Awesome Colleges You Can Actually Get Into (AKA Safety Schools for Overachievers)

Are you sick of hearing about colleges like Harvard and Stanford with admission rates below 5%? Are you wondering if there are great colleges out there where you might actually have a shot at getting in? If so, in this blog I’m going to talk about colleges that rank among the top 3% of institutions nationwide out of the 3,982 colleges in the country, but most of which boast admission rates of 60% or greater.

Before we get into my list of 20 schools that hit the mark for being in the top 3% of colleges ranked nationally as well as 60% plus admittance rates, I want to first talk about a couple other considerations that I encourage you guys to think about as you build your list and try to get some schools where you feel like you can get into. The first thing is that I want you to think about your state flagship or other in-state schools. If you’re not low-income and you don’t qualify for 100% need-based aid, in-state schools can be more affordable to middle- or upper-middle-class families a lot of the time. It really depends on your particular financial situation; sometimes they’re cheaper, sometimes they’re not. But in many cases, the sticker price for in-state tuition is lower. So, if you’re in a higher income bracket and you can’t get into the schools that are really hard to get into, sometimes that in-state school can be a really good option. Oftentimes, these in-state schools have honors colleges or other ways that you can build up some prestige and really surround yourself with like-minded people.

The other reason is that if you’re planning to stay locally after you graduate, the reputation of local state universities or the flagship state school where you’re from often carries the same kind of clout and reputation that all of the schools on this list that I’m about to read also have because of regional effects. So if you go to the University of South Carolina, in South Carolina everyone walks around calling that USC, and it has a reputation that people respect in that area, whereas if you know you’re going to move across the country, maybe it doesn’t have that. But if you’re planning to stay local, it can help you accomplish what you want, which is that you have a good alumni network, people respect where you went to school, and you’re able to leverage it in your future employment.

In terms of reputation, the other thing about local schools is that sometimes you can get a higher acceptance rate for being in-state. For example, if you’re in Washington State, you have a much higher acceptance rate at the University of Washington than out-of-state students do. And so that means what used to be like a fit or a reach school could actually be moving up the ladder in terms of that. In Texas, for example, UT Austin has a literal bar of GPA and performance that you have to cross in order to be guaranteed a spot there. So for super overachievers, we can sometimes call UT Austin a safety because it has such a clear metric required for in-state students who fall into this particular category. Now, obviously, it’s not a safety for anybody out of state or anybody beyond, and it doesn’t have a 60% admit rate. But again, if you know you have the metric you need, it can become a safety, and that’s really cool. So those auto-admission policies, especially for in-state students, are also something I encourage you guys to check out or investigate.

The second thing that I want you guys to think about is merit. Another way that I like to think of awesome colleges that you can actually get into is some schools that might be private and they might be small. Some of them offer really amazing scholarships to students with excellent academics. So, if you happen to be that high stats kid and you’re looking to fill in like some safety schools, sometimes some of my students will fill in a safety school with a school that offers a lot of full-tuition or full-ride scholarships. And even though the reputation isn’t as awesome as some of the other colleges they’re looking at, the financial aid is awesome. And so, you know what? Hey, if you can’t get in here or there and you’re not going to Harvard, why not go to Alabama? They’re going to pay your full tuition because of your crazy high SAT score, right? It could be a good choice. So whether that’s a smaller private institution or a large institution that just has a blanket policy, if you reach particular merit bars, it’s another thing to consider when you’re making your list.

So let’s talk about this list. This is a list, like I said, of 20 schools. One caveat for these schools: even though they have really healthy admit rates, that doesn’t mean that they have zero competitive juice to them. You want to make sure that you look up any requirements for SAT scores, ACT scores, or GPA for things like this, because some of them do have a bar that isn’t super low. You still need to have a solid GPA. An admissions percentage has to do with what percent of the pool that applied gets in, not what percent of the general population. And so, just keep that in mind.

So for the list, we’ve got Rutgers New Brunswick, Texas A&M, University of Minnesota Twin Cities, Michigan State, Rensselaer Polytechnic, UMass Amherst, Indiana University, SUNY University Buffalo, University of Delaware, Marquette, Virginia Tech, Rose Holman, University of Colorado Boulder, Arizona State, Penn State, Case Western, Iowa, Gonzaga, Drexel, and University of Oregon. Again, this is just a starting place. Are there some more universities that are probably easy enough to get into? Sure, they could be safeties for many of you, absolutely. But here’s a good list of colleges with really healthy admit rates.

You got a shot, people, and I hope this blog was helpful!

AWESOME Colleges You Can ACTUALLY Get Into