<p>If I'm the only in my class applying EA to U of C, Notre Dame, and Georgetown, would my chances increase significantly? Or does it not matter?</p>
<p>It matters more so regionally, not by school.You have a very slight increase in chance of acceptance if your state/city doesn’t have many people applying, particularly because schools love to say that they have students for all 50 states.</p>
<p>I’m from Oregon…Is that underrep?</p>
<p>Where in Oregon?</p>
<p>Your school doesn’t really matter. State might help a little bit.</p>
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<p>It can matter greatly but that depends on the specific university, your specific high school as well as your specific qualifications. If Naviance is available through your school you can quickly track the number of applications and acceptances (potentially over several years). You can also view the average stats of those accepted, which can be quite helpful as well. If that isn’t available, your guidance counselor (if worth his or her salt) can tell you how many students are likely to be admitted to the top universities from your school. </p>
<p>As a generalization, school matters much more than any other geographic breakout one can think of when it comes to top-tier private national universities. Many schools in a district will have deserving kids on par with the others schools in the district, in that case, when a school like Notre Dame has the chance of making two communities happy versus just one (as well as maintaining/enhancing a relationship with the guidance dept. of the individual schools) … well that’s a no-brainer. </p>
<p>Also, this stuff about getting a kid from every state is trivial for a top college that draws national attention. A heavily populated state like Oregon will have many students at Notre Dame. Even a small college like Carleton College (which is 1/4 the size of Notre Dame) enrolled 15 kids from Oregon last year. </p>
<p>Bottom line is your school and their standing with a top-tier college matters most after your own qualifications.</p>
<p>amciw: portland</p>
<p>ctyankee: thanks for the insight, that helps me greatly and i will ask my counselor sometime.</p>
<p>Oregon isn’t heavily populated. We have 1.2% of the nation’s population, which is less than an equal division thereof.</p>
<p>Did Carleton really enroll 15 from Oregon (I know two of them IRL, actually, but still)? Considering the enrollments for Ivy League colleges are uniformly lower (for much bigger schools), I’m not sure I can believe that.</p>
<p>Finally, I’m not sure that your location will really help you. It depends on which school you go to, and especially for Notre Dame, your legacy. If you are going to Jesuit (I’m going to assume you are a guy) and have family who went to Notre Dame, those will help you much more than being in Oregon. I don’t think top colleges discriminate by state except for a handful of really underrepresented states. Yale admitted 16 total students from Oregon this year (as an example), out of 200 applications. That is marginally over the 7.5% overall admit rate. I was thinking that being in Oregon would help me get admitted, but I am highly doubtful it had much of an effect at all. Moreover, the only kid in your class status definitely does not help. I was the only applicant to Stanford SCEA, and got rejected, and was the only applicant to Princeton, and likewise got rejected. In short, Oregon is not really viewed as underrepresented by national universities.</p>