Putting together final list of colleges to apply to and son has come up with the following. Looking to study computer science and also wants to be involved in a marching band. Not considering finances for now. Live in NY. Would prefer small to midsize school. #1 choice is Notre Dame. 1520 SAT 4.0 unweighted GPA, Varsity athlete, Drum Major, Eagle scout. top 1% of 500 student graduating class.
Reach schools: Harvard, Cornell, Carnagie Melon
Hard Target Schools: Duke, Northwestern, Notre dame.
Target: UNC, Boston College, Northeastern.
Safe: UMASS, SUNY Stoneybrook, Wake Forest.
No west coast or southwest schools considered. Did he place them correct? Any other schools to consider? Thanks
Put Duke, Northwestern and Notre Dame in reaches. They are reaches for everyone. I might move UNC up there too. Wake Forest should move to target - also not a safety for anyone. I think BC and Northeastern are in the right places.
I think this is a very reach heavy list and honestly I’m not sure how your son came up with his categories. For example, NU has a lower acceptance rate than Cornell.
For schools of this competitiveness, your son needs to look at overall acceptance rates, not where his stats fall. He also needs to consider OOS acceptance rates for his major, not just overall acceptance rate for the state schools on his list.
Any school below a 20% acceptance rate should be considered a reach for all students.
As long as as he has a safety on the his list (that he is truly happy with and can afford) then the rest is semantics. Make sure there’s a safety (maybe even 2) and then apply at other schools as desired. It is certainly true that Computer Science can be much more competitive than other majors so I would take that into account when assessing a “safety”.
For high stats kids it’s hard to find a safety that they feel they good about. Good luck!
Hard target was a category to separate from the ivies essentially. Hard to categorize some. According to some websites his stats are above 74% of accepted students for northwestern and Notre dame. For wake his stats are higher than 93% of accepted students, I would consider that safe, but that’s why I’m asking.
Agree with other comments, adding UMass (I assume Amherst) is not a safety for CS…CS is one of the most competitive majors anywhere, if not the most.
Not sure about Stonybrook CS, make sure to research the admission rate for CS, not the overall rate of the college, so that he can properly categorize schools.
I agree with you but have also been blasted on this site for basing these categories on stats instead of acceptance rate. I guess the part we don’t see is how many students with your sons stats are rejected from said schools. My D is applying to schools with 50% and 15% acceptance rate-- but with very similar student stats. I don’t know how to interpret that exactly, so I get your conundrum. I think the answer is 1-2 safeties and then cast a wide net.
As a general rule, I would consider no college with an acceptance rate at or under 20% to be a “safety”. For a high stats kid it can indeed become hard to find a true safety because colleges that practice yield protection may reject them, expecting them to go elsewhere.
I agree your son’s stats are fantastic and will open a lot of doors. But schools like WF are relatively small and have incoming freshmen classes of about 1100 students. A few hundred of those will be hooked in some way (athletes, legacy, portfolio/audition majors, international and/or URMs, etc.)
That leaves approximately 50-60% of the spots open for unhooked applicants. For WF, that’s probably 550-700 spots for over 10,000 applicants. Even for your son’s phenomenal stats, there are thousands of students across America with similar stats fighting for admission to the same group of top 40 unis.
I agree his odds are very good and he has no reason not to apply or expect to be denied, but I don’t know that WF is a safety. IMO, a safety is a school you can say is at least a 95% certainty. I don’t think any unhooked student can say that about WF, or any other school near its ranking: Georgetown, Carnegie Mellon, NYU, Tufts, etc.
As mentioned above, it really doesn’t matter as long as he has a couple of true safeties on his list. I think he’ll be accepted at more than one of his non-safety schools, but it’s impossible to guess which.
How can we begin to know or categorize his chances with only the gpa and SAT total? And that he’s involved in a few things but no mention of math-sci ECs for a stem kid.?
For yet another male from NY interested in computer science with good but not remarkable stats, and no impressive stem ECs, I think they all qualify as reaches except Stoneybrook.
U.Mass Amherst is very good for CS. This makes it competitive, particularly for out of state students. I do think that your son has a good chance for admission, and that the quality of its CS program is a very good reason to apply.
“Not considering finances for now.”
Do you have $320,000 for his education, or $400,000 if it goes five years? If not, then you need to consider the cost of education. Nothing is a safety unless you know that you will be able to afford it.
This thread from April '19 highlights the topic of a high stats student and application outcomes. Thankfully, the initiator of that thread had a sense of humor and titled it “How I Got Rejected Nearly Everywhere”.
He applied to and got denied from 6 Ivies, Stanford, Duke, UCB, and UofChicago. Accepted at UGA, GaTech, and Vanderbilt.
His thoughts: “I went extremely Top-Heavy in my applications. I applied to one safety school and then essentially went all out because, well, I thought I had a good chance at getting into one of them. Turns out, I should’ve had more match schools for myself, who would’ve thought?”
In a later post, he added: “My main goal was to point out to other kids that these extremely elite schools are incredibly competitive, and one should not apply willy-nilly to them like me. I should’ve had more realistic expectations entering this whole process, and, while I was lucky to get into the schools I did, I definitely could not have been. There was a very good chance I would have been rejected from every school and not have any place to go. I should have applied to more matches and safeties instead of a nearly all far reach list.”
The list is lazy. What we have here is a group of reach schools pulled out of a U.S. News rankings list and a couple of safety schools thrown in, that he’s not serious about. Every school, for the exception of UMASS and SUNY has an acceptance rate of less than 30%. He’ll get into one of the reaches, but there’s another factor to consider. Almost all of them are private schools. Financial aid awards don’t always come back as affordable. In fact it’s very common to get short-changed at the last minute. It happens every year on this forum like clockwork. Whatever figures come back from the Net Price Calculator, add about 20% to that for the expected contribution. Add those factors into the list, and he might be going to UMASS whether he likes it or not. I recommend adding more target and safety schools to the list, and scrapping a few of the reach schools.
Also understand that being above the 75th or 90th percentile in a college’s statistics is not determinative. Some schools reject 90 percent of their applicants in their top 10 percent, stat-wise.
I see 7 reach schools (Harvard, Cornell, CMU, Duke, Northwestern, ND, and UNC), 4 match schools (BC, Northeastern, Wake, and UMASS), and one safety (Stony Brook). I would replace some of the reaches with match schools. Some possibilities: University of Rochester, Case Western, WPI, BU.
1520 SAT, perfect GPA, ranked in top 1% among 500, varsity athlete & drum major should yield several acceptances for OP. I think that OP’s list is fine.
How common are drum major applicants ? Should give a decent boost for admission.
Curious as to whether Eagle Scout status is meaningful to any of these schools as an admissions factor.