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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]OP is asking about college for her B+, high scoring child with no hooks. USNews doesn't tell you anything about a good fit or admission chances. The scatterplots from the website you're linking to is all self-reported data from a very small number of students.

For real data, her child's school will have Naviance though it might be aggregated since the high school's class sizes may be too small. Since her child is going to a top private high school,  a good quarter of his class probably has higher SAT scores and GPA. It will be very difficult for her child to get super strong recs and there will be 10-20 stronger candidates on paper applying to the same elite colleges ahead of him.

For an applicant with his profile, his scores and prep school may be sufficient to get significant merit based aid at schools like Tulane, Vanderbilt, etc.

The other and probably better way to approach the question is what kind of school would work best for the student. Would a SLAC give him the chance to be a leader and learn to use his full potential. Or would a big land grant school give him more room to explore and find some more drive? Would a strong frat culture help or hurt his development to full adulthood? [/quote]

" a good quarter of his class probably has higher SAT scores "

The ACT score was 35.  The only higher score is 36.  There is no school in the country where a "good quarter" of the class has a perfect standardized test score. As a point of reference, the vast majority of HYPC Stanford students (more than 75%) score less than 35 on the ACT.

Good point on GPA and recs though.  OP didn't say anything to suggest that DD was a standout student who would get good recs.

There is an interesting HBS post on the importance of US News rankings to # of applications.  Given the increased importance of standardized test scores to US News rankings,  I expect that most schools would love to have that 35 score.

http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/6834.html

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