MY SON JUST VISITED UNC LOVED IT. SAT 790 MATH 710 ENGLISH. 4.73 GPA AP CLASSES. WAS COLLEGE BASEBALL PROSPECT HOWEVER HAD TOMMY JOHN SURGERY. STUDENT EMBASSADOR. COACHES SPECIAL NEEDS BASKETBALL, ANGEL FLIGHT CANCER VOLUNTEER. WHAT ARE CHANCES?
What year in high school is your son? Would he be an in-state or OOS applicant?
SENIOR. OOS. ANDOVER MASS.
UNC is tough for non-residents, but your son has excellent standardized test scores & great ECs. Nevertheless, UNC is hard to predict for non-residents so be sure to apply to at least 9 colleges & universities which should include 3 safeties.
Can you not yell in all caps
Generally, the chances for any OOS applicant to UNC-CH are somewhat problematic due to the highly competitive nature of OOS applications there: UNC-CH admits OOS applicants in numbers that are calculated not to exceed 18% of an entering freshman class. See “Undergraduate Admissions” on Page 2, here: http://www.admissions.unc.edu/files/2013/09/Admissions__Policy.pdf. As a further example of the difficulty for OOS students to be admitted to UNC-CH, the entering Class of 2022 had a 13% acceptance rate for OOS applicants: https://uncnews.unc.edu/2018/08/17/carolina-welcomes-5095-new-undergraduate-students-to-campus/ (29,563 OOS applicants; 3,829 admits).
If you look at the UNC-CH Common Data Set, here, https://oira.unc.edu/files/2018/06/CDS_2017-2018_20180605.pdf , under Part C7 it states that standardized test scores, application essay(s), letter(s) of recommendation, and the rigor of your high school record are “very important” academic factors considered for freshman admission, whereas GPA and class rank are “important” academic factors considered for freshman admission. Extracurricular activities, talent, and character/personal qualities are considered as “very important” non-academic factors.
Further, Part C9 of the Common Data Set for UNC-CH gives the median 50% for both SAT and ACT scores, as well as the percentage of the entering first-year class falling within certain ranges of SAT and ACT scores; Part C11 gives the percentage of entering first-year students falling within a range of unweighted GPA on a 4.0 scale, and Part C12 gives the average high school GPA of first-year applicants.
By way of comparison, our OOS high school usually has 8-10 students who apply, and 1-2 students who are admitted, each year to UNC-CH; and, with the exception of legacy students, our admitted students have SAT scores of 1500+, ACT scores of 33+, and weighted GPAs of 4.4+. These successful applicants also were involved in extracurricular activities that showed commitment over time (no “drive-by” ECs), and demonstrated leadership in the school as well as their ECs. Other kids in our city who I know were admitted to UNC-CH recently also had similar academic statistics and non-academic characteristics; and all of these kids were “unhooked” in admissions parlance (i.e., not a recruited D-1 athlete, or a URM, first-generation college student, etc.).
I don’t know whether your high school has Naviance or any similar program that gives information about how students at your high school have done in applying to colleges and universities; if so, you might peruse that data. I would also try to meet with a guidance counselor at your school as soon as possible to discuss application strategies for UNC-CH; if any former students from your school have been admitted to UNC-CH recently, the guidance counselor may be able to give some insight into how and why such student(s) were successful.
If your son plans to apply EA (probably a good idea), be aware that UNC-CH has a very early deadline for EA applications: October 15. In the event that your son does apply EA, then what he has under his control right now are his essays and LORs; all of them should be top-notch, and it would be a good idea, in my opinion, to emphasize leadership abilities (or perhaps overcoming obstacles, i.e., Tommy John surgery) in the essays.
As @Publisher notes, admission predictions for OOS applicants can be difficult because of the huge numbers of OOS applicants to UNC-CH. Your son is very competitive for admission, in my opinion; but I’m not the one making that decision.
Best of luck to your son!
Does it make a difference if recommendation letter comes from nations leading historian. she has given commencement speeches at, Loyola, Dartmouth, Yale,Georgia .Not to leave out PULITZER Prize. Again does that help?
Does the historian know your son well and in a context that is relevant to a college?
By example I know a kid that got rejected at Notre Dame who had an absentee reccomendation from the pope.
The schools care about the qualities the kid posses not the credentials of the author of the LOC. Well known example of a kid who got into Dartmouth based on a janitors recommendation based on the kids kindness to everyone.
Be careful of context or it can hurt or help.
Also assuming you are talking about Doris Kearns Goodwin? She fits the profile you describe to a tee.
You should be aware that some academics don’t associate her with the Pulitzer win in 1994 but the plagiarism scandal that forced her resignation from the Pulitzer board in 2002. She is not universally loved and certainly not considered “the nations leading historian” by many. Just a cautionary note.
