“When rank or class standing information is available, 94 percent are projected to graduate in the top 10 percent of their high school class, with 119 as the likely valedictorian or salutatorian, a new high.”
So that’s how they do it, they place the word “likely” in front of val/sal. I guess the question then becomes, how do those 119 kids know that they are likely to be the val/sal? At my kids’ school, only way would be to ask a guidance counselor (don’t know if they would divulge that information to a student as school does not rank). Or maybe Dartmouth reaches out to the applicants’ guidance counselors and gets the info directly. In any event, it does look like Dartmouth targets vals and sals. As it happens, sal from DS 19’s class got into Dartmouth ED last cycle.
Any issue with the Cornell (and I assume Dartmouth) PE classes honestly has to be because someone hasn’t looked very much into them. I can see those who can’t swim at all having an issue, since Cornell and a handful of other Ivies require students pass a swim test, but the PE requirement is not a big deal whatsoever. This comes from the mom of a kid who also hated PE from middle school through high school. She cringed on our Cornell tour when the guide mentioned a PE requirement… until the tour guide mentioned that there was even a PE class that consists of students sitting around and talking about how they feel about exercise.
I can’t speak for Dartmouth’s PE options but can about Cornell’s. My daughter chose a weekend yoga class for this semester. It will take place on on weekend (Friday evening, Saturday and Sunday through late afternoon) and then will be done for that credit. That’s it. She is planning on taking geo caching for 5 Sundays (a couple hours each) next semester because she had a group of friends that also hate exercise but think it sounds fun to do together.
There is a range of options and prices. IIRC, the weekend walk around campus is a free PE class. There is hiking, dancing, fencing, fishing, caving, ice skating, swim, bowling, tree climbing camping… I remember seeing backcountry cooking as a PE class. There are also wellness classes that focus on stress management and other health related but not sweaty PE areas. And these classes are pass/fail based on attendance, so not graded like high school. Also, we chose to view the activity fees as similar to buying a book for other courses. My daughter isn’t choosing super expensive PE courses (tree climbing in California on a spring break, for example) but is choosing some in the $100-200 range if she prefers the activity/schedule over a free one.
Before someone rules out a college, whether Cornell or Dartmouth or another, because of something like a PE class, they might want to at least look at the course offerings to see if they are really that awful.
Here’s another factor, at D20’s high school they normally have more than one Val and Sal. If the student reaches a certain high accumulative weighted GPA (4.3+?) by the end of 1st year, senior year they will automatically be one of several vals/sals (which is a whole other discussion).
My S19’s school does not rank and he did not list rank on his Dartmouth ED application. I think there was an option for ‘school does not rank’. The Dartmouth common data sheet says that 95% are val/sal ‘of those that came from schools that rank’.
Thelonius, you are right. She gym requirement just pissed her off, and Cornell is the most inconveniently located of all the schools she’s thinking about.
Love the farm thing
NH is very weak in terms of schools. Have you looked up her school on a national list to see where it ranks? Likely not so great. That means that with limited options for AP and strong honors courses she did the best she could have with what she had. There are not as many kids from NH applying to top schools. So that might help compared to a state like CA, or NY or MA.
Has she thought outside of Dartmouth? Chances are the best kids in NH are applying too due to proximity. But if she applies to a great school outside NE she might have a better chance. Just a thought.
Honestly, I don’t think she’ll get into Dartmouth. But if her farm essay is good and her volunteering is long terms and deep she may. Really depends on the whole package. If it were my kid, I’d tell her to apply to another Ivy/small Ivy outside of NE.
thanks happy times. That’s how I see it, too. Her high school is better than it should be given the socio-economic profile of the town we live in. Our tax rate for schools is just about the highest in the state and teacher pay is just about the highest, too. But it’s still just an average public high school. I think the projected valedictorian has a good shot at Dartmouth.
