why does it say that a college is a reach if it shows my chance as a 5%?

On College Vine the categories for chancing engine are the following from most difficult to least difficult:

Hard Reach

Reach

Hard Target

Target

Safety School

Typically you want to have more targets than reaches and a couple of safeties to make sure you land somewhere.

If a school is 5% it is most likely a hard reach, not a reach. So that means that according to the information you filled out in your chancing profile, you have only a 5% chance of getting admitted and a 95% chance of not getting admitted. Therefore, you have to improve your grades, test scores, activities, leadership service, course rigor, etc to have a better chance at this school. One thing I recommend all CV members to do is to compare the published acceptance rate for their colleges on their list versus the CV chancing engine results. If the published admission rate is said to be 6% in the case of Columbia University and your CV chancing % is like 37-48% hard target, then you are in very excellent shape to get admitted but if it is like 1-5% then you really should not apply to this school because it is lower than the published rates. Of course, applying to many schools increases your chances but in this example say your Ivy list shows hard targets for all of them, then apply to all 8 of them because statistically, you are going to get into like 2 or 3 of them, but if they are all 1-5% then even if you apply to all 8, that's not going to help much since your chances are so low.

The CV tool is to help you decide for yourself what you can change about your application details and see how that might affect your chances. If you can't change your outcome very much, it a great brutally honest tool to help you re-adjust your expectations and make a new list of colleges.

I hope that helps clarify how to use the tool and what the catagories mean.

Think about what reaching for something means in general. Like say you are reaching for a apple. It means that the apple is pretty far away and hard to get. In this case, a reach school is basically a school that you will have difficulty getting into (or more harshly, most likely will get rejected from). That doesn't mean you shouldn't try though if you really wanna go to that school. For your 5 percent chance, it means that you are highly unlikely to get into it. Just know that this is a calculator saying it, not the actual admissions officers so it could theoretically be higher or lower but just know that your college is a reach based on your stats, extracurriculars, etc. If I am wrong, anyone can feel free to correct me or something.