i will fill them out right now and see what they come out to
U of A has a table. It’s easy.
Your 3.97 will likely get you $30K but maybe $35K. You need a 4.0 for a 35 but they don’t use all classes.
ASU will be, I think, $15K - but theirs you have to fill out.
QB still the way to go - you’d know in time to then hit safeties later.
QB is such a fantastic deal - even if you ended up at a school that wasn’t perfect so what. But you will find one on there.
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Neither ASU nor Arizona offer full ride. AZ does offer better merit in order to attract students away from Barrett.
AU is not trying to attract lower income Asian students from California with FDS. (Its scholars tend to be AA, Hispanic, can be Native American or from rural VA – think of it as a very small scale Johnson). It’s worth trying only after all other applications are in because the odds are close to zero.
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A friend of my has a daughter at American. Overall she likes it but complains about the dorms being run down and not well maintained. I’ve read the same thing here.
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a little update. this is what my list is looking like as of now.
Safety
- University of Arizona (looking for merit aid)
- UC Riverside
- there will be one cal state on the list for sure. took off sac state since I heard there’s a large drug/alcohol culture on campus
Match
- UC Davis
- Occidental
- considering UCSD or GWU
Reach
[ ^ denotes QB rank, ` denotes QB RD ]
- UCLA
- UC Berkeley
- Stanford ^ (if through common app, likely REA)
- Columbia ^ (if i don’t REA Stanford, I’ll probably ED here)
- Swarthmore ^ (might not rank ??? a little iffy but it’s still here)
- UPenn ^
- UChicago ^ (might EDII here if Stanford doesn’t work out)
- Northwestern ^ (will double major in poli sci and journalism)
- Yale ^
- Tufts `
- Brown `
- BU `
- Princeton `
- considering Pomona/CMC, Harvard, Rice, Haverford, Barnard, Macalester, Wesleyan, UCI
You’re good for safeties and reaches, so only matches need work. Normally it wouldn’t be a problem as long as you’re admitted to your safeties ’ honors college but the financial part of the equation would lead me to advise adding 2 or 3 meet need colleges. Not sure any Questbridge college would be a match, Barnard or Macalester for instance might be too selective to be matches for anyone. Not sure.
i really like occidental and i heard that it’s full need met ? i previously had reed on my list but I decided I wasn’t very interested so I dropped it. macalester has about the same acceptance rate as UCSD so it could be a match if I look more into it. i don’t think i’d rank it though through QB
You can’t look at a school’s admission rate to see that it’s like - meaning, two schools may both admit 30% but be entirely different in student profile. So be careful with that.
Occidental does meet need - don’t forget, every school determines need differently. I can’t find it on their website but I assume they are need aware. A need aware school can take your finances into consideration - so for example, there’s a story about Lafayette College turning down someone who was the perfect everything, all because his need was full and they didn’t want to cover.
Oxy is a great school - but as you look at meets needs schools, you also want to take need blind vs. need aware in the admissions process into account.
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ahh i see. and yeah i think oxy is unofficially need aware … ugh this complicates things so much
edit: according to macalester’s 2020-2021 CDS they had a 39% admit rate and my SAT is above the 75th percentile. i don’t see their data for GPA on the CDS though.
If you demonstrate interest starting now if you haven’t already, Macalester could be a ~ match indeed.
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i don’t think macalester considers demonstrated interest? i’ll sign up for the mailing list just to be sure lol.
All LACs do. With such a small class, it matters that you made the effort to know what theyre about.
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Actually on the Macalester CDS it explicitly says “level of applicant’s interest” is “not considered”. No harm in showing some interest, but not sure if it will help or not.
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I ran a filter through Reddit A2Cs self reported census from the 2020 Hs graduating class of a few thousand applicants to highly selective colleges:
-non-URM
-better of SAT/ACT results 1490-1560 SAT 34-35 ACT (SAT equivalent range). Better than your current test, but you’re looking for a bump.
