The Likely Dance

At this time of year, my brain is a jukebox stuck on a single track: The Safety Dance.

For those who may not be aware, the song dates back to 1982 and is by a Canadian synth-pop band called Men Without Hats. It helped drive the musical revolution known as New Wave, and was a smash hit all over the world. I guarantee your mom danced to it in high school with her ridiculously teased hair and white Keds. The bizarre, ultra camp video made zero sense - but it still played on blast on MTV for the rest of the ‘80s, and it happily populates some of my first sensory memories.

In my adult years, I’ve danced to it at glamorous Westside Bar Mitzvahs, sweated to it at hot spin classes, and grocery shopped to it as its beat pulsed down the aisles of Market Basket. I’m even listening to it now, and it's still genuinely delicious.

But as much as I adore the song, the word safety itself has occupied a stormy place in my professional lexicon. In a college search, a safety is defined as a college to which a student has a very high chance of being admitted. I even remember my own high school counselor explaining this concept to me in the fall of 1997, as I lounged in her office in a fabulous argyle sweater vest from J. Crew and my moss green Birkenstocks.

Safety as a concept is a great thing, and a necessary - dare I say critical - element of any college search and any life. But I’m a strict devotee of semantics - and using this particular word in this context just doesn’t sit well with me.

Put it down to experience. I have found that its use, for one reason or another, can unwittingly cause a student to take their safeties for granted. They start to view them as a fait accompli. This can lead to an undeserved devaluation of these schools based on the sheer fact that they can get in. Alarmingly, it can encourage an unfortunate overreliance on quantitative measures of selectivity in this process - instead of what matters most: fit.

I have also found that its use can often be accompanied by blatant and eye roll-inducing snobbishness. When I was an admission officer at Tufts, the entitled and charmless father of a young woman we’d waitlisted howled at me in anger and confusion because she hadn’t been admitted. Sporting an unforgettable, pitch perfect Long Island accent, he went on to brazenly detail his position: “Everyone knows that Tufts is merely a second tier safety school for those hoping to attend Brown.”

Double rude. But never you fear: I swifty and intently corrected his thinking with guile and professionalism reminiscent of Alexis Carrington - all while attending to a chipped nail with the Bobbi Brown manicure set I kept next to my phone. Needless to say, his daughter was not admitted from the waiting list.

So you get it: I don’t use safety, and have consistently asked my students and parents not to use it either - for their sake, as well as my own.

Instead, I use likely. Say it with me: likely. That’s better.

So now, in reference to your likely schools. You need to pause at this time of year and look at your finalized college list and ask yourself the following questions:

1.) Are all of my likely schools a good fit for me?

2.) Would I be happy to attend any and all of my likely schools?

And you have to be honest with yourself. Brassy gay uncle honest.

If you answer no or maybe to one or both of these questions, you have a big problem. You’ll either need other likely schools, or, at the very least, you will need to extend much more time, energy and love to the ones you already have.

The good news for you is that it’s definitely not too late to course correct - it’s admittedly the 11th hour - but it's still not too late.

So do this last little bit of heavy lifting. And I guarantee that we'll all sleep, and dance, better this winter. And come spring: “everything’ll work out right.”