The new safeties

There was a time, not so long ago, when everybody — well, everybody but me — knew which safety schools to apply to. Tufts was a fallback for Ivy League applicants. Washington University in St. Louis was a security blanket for Midwesterners like my brother, who wanted to go to Northwestern. And Grinnell, in Iowa, was a sure bet for my husband, a B student from a New England prep school.

As for me? I wasted an application fee applying to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign "just in case" Indiana University Bloomington said no. Little did I know both Big 10 schools would have been equally happy to have me. A college counselor could have set me straight, of course, but I didn't know college counselors existed, either.

Life has changed. Now there's a counselor on every street corner, and they're all happy to inform you that colleges have become pickier. Three-quarters of Grinnell's freshmen now come from the top 10 percent of their class. The SAT scores of first-year students at Tufts rival those of Cornell freshmen. Wash U's acceptance rate is now lower than Northwestern's.

With more students applying each year, many colleges that were traditionally considered safeties have shed that label, sending applicants scrambling to find replacements.

"The top colleges used to be a little clubby group," says Willard Dix, college counselor at the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools. "Twenty years ago, Tufts was in the shadow of the Ivies and people would joke, that's where kids go who don't get into the Ivies. Now Tufts is just as competitive." So are Vassar, Middlebury and, oh, by the way, have you heard how hard it is to get into Boston College? So much for colleges that earlier generations of Ivy hopefuls considered safeties. Luckily, there are new safeties, and ways to find them. ...

•	The New Safeties The New York Times, Sunday, July 29, 2007 Byline: Michelle Slatalla