Any advice for racial diverse target school?

College Search & Selection
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<p>Hello -</p>

<p>My D has asked me for advice. She is looking for a racially diverse (she realizes it may have to be "relatively" diverse) that would be a target school for her (accepting 30% or more). Her SAT superscore is 2240. She is a white female living in an very affluent community but lives a very different life than the peers in her town. She attends a private high school with more than 50% students of color, and her two best friends are a young woman who is African American and other who is Latina (first-generation). My D is fluently bilingual in Spanish and English. There is no question that her SAT scores, her subject scores and her ECs are phenomenal. But almost all of the schools that she has fallen in love with admit less than 20% of their students. She also loves Wellesley and Mt. Holyoke and Macalester, all of which accept 30% or more. But she realizes that acceptances at highly selective schools is a crapshoot and she needs to add 1-2 more colleges to her list.</p>

<p>She is specifically looking for a school that is less than 5,000 undergrads, has a campus feeling, has at least 25% students of color, and offers more of a liberal arts undergrad environment. She is fine with rural or urban. </p>

<p>Does anyone have any advice? Or are the three "safeties/targets" that are listed above enough, if all of her remaining schools are 20% acceptance or less? Someone mentioned Emory but she is concerned about whether it may be too conservative (she is quite liberal).</p>

<p>I would love to pass on any advice anyone has for her. Thank you.</p>

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<p>Why would she be concerned that Emory is too conservative? Most college campuses are pretty liberal places, and Emory isn’t an exception to that.</p>

<p>An alternative to Emory is Oxford College, which is a 2-year division of Emory in a more rural-ish area that is much smaller - more like an LAC. The students who opt for this attend Oxford College for two years and then transfer to the main Emory campus, so they get the advantages of a large research university and the advantages of a small liberal arts college. Oxford’s campus is also even more diverse than Emory’s campus - 30% white, 26% Asian, 6% Hispanic/Latino and 14% African American (with most of the rest being international students). It’s also similar in its selectiveness to the parent campus; about 29% of applicants are admitted.</p>

<p>Here are some relatively diverse places that would either be safeties or matches for your daughter:</p>

<p>Scripps College
Mills College
Agnes Scott College
Bryn Mawr College
Smith College
Occidental College
Seattle University
College of New Rochelle
Loyola Marymount
Soka University of America
Syracuse University
Santa Clara University</p>

<p>Scripps is about as selective as Mount Holyoke, but also a diverse women’s college. Bryn Mawr and Smith are still top women’s colleges, but are less selective than Mount Holyoke and Wellesley. Both are also very diverse places. Mills and ASC are very small women’s colleges that are a tier below Bryn Mawr and Smith, but very diverse places that may be generous with financial aid for your daughter. Both of them are also known for being kind of hippie liberal women’s colleges, Mills especially. (College of New Rochelle is still a tier further down.)</p>

<p>Soka University of America is actually a top liberal arts college of which I had never heard, but was apparently founded on Buddhist principles and has a mostly international student body.</p>

<p>Then there are these colleges:</p>

<p>Carnegie Mellon
University of Miami
Case Western
Fordham</p>

<p>Which I put on a separate list because they fulfill some of your daughter’s wants but not others. The University of Miami has the diversity and is a target for your daughter, but is not really a small liberal arts college - but then again, neither is Emory and I think the two schools are similar in a lot of ways. Carnegie Mellon is technically 25% minority, but is probably a smidge too selective to be a target school. Also, their minority mix is largely Asian, with very small percentages of African American and Hispanic students. Case Western follows a similar pattern. And Fordham is more diverse than most schools and is also a target, but I was surprised in that it’s not really as diverse as the schools on the first list.</p>

<p>I also didn’t include any public colleges, but there are affordable public colleges that are pretty diverse in my state (NY). SUNY Old Westbury, a public liberal arts college on Long Island, is a very diverse place that would be a safety for your daughter. Another diverse campus (that is actually pretty selective, with a 33% acceptance rate) is the SUNY College at Purchase, which is about one hour north of NYC.</p>

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<p>[Discover</a> B-CU - Bethune-Cookman University](<a href=“http://www.cookman.edu/about_BCU/index.html]Discover”>http://www.cookman.edu/about_BCU/index.html)</p>

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<p>Unweighted GPA (and UC/CSU GPA if in California)? Cost constraints (safeties must be affordable)? Is your state of residency California? Academic interests (or undecided)?</p>

<p>UC Merced (18% white) and CSU Monterey Bay (42% white) have about 5,000 students. CSU Channel Islands (47% white) has about 3,000 students.</p>

<p>Wellesley and Mount Holyoke consider “level of applicant’s interest”, so they cannot be safeties. Macalester does not, but considers a bunch of subjective criteria, so it is hard to see it as being a sure thing, no matter what one’s stats are. It also fails to meet the “diversity” criteria you mentioned, being 76% white.</p>

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<p>This is a tough one, but you have some excellent approaches suggested already from juillet and ucbalumnus. I ran a Main Site college search and came up with CSU Monterey Bay and SUNY Old Westbury, but I also saw Whittier College as a possibility. The size requirement is one of the significant limits on this search of schools that are 33-67% non-white.</p>

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<p>Maybe look at Tulane?</p>

