Her school does not rank. She will retake her standardized tests and will be prepping over the winter break. She is taking a full course load this semester and with all of her ECs, there has been very little time for any meaningful SAT/ACT prep.
Yes, she is assured admissions with a state school that has an honors program that she will apply to.
Good to know.
My high school–I am well beyond my high school years–has placed a lot of athletic recruits at both Northwestern & Columbia. Typical SAT scores of these athletic recruits was in line with your daughter’s SAT score.
haha, my daughter is definitely not an athletic recruit 
but she still somehow manages to do a sport and all of her other ECs on top of her full course load. She knows her list is currently reach heavy and I’m sure it will change after our meeting with the GC.
And that was my point as athletic recruits & URMs tend to be given the most leeway in admissions with respect to standardized test scores.
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I would consider adding UNC to the list
If your daughter doesn’t meet the threshold for UT Austin auto admit (top 6%) then it is doubtful she will be successful as an ED applicant to Columbia.
The second issue is the test scores. While many of the top colleges will be test optional next year, it will be largely used to admit low-income students who don’t have the means for study prep/travel. If she can’t get the scores up to 1500 (SAT) or 33 (ACT) then you need to consider other options.
Final issue is the URM status. There are a handful of southeast asian groups which are poorly represented in US college admissions: Bhutan, Myanmar, Laos and Cambodia. If you have ancestry from India, China, Thailand, Vietnam, Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia or Singapore then it will be much more difficult. If that is the case, she will get no special bump.
I personally wouldn’t waste the ED application on Columbia. If she can get the scores up, then Barnard would be a much more realistic option.
She is interested in journalism or English, but I do not see any AP/Honors English classes listed in your original post. I would think she would want advanced English on her transcript.
Don’t assume she will get favorable treatment for being in an under represented minority group. At many universities Asians must have higher grades and test scores to gain admission than other minorities, or even whites. Much has been written about this trend.
Her school does not offer AP/Honors English courses.
First of all, your daughter sounds wonderful. Great student. Lots of interests and activities (although what is DEIQ?) She is going to do incredibly well wherever she goes to college. I would assume that she may want a graduate degree in journalism, eventually, so you really need to try to plan finances with that in mind. That’s when she might wind up at Columbia - for her grad degree in Journalism.
Even if your daughter’s ancestry were from an oppressed minority group within SE Asia, such as Hmong, by the time one gets to being the child of a UVa graduate, there would be no admissions boost for her. So she most definitely would not get a URM boost - in fact, she would be lumped in with all the other highly qualified East Asian, SE Asian, and South Asian applicants, in which category she currently would absolutely not stand out. Whether it’s fair or not, when it comes to admission to highly selective schools, she is at a disadvantage.
Although her achievements and qualifications are lovely, she has no national or even state-level awards or achievements, which is why she won’t stand out from the pool of applicants to the most selective schools. Even if she were to prep for the SAT/ACT and get her score up to a near perfect score, she still wouldn’t stand out, especially with most schools having gone test optional (and BTW, UC has gone test blind, so the only way to let them know about high test scores is to have done so well on the PSAT that one is a National Merit Semi Finalist). The only way that I could be wrong about this is if she is a private school so prestigious that it has guidance counselors who have insider connections to admissions committees for highly selective universities, the way that the absolute top prep schools seem to have, and those guidance counselors are willing to go to the mats for her.
Unless you are willing to pay full fare for her in the UC system, she probably shouldn’t even bother applying to them. She will probably get into UT Austin, but you need a safety backup at one of the other UT schools.
She is very unlikely to get into Columbia, even ED, unless she has some extraordinary achievement before then (like writing an amazing in-depth feature journalism article that gets published by a national level news organization, like NPR, NYT, Washington Post, etc., or having her first novel published by a publishing house AND being a huge hit, high up on the NYT book review list.) Now, the journalism article is actually a possibility for her. As you and she are surely aware of, there have been some very interesting and newsworthy developments in TX in the last few months that most surely affect young women in TX. But I haven’t seen any reporting on it from the viewpoint of young girls, who of course are the ones most affected by it. She still has time to do an amazing, in-depth feature article about this issue, interviewing a wide swath of young women from all socioeconomic levels in your city, and at certain relevant locations just across the border in neighboring states and just across the border into Mexico, and how they’ve been affected, how it’s changed their lives, even if they are not immediately and concretely affected by it - and of course, the ones who ARE being immediately, directly, intimately, and imminently affected by it would surely have very compelling stories. A feature-length article like this, well-researched, well-written, at the level of a seasoned journalist but coming from a 17 year old, that gets published by NPR (which is always looking for articles written from teenage perspectives), or even the NYT, which does look for teen perspectives too - THAT might get her into Columbia, or any other highly selective school. THAT is the kind of “spiky” achievement that they’re looking for.
Without some outstanding spiky achievement that screams, “This person is going somewhere!”, or that is in something that the school really wants and needs, such as a tuba player that the school’s orchestra conductor is begging for, the only highly selective out of state school on your list that I think she has a chance at is UVa, because of the legacy status, and probably with no merit money.
If you want to chase merit money, you’re going to have to look at third tier LACs, or flagship state U’s in the South or Southwest.
If she is unable to create something that makes her really stand out from the pack, I doubt that she would be accepted by any of the schools on your list, other than UT Austin.
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I vehemently disagree. Good ECs, Good GPA… definitely has a shot at NYU (especially ED)
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Yeah, I think you might be right about that, even though NYU got a huge number of applications last year.
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As a former, long-time journalist I disagree with comments that she will need grad school. It’s not required, and neither is getting a story in the Washington Post. What she really must do is write stories for her high school newspaper and perhaps a small local weekly or daily as well as social media. If she’s breaking good stories and getting local awards that is fine.
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ASU has the excellent Cronkite School- she should take a look.
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