We just found out my son’s SAT score which was 2310 (first try). He has about a 98 gpa so he’s at the top of his class. Not saying that for any reason other than that we don’t have a lot to spend on his college (he’s a Junior), especially with his sister a year behind him, so we are looking at either colleges offering national merit, which he should get (we think), or colleges where he can win a competitive full ride or full tuition scholarship, or an ivy league college where he can possibly get enough need-based aid to go to school there. My wife is pretty insistent that he stay within about 6-8 hours of where we leave which is NY state, so that makes the ivy league colleges more attractive.
All that being said, even though he has stellar grades and SAT, he probably has a slim chance of getting into an ivy league college because he has low ecs, no leadership positions at school (small Catholic school with about 50 in his graduating class), and will have only about 70 hours of volunteering in. He did work for most of his junior year so that might help. His only ecs are the lead in the school musical for 2 of the years and regular band and folk band all three years.
Is it even worth applying to an ivy with low ecs like that?
University of Alabama would give him a great guaranteed scholarship…and by plane, it’s a lot less than 6-8 hours away.
I will say…6-8 hour drive away is FAR. If your wife is thinking that is close, and it will be easy to visit or for your kiddo to come home…it won’t be. It’s just too long a drive. To be honest, he could go to school across the country and get home by plane in less time.
Agreed - his EC’s are fine. The fact that he is working may actually be a mini-hook EC - adcoms at all the ivies we looked at definitely all made a point that students don’t have to have lots of ECs - they understand the financial realities in today’s world and they just want to see how a candidate spends his/her time. They don’t care if it is EC clubs, work, taking care of younger siblings, disabled parents, whatever, if it gives them a sense of who the kid is, it will help. If there are none at all - and they see the kid took the SATs 8 times, they will conclude that this is a student whose hobby is test-taking.
I liked the story one adcom told about the first kid they accepted the year before, who started his essay about how he spent most of his time gaming. Every day after school. He wrote very well. But as he went on in his essay, he shared how was playing video games with his best friend and neighbor, a special needs kid in a wheelchair. This was what was important to both of them. The message was clear to my kids - when you have a chance to write about yourself, embrace it, because the essay is far more important than 40 points on the SAT. Supporting your family may be more important to you than French club (nothing against the French club) - and if so, they want to see you be genuine you. And it is okay if you are still trying to find yourself in high school - lots of kids are. What becomes important is your ability to tell them who you are.
It is good that you understand his chances at the Ivies are not great - because nobody’s chances are great.
“6-8 hour drive away is FAR. If your wife is thinking that is close, and it will be easy to visit or for your kiddo to come home…it won’t be. It’s just too long a drive. To be honest, he could go to school across the country and get home by plane in less time.”
I have to disagree with this. If you don’t live near a major hub airport, you can’t get anywhere without connections that turn even relatively short trips into quite a few hours of travel, or even days when you miss your connection and you were on the last or only connecting flight. Not everyone has the luxury of living way closer than 6-8 hours drive from an entire list of suitable colleges. And, no you cannot get across the country to most destinations in less than 6-8 hours. Holiday travel can also become very difficult or costly as small planes fill up fast.
"we don’t have a lot to spend on his college " - If you qualify for need-based Financial Aid, then Ivy may be worth considerations. If not… strike them off your list since they usually don’t have an merit scholarships. Check out some college website NPC - Net Price Calculator.
I’m going to disagree with everyone here and say that unless you qualify for fee waivers and/or you have some hook you haven’t mentioned, e.g., URM or first generation college student or stellar achievement in some academic contest like a science Olympiad or AIME, I personally think that someone from NYState with your S’s ECs is extremely unlikely to be admitted to an Ivy. There are just too many NYers applying.
Most kids don’t handle rejection well. Personally, I wouldn’t put a kid through the rejection experience unless the drive to apply to Ivies was coming from the kid. It doesn’t sound as if it is.
I would add an exception though for the state school components of Cornell. They may be worth checking out.
We always have a lot of kids from our NYS high school applying to Cornell and a fair number get in.