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<p>Mills or Agnes Scott would be great safeties.
Santa Clara or Seattle U would also be safeties, perhaps a little lower than those. Whittier also, still one rung below.
Occidental would not be a safety due to selectivity but a great possibility and a near-safety.
I wouldn’t recommend Old Westbury to a student with an SAT score 2240 since to get into the Honors College a 25 ACT/1100 are sufficient and those represent the tippy top students.
Soka is to buddhism what Jehovah’s witnesses is to christianism. It’s a beautiful campus with a very weird vibe is all I’ll say. Type it in your search engine if you need further elaboration since I don’t want to attract trolls. In terms of diversity, most students come from Japan. Also has the distinction of being the only college on a rival website starting with a P that has not a single student complaining, criticizing, or just razzing.</p>

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<p>Soka is not majority from Japan, although it heavily recruits domestic students from both a Buddhist sect and the surrounding area which happens to have among the highest concentration of various Asian sub-groups anywhere in the US. That being said, I will second Myos and suggest you consider other options (I used to live within walking distance of the school and have spoken at length about it with a high school classmate who goes there). </p>

<p>By students of color, do you mean any race other than white or are you specifically referring to black? If it’s the latter, most of the California schools shouldn’t be considered as almost all of them, save for a bottom tier CSU, do not have a large percent of black students. </p>

<p>Grinnell is also a diverse school although white Americans comprise around 57% of all students. </p>

<p>If I’m not mistaken, Oxford College of Emory accepted around 41 percent of applicants last year. If you have any questions about the school, feel free to PM me.</p>

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<p>I think she would like Fordham, the Rose Hill campus in the Bronx.</p>

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<p>When I was in college, “of color” in racial terms typically meant any non-white. Has it changed since then?</p>

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<p>Also note that admission rate is not a reliable indicator of selectivity.</p>

<p>[Top</a> 100 - Lowest Acceptance Rates | Rankings | US News](<a href=“http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/rankings/lowest-acceptance-rate/page+4]Top”>http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/rankings/lowest-acceptance-rate/page+4) indicates that Cal Poly SLO and Jackson State University have the same 31.3% admission rate. But while Jackson State University, like other Mississippi public universities, auto-admits students with 3.2 HS GPA, or 2.5 HS GPA and 16 ACT, or 2.0 HS GPA and 18 ACT, no one would think that a student just meeting these standards has any chance of admission to Cal Poly SLO.</p>

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<p>I thought students of color meant black but that’s mostly because I always associated the term “colored person” with black. Regardless, I’ve never heard anyone my age use “person of color”.</p>

<p>Anyways, back to the OP’s post.</p>

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<p>Mount Holyoke does seem to fit her preferences. It was a safety for my D2 (per her college counselor), and she was admitted with a 21st Century Scholar merit scholarship ($25K/year plus a one summer research stipend). With a 2240 SAT, I think you probably can put it in the safety category as well. You might add Scripps to her list as well. It has the bonus of being part of the Claremont consortium, so it has a small LAC feel with the resources of a bigger campus.</p>

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<p>OP,</p>

<p>I sent you a PM.</p>

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<p>Mount Holyoke, like Scripps, has the benefit of being part of a consortium, although their campuses are not contiguous as the Claremont Consortium schools are. Mount Holyoke is part of the Five Colleges Consortium of western Massachusetts: MH, Amherst, Hampshire, Smith, and UMass. Like Scripps, it’s an excellent choice, although I don’t know that one can call it a safety.</p>

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<p>Mount Holyoke considers “level of applicant’s interest”, so it is unwise to use it as a safety.</p>

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<p>Well… when my D2 (who did have a higher SAT score, but lower GPA than the OP’s kid) applied, I was initially thinking a low match. But her GC (who is pretty experienced and used to work at a top 25 LAC) said she thought it was a safety. And clearly given D2’s results (largest merit scholarship they offer), it was. My D1 was also admitted a few years ago with stats quite a bit lower than the OP’s. So I guess you can call it a low match if you want to, and if affordability is an issue, then maybe it isn’t a safety depending on the OP’s situation. But it sure seems like a likely admissions to me unless the OP’s daughter has not shown interest or has something in her essays/recommendations that causes an issue. If a student has visited, gotten on their mailing list, and shows a level of knowledge of the college in their essay, I don’t see that a college like MH would ding them for “lack of interest”. I have never heard the fact that a college uses that criteria as a good reason to say they can’t be a safety.</p>

<p>OP, are you familiar with the Common Data Set? Just search for “Common Data Set” <college name=""> on Google, and you will almost always get a hit on the college website where you can click into these documents. Section B2 of the document tells you something about the ethnic makeup of the student body. This may help you compare colleges in this area. And there is other good info in there, too. :)</college></p>

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<p>Colleges know that higher stats applicants are less like to matriculate if admitted (students generally prefer the more selective schools out of those that admitted them). So they use “level of applicant’s interest” to reject or waitlist higher stats applicants that they believe will not attend if admitted (i.e. those applicants using the college as a safety). The risk may be less if the applicant plays the “interest” game to the college’s satisfaction (though what the college considers as “interest” varies by college; an article about Lehigh admissions indicated that one applicant was waitlisted due to not checking the admissions portal often enough, indicating “lack of interest”).</p>

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<p>I don’t see what GPA OP’s D has, it’s hard to give advice without this information.</p>

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<p>Have you considered Wesleyan? I think their acceptance rate is just over 20%, but they meet most of the needs you are looking for.</p>