Learn to assess whether your grades and test scores clear college admissions thresholds, then build a balanced list of safety, target, and reach schools. The framework uses admitted-student percentiles: safety means top 15%, target means top 25%, reach means top 50%. Every school on your list, even safeties, must be one you'd actually want to attend.
All right, welcome back. Week six, video three. We're going to talk now about what I call the viability test, the viability exercise. And before I do that, I want to illustrate it through a story about Brian. Brian came to me kind of late in the game. He called me after he got rejected by 14 schools. Schools. And the problem with that is that he only applied to 14 schools. Yikes. So he was wondering what he could do. What ultimately happened with Brian is he took a gap year, reapplied to the right schools, and ultimately got into a school where he's very happy now. But when I looked at his list, the 14 schools, 14 of them all were in the top 20 in the US News and World Report list, which means that they were the top 20 most selective schools in the country. So all of his eggs were in one basket, that instead of applying to 14 different schools, he in reality was applying to the same school over and over and over again. They all had the same academic thresholds, right? We talked about that in the first video this week that they all had the same level that everyone had to clear. And he just wasn't quite getting there. His GPA and SAT and ACT scores were not high enough for him to get past the first round of review at a lot of these schools. And while he had an amazing story, Amazing story and really good teacher recommendations, no one ever heard those. They never got to listen to his story. And the problem is that if you don't know where this hurdle is and you submit to only schools with hurdles that are above where you are, you're never going to get in. Okay? And what I especially stress for people like the Brians of the world who do not have an admissions hook, right? They're not children of alumni or donors or international students or have a great arm and throw the football 900 miles per hour, is that you have to make sure that you have a variety, a diverse portfolio of schools that you're applying to. And we talk about this the same way that a lot of people do. I'm sure your school counselors talk about it in the same way, too, that there's safety schools. These are the schools that you feel comfortable that you're going to get into. And for most of those, we like to say that if you look at the admitted student profile, we talked about this before, the admitted student profile from the previous year of the school. Are you in the top 15%, top 15 percentile of that admitted student profile as far as your GPA and your SAT or ACT scores, if you are, then that school is going to be considered a safety school for you, and you have a great chance of getting in. Okay? Your target schools are where you're looking at it, and you're going to fall probably in about the top 25%. So you are better than 75% of the GPAs accepted in the previous year and ACT or SAT score. So these are target schools, and then the last one are reach schools, dream schools for some. Right? And this is where you're looking, and you're in the top 50%. The one addition to this is the reach schools. About the top 10. The top 10 schools in the country on the U.S. news and World Report, which is basically a ranking of selectivity, not quality, are reach schools for everybody who doesn't have an admissions hood. So if your grade is going to be in the top 50%, it's going to be a reach school for you. Okay? So if you're looking and they have an average GPA of 3.5 and your GPA is 3.5, you would say I'm in the top 50%, right? Wrong. The reason why that's wrong is because of the admissions hook. People are driving that number. So you have to think about where you're going to fall. So we always add a little cushion. But for purposes of just general math, top 50% for reach schools, top 25% for target schools, top 15% for safety schools. And you want to have a mix of schools so that you don't end up like Brian. You want to make sure that all of your schools are not reach schools, which they were for him, that you have a mix of safety, target and reach. And we usually have students apply to about five in each category. There really is no reason to apply to more to that than that if you've done your homework correctly, because you're always going to have somewhere where you're going to get into with some level of comfort. Here is the key point, though. Whatever school you put on your list, including your safety school, needs to be a school where you actually see yourself going there. Too often we see people have all their hopes that they're going to get in one of these schools, and then they all right, I'll just add the local community college here because, you know, I need a safety school and add the target school here because my mom said I should probably go there. But you don't see yourself going there. What you need to do is spend the time on the front end to make sure that your list includes schools in every category in Every bucket where you actually see yourself going there and being happy. And that's just a matter of doing your homework, doing the exercises we talked about in the previous videos, and coming up with a list of 15, sometimes upwards to 20 schools where you actually see yourself. If you don't see yourself being there and being happy and it doesn't mesh with who you are as a person, doesn't support your opening statement, you're not going to be happy there. And you may end up there. These are the schools you're applying to. So this becomes your list, your complete field of schools where you're ultimately probably going to go. You may end up there. So make sure if you're applying there that you could actually see yourself going there and being happy there. It's a key problem a lot of people have when they add especially safety schools on there where they really don't have any interest and then they end up miserable. Okay, key point. The other thing that you want to focus in on right now is how do we actually put ourselves in a position to clear that hurdle? So we talked about the admitted student profile. That's the first thing. Making sure that you're in that top range of the schools, the top 15% being ideal, so you have a better chance of getting in and also getting a more generous financial aid package as we talked about previously and in our financial aid course. The other thing is to make sure of course, that your SAT and ACT scores are above that threshold, higher is better, without going insane, and that you are explaining away any discrepancies, trends or, and strengths that you have in certain areas. So we talked about my freshman year of College. Remember this one? 1.7 GPA. Yikes. Not good. This isn't the story I told law schools. I told them about my sophomore through senior year and that was like a 3.78. Okay, so what story are you telling? What part of your GPA you want to focus in on with the idea that at the very first analysis, though, wherever you fall in this spotlight and spin exercise, your overall GPA still needs to be above their first round review hurdle. Right? So it's important to understand where that is in order to see if you're actually going to get the chance to tell this story. So again, admitted student profile, make sure that you're in that area. And then the other thing is making sure that the viability exercise that we're talking about right now shows that you are showing your strengths in the areas where you say you're strong in. And then lastly talking about how you've excelled recently, so that the story becomes that even if you're just barely above this line in your overall gpa, that the reason you're just barely over that line in your overall GPA is you had a rough freshman year, but then you've brought your grades up to a level that's well above where they. Where they view as being the cutoff. And this is the student you're getting today, not this student. Okay, academic thresholds, they're my least favorite subject, but they're the most important thing when it comes to actually getting in. Numbers matter, at least at initial levels for first round reviews, but that's not what gets you in. What gets you in is, once you're past that hurdle, telling a story that's going to make you stand out above the masses. All right, we're going to take a break and then next week come back here for the next modules. And in that series, we're going to talk about when to apply to college, where to apply to college, and why it matters. Next week.