@VOLVO1 No real advice for your DS, but wishing you all the best. My DS is a freshman, just started three weeks ago. We’re from right down the road from you in Wilmington, MA. Its a real challenge to be admitted OOS, but you never know until you try. If he ends up attending then contact me, there aren’t many kids from MA this year.
My DS SAT scores 790 MATH 700 R/W I thought 710, below 1500,GPA 4.73 5 AP classes all 5’ on AP exams.How does this compare to your DS? SAT scores higher enough to be considered?
A 1490 SAT score is equivalent to a 33 ACT, according to the concordance tables. A 10-point decrease on the SAT shouldn’t make much if any difference.
My DS didn’t take the SAT; did better on the ACT. He got a 33 ACT. GPA was a bit lower, however, he attended one of the local boarding schools which has significant grade deflation. Hard to compare. That being said, you just never know. Two of his friends from boarding school were rejected from UNC and had higher grades and test scores. You just never know!
Have not visited UVA any thoughts.NC first choice looks like 50/50 at best.
^ In considering the comparative UVA/UNC-CH admissions numbers, I looked at the UVA admissions website, which states that “we do seek to maintain a 2/3 majority of Virginians in our student population” whereas UNC-CH caps OOS admissions at 18% (and in fact the OOS admission rate last year was 13% at UNC-CH). http://www.admissions.unc.edu/files/2013/09/Admissions__Policy.pdf. So, initially, a higher percentage of the UVA student body consists of OOS students than the UNC-CH student body.
Then I looked at the admissions information for both UVA and UNC-CH for the past two admissions cycles.
The admissions information for the entering Class of 2021 for UVA is found here: https://admission.virginia.edu/unofficial-uva21-admission-statistics; the UNC-CH information for the same time period is found here: https://uncnews.unc.edu/2017/08/18/carolina-welcomes-5158-new-undergraduate-students-campus. The statistics from these websites show that UVA had 5,681 admitted OOS students for its Class of 2021, with an admit rate of 22% for OOS applicants; by contrast, UNC-CH admitted 3,785 OOS first-year students for its Class of 2021, with an admit rate of 14% for OOS applicants.
The statistics for the Class of 2022 at the respective institutions provide roughly similar numbers. For UVA, there were 5,546 OOS applicants admitted in its Class of 2022, here: https://admission.virginia.edu/unofficial-admission-statistics-uva22; for UNC-CH, there were 3,829 OOS applicants who were admitted, here: https://uncnews.unc.edu/2018/08/17/carolina-welcomes-5095-new-undergraduate-students-to-campus/. UVA’s Class of 2022 had a 21.4% OOS admit rate; UNC-CH’s Class of 2022 had a 13% admit rate.
So for the last two years it appears that UVA has admitted roughly 1700-1900 more OOS applicants than UNC-CH. From this I conclude that, all other things being equal, an OOS applicant has a better chance of admission to UVA because it has a slightly larger admit rate, and also admits a larger cohort of OOS freshmen each year compared to UNC-CH.
@VOLVO1: Further, UVA is, like UNC-CH, one of the “public Ivies,” and your son should be able to get an excellent education there. It is worth a visit there, if you can swing it (actually, the best college tour that I made with my kids was to UVA).
If you do visit UVA, I would also try to make a visit of the College of William & Mary, which is a couple of hours drive away. Like UVA and UNC-CH, it is one of the “public Ivies,” and your son could get a high quality education there as well. To me W&M had a different vibe than UVA did; but both are excellent schools.
Gandalf78 what specifically does the term “public Ivy” mean? The Ivy League is a very specific and well defined term referencing 8 schools in an athletic conference. Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Penn, Princeton and Yale
Not sure it should just be applied casually to others in order to convey prestige or comparison without being misleading and almost condescending to the fine public schools you reference. They are outstanding in their own right and hardly need to be embellished with a term they have nothing to do with.
UVA has 16,000 plus undergrads a multiple of all Ivy schools but Cornell and plays in the ACC. I don’t see similarities to Ivies but some great stand alone attributes for the right student.
@Nocreativity1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Ivy
When someone mentions the phrase “Ivy League”, most people I know think not of athletics but academics.
“[A]lmost condescending to the fine public schools you reference” – Are you kidding me?
No I wasn’t kidding. UVA doesn’t need to be compared to other schools to validate its fine academics.
“It’s a BMW which is just like a Ferrari”
“It’s a Seiko which is the Rolex of…”
^ Since the OP (or, more properly, the OP’s son) lives in Massachusetts, I don’t know how familiar the OP is with UVA or its reputation; that’s why I used the phrase “public Ivy”. It’s not a question of “validating [UVA’s] fine academics,” it’s a question of providing a context for understanding by the OP in the event that s/he needed it.