There just aren’t a lot of good reach options for my kid. Because we own land, not just land that’s part of the farm, but lots of additional land that is connected to the farm, we will not qualify for a lot of need-based aid. But in reality it would be nearly impossible for us to turn the land into cash even if we wanted to because it’s jointly owned by more than one family member. So price is a factor.
Net price calculators are showing $50k+ for most schools for her and that’s more than we are willing to pay, especially since McGill will be about $30k for rb&t at the current exchange rate, and McGill is an excellent alternative to elite American schools.
Before she ruled out Cornell I emailed admissions and asked if they ever take complicated land ownership situations like ours into account when determining need-based aid and they said “absolutely” so maybe we could get the net price down below $50k?
I agree she’d have a better shot if she applied somewhere a little further away, but nothing further away really interests her the way McGill does, or even u of Ottawa. But we’re still looking.
Look at Concordia. In Canada it’s up there with Mcgill ( which for some reason Americans have always known about).
I wouldn’t let the land thing stop you. Those calculators are not made to assess multivariable contexts. If the land cannot be sold, it’s likely not to be considered.
Would she consider UPenn or Princeton? Out of your area and might be less applicants from NH.
U of British Columbia also has a good reputation and lower price tag
I think we have to report the value of our share of the land, even though there is no reasonable way for us to sell it, and we wouldn’t anyway.
An analogy would be a vacation house jointly inherited and owned by several relatives. You own a share of that house, but how could you ever get the money? You’d have to ask family to buy you out and you would never want to go to the house again. Impossible.
She wants to be in a city (but would go to Dartmouth because it’s close) but all those schools are probably not worth applying to. Harvard, for example.
Good luck to OP’s daughter from another Granite stater - hope she gets in at Dartmouth. The farming can be a real positive to her - and agree McGill is a good choice.
Thought of adding a few comments about some assumptions made about competition from NH - its true its not as competitive as say NY/MA/CA but still not trivial. For context, in our public school there are “at least” 25-30+ kids with: 1500+/34+ SAT/ACT scores; 3.75+/4.5+ (UW/W); 8+ AP’s; and more (note the emphasis on the ‘at least’ part). This is true for most years. How many kids get into colleges like Dartmouth: at most 1 or 2 (most years only one). This is among 20+ apps/year. For Ivies out of NE - results are not so great either - true, fewer kids apply but results are either 0 or 1 or 2 admits. These are all extremely talented kids with competitive state/national level credentials. I too wonder why results are so bad for such a low populated state - I guess Universities don’t take that many from NH. In addition, NH public school students have to compete with boarding school students (many ivies recruit heavily from these boarding schools and can satisfy any geographic diversification claims - technically these boarding school kids are from NH). Boarding schools like Exeter sends dozens - they have GC’s who start working with kids from freshman year.
Anyway, the point is that I have been observing our school’s college admission record for the last 5-6 years. Kids who got into top-10 colleges - they all had stellar scores as compared to other admits on cc. Don’t expect any NH concession.
Very interesting discussion. Quick question regarding vals/sals, is great weight given to vals/sals from larger public schools with hundreds of students in the graduating class than to vals/sals from smaller public or private schools with less than a hundred in the graduating class?
Nhdad, I’m trying to figure out which public school you’re talking about. I’ve got a couple of ideas.
I work in one of the 5 large inner city schools in NH. In any given year we have 0-3 students with the stats you described. In the last 10 years I think 3-4 of our valedictorians got into Dartmouth. About 12 years ago we had a kid get into Harvard. In addition to having the stats, he was a star athlete and a student of color. One of our grads recently graduated from MIT.
As you can see, it’s extremely rare for one of our students to get into an elite school.
I have had 2 students in the past who were illegal immigrants (not judging, just an observation) who had very high psat scores and were offered full scholarships to Phillips Exeter. Both transferred there after sophomore year. One is now at a top Ivy on a full ride scholarship.
So it’s interesting that maybe the numerous kids from Phillips Exeter and St. Paul’s who get into elite schools are taking all the spots that might have gone to public school kids.