On the surface your son’s EC’s may not be enough - or they might be. It’s not really about the hours or the descriptions. It’s what you do with them and how you talk about them. For example there was a question about what your favorite EC was on the Common App the year my younger son applied. He wrote about a volunteer job he’d done for the neighborhood association scanning records into pdf files. In the process he learned a lot about the history of the neighborhood including how there had been a huge fight to keep open classrooms in the neighborhood schools. He read all the correspondence, but the resolution was not in the papers. He talked about feeling like a real historian as it made him realize for the first time just what the limitations of primary sources can be. He knew they must have lost the fight, since there aren’t open classrooms any more, but it’s not in those records.
He also told a hilarious story about the school playground, which went back and forth being open after school hours as each succeeding generation forgot why they’d locked it in the first place.
Anyway the point is, that it was a nothing project that he’d started because he was required to do some community service for a government requirement. But through his essay he was able to show his intellect and his sense of humor.
You can’t get from New York to California in 6 hours unless you have a private plane, you live at an airport, and your destination is also an airport. Otherwise, the actual door to door travel time is much longer than 6 hours.
The Google guesstimates multiple flights from NYC to Palo Alto in less than 6 hrs but I didn’t try to book any.
Better luck coming from NY to Stanford, than getting into an Ivy school, I bet.
And don’t the parents want an excuse to go to California?
Well, there are not any scheduled commercial flights to Palo Alto airport. The nearest airports that scheduled commercial flights go to are San Jose and San Francisco. Don’t forget travel time on the ground at each end of the trip. Total door to door time might barely be within 8 hours.
^^ The problem is a simple matter of collegiate geography. In the entire area West of the Mississippi, there are relatively few Ivy-caliber private universities with Ivy-caliber need-based aid. There’s WashU (St. Louis) … and Rice (Houston) … then there’s Stanford, USC, and Caltech (plus a few LACs.) There are very good state universities, but they don’t give very generous n-b aid to OOS students.
This lay-of-the-land is one of the factors that shores up the prestige (and suppresses the admit rates) of the Ivies and other top private schools in the East.
One of the OP’s first tasks should be to assess affordability of various reach-match-safety schools. To do this, s/he’ll need to assess eligibility for need-based aid by running the online Net Price Calculators. Then s/he’ll need to assess whether they can cover their Estimated Family Contributions (EFCs).
Nationwide, about 60 schools at least claim to meet 100% of demonstrated financial need. Many of them (by no means all) are in the Northeast. (http://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/paying-for-college/articles/2014/09/15/colleges-and-universities-that-claim-to-meet-full-financial-need). Unless the OP’s family earns more than about $200K/year, with the indicated stats they probably will be eligible for admission and some need-based aid at some of these ~60 schools. All are at least fairly selective. They do span a fairly wide range of sizes, locations, and selectivity (although many of them are small liberal arts colleges that do not offer engineering or business majors.) Many other private schools don’t necessarily claim to meet 100% of demonstrated need, but in practice sometimes do (and on average meet over 90%.) Example: Skidmore College (Saratoga Springs, NY).
Try running the online net price calculators on some of these schools. Go ahead and try a couple of Ivies, but also try some less selective (but still very good) alternatives like Colby, Holy Cross, or Trinity. Don’t worry too much about quality or “fit” at this point. You need to see if you’re close to being able to meet the Expected Family Contribution at the most generous schools. If you cannot do so without borrowing more than the federal loan limits (https://studentaid.ed.gov/types/loans/subsidized-unsubsidized), even at these schools, then your strategy probably needs to emphasize some combination of low sticker cost and merit aid, not need-based aid.
For low sticker cost, the best options start with your in-state public schools (including, if necessary, schools within commuting distance.) For merit aid, there really aren’t all that many selective schools in the Northeast that offer very much (except at a couple schools like JHU to a few super-stellar students). For big merit scholarships, you’ll need to look at much less selective schools, usually in distant states. The University of Alabama is one of the few US News top 100 national universities to guarantee full tuition merit scholarships for specific stats (>= 1400 SAT M+CR, >= 3.5 GPA). You can get smaller “merit discounts” at many other schools (including many good, selective colleges outside the NE). Clark University and URochester are 2 solid schools in the NE that do offer these “discounts” in relatively big average amounts to relatively many students.
