Above average GPA (just) and 1540 SAT at rigorous HS
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Anonymous
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Unless your kid applies ED or you have a strong connection with admissions, your kid has a very low chance of getting into any top 40 school. Maybe even top 60. This is the reality of things today. My kid had a 4.0 at Whitman with top everything and got into UMD honors and some very low ranked safety school. Rejected from Tulane after showing lots of interest but didn’t chat up Owen Knight, rejected from Brown, Penn, Vanderbilt, Wash U, Northwestern, WL at Emory, WL Wake Forest…. basically she got rejected from everywhere except UMD. Good luck people cause you’re gonna need it.
Signed, A very jaded parent. |
Anonymous
You just listed all T25s except Wake Forest. Not surprised. UMD is a good school. Think the average SAT score is around 1400. |
Anonymous
Congratulations on UMD! That is not an easy admit. |
Anonymous
| UMD is Top 10 (maybe even Top 5) in some areas. If your child is going for one of those programs then you can boast with confidence. |
Anonymous
Rigor has more to do with class selection than HS. |
Anonymous
General observation: the expensive private schools have some of the best college counseling and people come to these forums when they don’t like what they’re told. Listen to the counselors you pay tens of thousands of dollars for. |
Anonymous
Did you DC not apply to any schools between Emory Wake … and UMD? I feel this was a failure in choosing schools to apply to. |
Anonymous
FWIW, I have a kid at a top private nyc school and they don't do a lot of personalized college counseling til beginning of senior year. There's one kid and counselor meeting to get acquainted. And they do do wonderful group work in class: how to make a list, how to research schools, even writing the personal essay. But the mom and dad and kid meeting one on one with counselor is September of senior year. so this is likely why OP hasn't met with anyone yet - not that she's ignoring advice. |
Anonymous
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Anonymous
Is your son full pay? Does he want to major in the humanities, social sciences or non-premed sciences? If he wants to major in CS or bust: He’ll have a hard time. His top state CS school will be the match lottery school. (He’ll certainly be qualified but might have only a 20 percent chance of getting in.) He’ll need to develop a list of public CS programs at schools you’ve never heard of, along with, if you’re full-pay, CS programs at private school you’ve barely heard of. If he’s full-pay and open to majoring in history, he can probably have a 2 percent chance at the very most selective national universities (Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford); roughly a 15 percent at any given private T40 through T15 school; maybe a 60 percent chance at any given private school ranked 40 to 100; and almost 100 percent chance of getting into private schools ranked under 100. If he’s a full-pay English or history major, the percentages might be about 10 percentage points higher for any given category of liberal arts college. So, say, 12 percent for Amherst, 25 percent for a Grinnell and 70 percent for a Gettysburg. But you have to look hard at the finances of the lower-ranked liberal arts colleges to make sure they’ll will last four years. He’ll have an 80 percent chance of getting into his state flagship or the equivalent (say, SUNY Buffalo and SUNY Stony Brook), but the odds of him getting into the honors program or a lot of merit aid may be poor. A lot of schools will give you enough aid to make the net cost comparable to the cost of your state flagship, but it might be hard to get enough aid to get the net cost much below the cost of your state flagship. These estimates are based on a very rough idea of what the US News rankings are and me obsessing over Chance Me and admissions results posts on College Confidential for about a year. A possible s |
Anonymous
What does "with top everything" actually mean in concrete terms? I am sorry about all the rejections but UMD is a great place to land. I hope she has a fabulous time there. |
Anonymous
Continued - A possible solution, if you find these stats disappointing, and you can be full-pay for $40,000 to $60,000 per year, and your son is sane, well-organized and open to an unusual college experience, is to look at universities in Canada, the UK or Ireland, and, possibly, English-language bachelor’s programs in places like Belgium. The disadvantage would be administrative issues, lack of U.S.-style student support and some suspense about how U.S. employers and grad schools will see the degree. The advantages are that your son might be able to get an affordable, fun, high-quality education, without a lot of admissions insanity. So, if you see the arguments back and forth here about the University of St. Andrews, that’s way. It would probably be a pretty good fit for someone like your son, and its admissions office wouldn’t make him feel like a worm. But Scottish people who think of it as the Scottish version of Goucher might wonder why a high-stats student would go there. The answer would be that, for some kids, going there would be more fun and cheaper than going to Goucher, and much less hassle than trying to get into Bates. |
Anonymous
Don't know why people bring up overseas colleges on this forum. 99% of U.S. families have absolutely no interest unless it's graduate school related. Even then, meh. It's T50 USW&WR nationals and SLACs! That's about it in DCUM world. |
Anonymous
OP needs to go to the school counselor. After all, s/he's paying an arm/leg in tuition. Coming here on a free forum, s/he will get what s/he is paying for. |
Anonymous
Where are you getting those stats? From under the rock you reside beneath? |