<p>Thanks for your thoughtful responses. Have you all found Naviance helpful? For my school, the scattergrams seem to show not much relationship between stats and admittance. Maybe there aren’t enough acceptances for the schools–reach, match, and safety–to be indicative, but I think it’s more that the simple stat/acceptance equivalence doesn’t work, and you don’t know what other factors are in play. The information is for the last ten years, undifferentiated, and I have often heard that the situation has changed radically even in the last ten years. I’m not looking for a guarantee of acceptance to any school, just some sense of how widely she will need to cast her net–and it seems that the answer is, quite widely.</p>
<p>Mary, while I do find Naviance helpful, I agree with you that there is no way to know how other factors (legacy, athletic recruit, URM status, full pay, etc) may have played into the results. Since my kids attend a suburban public school, we don’t even know the course load. One of my kids could sometimes help because she knew who the kids were. (“Oh, the person who applied to Duke-Vandy and Iowa in 2009? That’s so-and-so and her dad is a senator or she is a recruited athlete or has an amazing life story.”) I would love to say our guidance counselors were good at predicting where kids would be admitted but, frankly, I found cc much more helpful for that. </p>
<p>The only one of those colleges to which my kids applied was Bowdoin and did include Bates and Colby. I do think your daughter could easily like all three.</p>
<p>I would definitely recommend researching all of the University’s before deciding which ones you’d like to visit. My son wasn’t exactly an AP student, but weather (we don’t like the cold at all!) and preferred major were a major factor in which colleges we visited. And honestly, to really get a feel for the campus and environment, I’d recommend staying at least 2 days. If this is a place that your daughter plans on spending at least 4 years, then very careful consideration should be done. Good luck to you and your daughter!</p>
<p>-Jess</p>
<p>I really took the approach of finding the lovely safeties and matches and starting with that right away. I saw kids falling in love with reach schools, partly because their parents were in love with them and then the kids were rejected or not offered enough FA to attend. Not going to happen to my kid, I said. And it didn’t. Probably half of the schools we visited were safeties and S identified 2 he could love. </p>
<p>There are schools with a fairly high acceptance rate that are nevertheless really interesting and academically challenging. Let’s say, Evergreen State or Colorado College. We made sure to visit some of these schools early. </p>
<p>As it turned out, my son chose Lewis & Clark and Goucher as his safeties because of their international focus and location near interesting cities. He was accepted to them EA (big sigh of relief!) and then was admitted to the other 8 schools he applied to.</p>
<p>Consider the reverse commute. My son didn’t want to stay local, so that helped, but applying to schools where your child will be at all exotic yields an advantage.</p>
<p>Then he chose Grinnell, when he could have chosen a more "selective " school and it has been the best fit possible. What a wonderful college, overlooked by many because it’s in Iowa.</p>
<p>Naviance didn’t help us at all. Most VT kids stay local.</p>
<p>Naviance helped us a lot, but we are a huge high school. It was very accurate. You just have to realize when most people that get in and have GPA X and there’s one kid who got i with much less that that kid probably brought something else to the table as a hook.</p>
<p>At this stage of the game I would recommend that while it may not be as exciting, it would be more productive to visit safeties and matches. </p>
<p>From a practical perspective you’ll want to know that she likes the safeties and matches she applies for. This is not as critical for the Reaches initially because she might only get into 20% of them (just an example). As a result, I feel it would be better to plan on visiting the Reaches in Senior year after being accepted.</p>
<p>I think it is better to fall forward to a Reach than fall backwards to a Safety.</p>
<p>Both my kids had SATs at/above 75th%tile at all the schools to which they applied. Still got rejected from some of them. </p>
<p>An example of jonri’s warning about classes being filled by ED – Washington and Lee. Last year, they took 47% of the entering class via ED. When the freshman class is 470 kids and 6,500 apply, the odds are not good if you weren’t one of those 450-500 ED applicants. In addition, they are a school that really values students showing the love. Someone else posted a thread recently about her D being rejected there with a 2340. Not picking on W&L – but I just looked up their CDS last week, so it is fresh in my head. If you are looking at small LACs, knowing the % of the class filled by ED is important info, esp. if you are applying RD. </p>
<p>Some schools limit the % of students admitted via early applications (ED, EA or otherwise), but it is not a universal thing.</p>
<p>Both of mine felt they could make the flagship work for them – there was merit $$ and there are ways to make the campus feel smaller. One of my kids added a private “likely” as well. Both applied to EA schools, hit the lottery and dropped several apps once they got the good news.</p>
<p>OTOH, the ~30 kids who applied to Yale SCEA hoping they could be “one and done” spent the winter break submitting more apps – and these were kids with tippy-top scores and an incredibly tough program.</p>
<p>Naviance was very much on target – we could see that certain schools really liked kids coming out of the programs mine attended. Other schools penalized kids for the hit on the GPA taken by attending a program that intense, no matter what else they brought to the table. (Learned that with S1.) </p>
<p>While my younger son fell into a gray area where there weren’t any kids with his SAT/GPA combo on the scattergram, in a couple of cases we were able to see that the schools(s) had accepted everyone with at least a XXXX SAT, combined that with the knowledge of which schools liked kids from his program, and found there were enough data points to give us some confidence that he’d have a good shot.</p>