-UWGPA 3.75+ with a good bump in WGPA to demonstrate rigor
-filtered out compsci/engineering majors
-applicants requiring substantial FA
It’s a pretty good sample size. Your reaches are generally at 10-25% RD admission using those filters.
One school jumped out at me: Emory ~55% RD admit rate at those stats. It ticks a lot of your boxes:
-liberal, diverse campus near a large city
-QB school
- strong in polisci and creative writing. The did away with journalism, but have some excellent long form (magazine style) non-fiction creative writing, social issue non fiction writing, gender/race writing courses, etc.
-not religious, 25% Greek but not the end-all be-all of social life, not really a southern school.
-need blind
-if you’re interested in getting a dual LAC/national university experience, you could start at Oxford and move to Emory. Or not.
-excellent FA (but not as good as top 10 or so mega endowment schools).
-does have a pre-professional bent compared to many other T20s, but large enough that you’re going to have a large segment of the school in your lane as well.
As far as private national universities go, that’s a very strong match for you in terms of admission, curriculum and the non-academic side you were looking for. The other one that was at 50% was one I think you’re trying to avoid IIRC: USC.
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To follow up on my prior post, I thought I’d post the data from that census filter. Keep in mind, this is a self-reported non-random sample. We don’t know within that sample how acceptances were distributed. It could be that the top 20% by stats, ECs, whatever received 80% of the acceptances for each school. There may be some athlete or legacy hooks included, although I’d argue these types are less likely to post and hang out in an admission forum. We don’t know how individuals compare or how they “fit” at a given institution. The acceptance rates themselves are less useful than the inflection points where the odds improve. Some schools are lower than expected because they aren’t need blind. 2020 was a weird year, so I did exclude waitlist -->accept as there was a lot of waitlist activity that year. The are sample size limitations, although 400 students from the census met these criteria. Schools by acceptance rate groupings. All had a sample size of >30 applicants in this cohort. Most closer to 100:
<15% HYPSM, Brown Penn, Columbia, Northwestern, UChicago
15%-19.99%: Dartmouth, Duke, WashU, Rice
20%-24.99% JHU, Vandy, CWRU
25%-29.99% Cornell
30%-34.99% Tufts, Carnegie Mellon
35%-39.99% Georgetown
40%-44.99% NYU
45-49.99% no large private U w/ sufficient sample size
53.8% Emory
54.7% USC
60% Northeastern
65% BU
70% BC
UC schools UCLA 43%, Berkeley 46%…Irvine, SD, Davis and UCSB 74% - 84%. LACs lacked sample size.
Here’s the bio of someone at Emory who does a lot of the non-fiction creative writing instruction. Seems to be a good fit for the OP:
http://creativewriting.emory.edu/home/people/core-faculty/klibanoff-hank.html
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I usually trust the CDS but this must be a typo: LACS are too small not to take interest into account. The impact of not tracking interest is disproportionate for colleges under 3,000 students and they can’t afford not to.
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Schools that say they don’t consider demonstrated interest = person who says they don’t care what other people think about said person. 85% of the schools/people who say they don’t care really do care. It may not be measured via visits, clicks, interviews, email contacts. But part of fit is in accepting people who really do want to attend.
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Have you verified affordability? To be a safety, affordability (as well as admission) must be assured.
Local CSUs as a commuter will be cheap, but CSUs (unlike most UCs) historically do not increase financial aid if you have to live there (that costs more).
ASU has a scholarship calculator on its web site, and UA has a scholarship table. Use these to check if the scholarships will bring the price down enough to make them affordable.
i’ve considered emory but i’m not sure about Atlanta? I’ve heard its very nice and CNN being there is intriguing but I still don’t know… ill sit on it
Emory is in the city limits but not in the city. The city is easily accessible but you’d have to make an effort to go. Also you can spend the first two years at Oxford, 40 miles outside.
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