-of-state applicants, which is even more selective than the overall rate at schools like Stanford and MIT!).
Ethnicity: Since the Supreme Court overturned Affirmative Action in 2023, colleges are now forbidden from directly considering race or ethnicity in their admissions decisions. That said, colleges still want to accept diverse classes that include students from a variety of backgrounds, and they are allowed to indirectly factor in your racial or ethnic identity. For example, you could write about your race in a supplemental diversity essay, as part of your broader story.
Elements of a Balanced College List
There is no magic number for how many colleges you should apply to. The College Board—the organization that administers the SAT—recommends between 5 and 8, while a report from the NACAC found that 36% of enrolled first-time freshmen had applied to 7 or more colleges in 2017. A safe bet is to apply to at least 8 colleges, with those 8 consisting of 2 reach schools, 4 target schools, and 2 safety schools.
How to Find Schools for Your College List
1. Figure out what’s important to you.
“Fit”—how a college aligns with your academic, social, and financial needs—is a great way to begin building your college list with intention. Consider aspects like size, location, intended major, extracurricular activities, and diversity. For example, if warm weather is key to your happiness, you’re going to struggle to enjoy your time at the University of Chicago, no matter how great of a school it is—but you may like Pomona College.
2. Use CollegeVine’s school search tool and chancing engine.
Our free school search tool allows you to find schools based on characteristics like size, location, majors, diversity, and more. This can help you discover colleges you might not have otherwise known were a good fit, and can help you eliminate colleges based on your personal “non-negotiables.”
Our free chancing engine also can estimate your chances of acceptance based on factors like your GPA, test scores, extracurriculars, and demographics. The engine will characterize over 1,000 colleges across the U.S. as Reaches, Long Reaches, Targets, Hard Targets, and Safeties, to make building your college list straightforward.
3. Eliminate schools until you have a manageable and balanced list.
Make a list of all things that are really important in a school—for example, a university or LAC; urban, suburban, or rural; a large student body or small student body; in-state or out-of-state—and start cutting the ones that don’t meet your high-priority needs. Another effective tool for paring down your college list is to cut colleges that aren’t able to provide sufficient financial aid, if that’s a concern.
