Safe, target, selective schools

In the beginning of your college application journey, you will receive a flood of advices from well-meaning friends, family, and counselors. One idea you will hear a lot is breaking your prospective schools into three groups: safe, target and selective. Selective schools also called "dream" or "rich". But we stick with "selective" for now. The breakdown will be unique for every student, depending on test scores, GDP, desired major, legacy policies, family circumstances etc. But ultimately, it depends on the admission rate of each school.

The idea is very simple. Application to each school is a tedious and time consuming process with a price tag. With all of that, you will apply to 10-20 schools. If all of your schools have acceptance rate below 10%, you may end up with no acceptance. So the common advice is having a few schools in your list that accept most of the applications.

Let's look at the acceptance rate of all schools in the US that give bachelor degrees (2257 schools in our dataset). We will consider schools with acceptance rates below 25% and less are selective schools; with 0.75 and more are safe schools. Everything in between are target schools.

School group	Acceptance rate	Number of US schools that give bachelor degree
Selective	Below 25%	80
Target	Between 25% and 75%	776
Safe	More than 75%	1039

Conclusion: Just under 100 schools are, what we consider, highly selective. There is still a large body of school to secure your education with. And whopping half of the school will accept you as you are 🙂

What to know more? In the second part of the series, we will look at the acceptance rate of Ivy schools and Forbes top 500.

Disclaimer: This article is based on 2010-2022 CollegeScorecard data (https://collegescorecard.ed.gov/).