Since I originally posted this my daughter has decided that McGill is her first choice, almost regardless of where else she might be accepted. If by some miracle she got into an Ivy with a surprisingly large aid package she might change her mind, but maybe not. Part of it for her is that we are middle class and very few kids at elite schools aren’t from wealthy families. She talked to someone who grew up middle class and went to Middlebury who was very uncomfortable there. She felt like a second-class citizen. This will not be the case at McGill.
@nhtigerdad not sure your theories are correct. Our DD graduated from PEA in 2019 and is attending Dartmouth. We are a middle class family and we’re lucky to have received substantial financial aid from Exeter. I can assure you we had zero special prep from college counselors starting in freshman year as @nhdad2012 suggests. Honestly, the college counseling process leaves a lot to be desired and isn’t even discussed until junior year. To our knowledge our daughter is the only 2019 PEA graduate matriculating at Dartmouth. She has not felt out of place at PEA or Dartmouth as a middle class kid. She was accepted to 9 of the 11 schools she applied to and Dartmouth had the best FA package of all the colleges she was accepted at. Hopefully your daughter finds a college she is a good fit at - as this can make all the difference. We have 3 older kids in college - so have a lot of experience with fit: good and bad.
vegas1. I admit that I know very little about how the prep schools in NH operate, or how any elite schools decide who gets in. I wasn’t even thinking about any of this stuff until my kid got a higher than expected ACT score. Her dream school has been McGill, but she’s going to apply to Brown and Dartmouth and maybe a couple of others just for kicks, probably. If she got in, they’d hav to offer her a large aid package to make her even think about it. McGill is about $27k for tuition room and board at current exchange rates for either of the programs she’s looking at. The net price calculators are showing a lot more than that for us at Brown and Dartmouth.
I’m sure if my kid got into an ivy she would find a friend group and would be ok. She would certainly meet people who could help her tremendously later in life. To me, that seems to be one of the main benefits of attending the best possible college you can get into. I don’t know how my kid feels about this, but I like the idea of McGill being full of kids who got there strictly on great grades and test scores. In-provence tuition is $2500 a year, so literally anybody from Quebec with the stats can go there.
Son is in 2nd year at McGill, and both BIL and SIL are Profs at Dartmouth. Can confirm that McGill is very rigorous. You might want to look at Queens as a high ranking, and somewhat local alternative to McGill. It is in a far smaller city than Montreal, but Kingston has it’s charms. Queens is excellent, though. Concordia is fine, and I would certainly not consider Ottawa as a tier above. I would consider both those schools a tier down from Queens, all things being equal(though they never are), but you can get a good education at both.
The cost of McGill will actually go down in the second year when students move out of dorms and into the city. Rent is pretty reasonable in Montreal compared to cities like Toronto, NYC, and Boston.
Sounds like you are in a win/win situation, as ED is not really a thing at McGill. Being an english major at Dartmouth would be wonderful…some of the English buildings are old and ooze history.
Only read the original post in this thread. What impressed me most was the OP’s daughter’s class rank & the fact that she grew up on a working farm. Otherwise, stats are fine. Should receive strong consideration from Dartmouth College admissions, in my opinion.
@nhtigerdad good luck to you and your daughter. I’m sure she will do great wherever she ends up. Our daughter was accepted at Brown as well, but upon revisit day she realized she was not a good fit socially for the school. Have you guys visited? I will say, don’t forget you can always ask colleges to match other financial aid packages for similar schools- probably not McGill of course. Brown actually matched Dartmouth offer for need based aid before we realized our daughter would not be attending. Before revisits she though it would be Brown for sure, otherwise we would not have asked them to match the offer.
@57special Why do you think Concordia is equal to Ottawa? I ask because the handful of rankings I’ve found have Concordia’s world rank at 500-800, and they all have Ottawa at 200 or below. We have not toured Concordia, or looked into much, but we did have a great experience touring U of Ottawa.