Op here. Thanks for everyone’s input. I’ve already done quite a bit of research. I 've run the NPCs and also scoured the financial aid threads.and have been over them with a fine tooth comb so to speak. Unfortunately the airfare aspect for out of state colleges is an added cost. I realize that gas is a cost also when you are driving 6-8 hours but still not as much as airfare. We may end up needing to send him to Kentucky or Alabama in the end but just wanted to see if anyone thought applying to an ivy even made any sense.
mathmom- Thanks for the suggestion of focusing on the essay. I’m sure that makes sense no matter where he applies to.
It may not. Not necessarily because you’d have zero chance of admission, but just because there are so many good alternatives that are (a) somewhat less selective, and (b) just about as good (or frankly even better) for undergraduate education. The 8 Ivy League colleges are very good schools that tend to offer very good need-based aid. However, they are not the last word either in quality or in affordability for all good, middle class students. Your “search space” easily could amount to 8 X 8 good schools with good aid. Now you need to find the boundaries of that space in terms of the kinds of schools with the kind of aid you need. I like to start with the ~60 “full need” schools … but the right search space for you might be more focused on merit aid, or on lower cost state schools.
Keep in mind that 7 of the 8 Ivies started out as, basically, small liberal arts colleges. They evolved into bigger research universities not because that was necessarily the best model for undergraduate education, but because that was a model that better met the needs of the local and national economy (which needed the trained experts provided by med schools, law schools, business schools, ag schools, etc.) So – unless you’re after a specialized pre-professional credential (in ag, nursing, business, engineering etc) – keep those small schools in mind. Many of them offer good aid (n-b/merit), as well as smaller classes than any of the 8 Ivies.
It is worth looking at your high school’s acceptance history. In my kid’s school for the last 10 years and with NO exception every single kid that got admitted to an ivy had a special something. Usually won a major award or was selected to prestigious hard to get program or was recruited athlete, outstanding URM etc. High scorers with the normal ECs (music, varsity sport, community service etc) had excellent results with other schools but not the ivy league. So, if I had a high scorer without that special something I would not even bother. Especially Stanford. The only admit to Stanford we ever had was an outstanding student that also made the summer Olympics in a popular sport nevertheless…I know it sounds cliche but it holds true to our high school. Also, among the ivy league it is clear that a couple of them show more “love” to our students. The guidance counselor denies that but year after year the results don’t…
I want to start by saying…sure…apply to an Ivy or two. Why not?
Not wishing to belabor the point…we had a kid who went to college 2 hours and 20 minutes from our house. We had another who went to college all the way on the opposite coast. No direct flights. She flew SW via Baltimore.
We were able to see the 2.3 hours away kid more often, because we COULD hop in the car for a day trip, or even after work to get there for an 8:00 concert. If he had been 6-8 hours away…no. That is not a day trip.
I think the mom needs to identify WHY she wants this kid within a 6-8 hour drive of your home. If it is because she anticipates more visits, or thinks it’s an easy drive to do back and forth…I would,say no. And definitely not when you have winter and/or holiday traffic to consider.
We asked our kids to apply to colleges within a three hour drive from our home OR within one hour of a close friend or relative. We have a fairly large and spread out family, so this was not too restrictive. I think they both thought we were nuts until DD was admitted to the hospital via the emergency room trip for surgery the next morning at 7. No way we could get there before the surgery began, but close aunt, and very good friend were all over it…aunt actually spent a week with DD (they kept saying dd was going to be discharged…but then she needed a second surgery).
Anyway…take a pencil and an old fashioned map…and draw a circle that encompasses the 6-8 hour driving range from your home…then go from there. The northeast is filled with great schools. The Ivies meet full need…but so do a number of the smaller schools…Amherst, Williams, Bates, Colby, etc. lots of choices.
