My daughter just finished her junior year and is interested in liberal arts colleges. Here are her primary stats:
3.78 cumulative GPA (unweighted). Her weighted GPA is either 4.18 or 4.34, depending on whether honors classes are worth +.5 and AP worth +1 or whether they're both worth +1.
Probably top 20% of the class based on prior years' cutoffs
5 AP classes completed (5s on the 1st 2 tests. Results of the next 3 won't be available until next month) - The ones she got 5s on where Japanese and World History. The other 3 from this year are Microeconomics, Lang, and Environmental Science
Will be taking 4 more APs next year (Calc AB, Psych, Literature, and Government)
35 ACT
Biggest extracurricular is that she founded her school's ACLU Club in her sophomore year and has been president ever since. It has about 20 members. They've published a Know-Your-Rights guide, run a voter registration drive, got the school to change how they handled MLK Day, and a few other things
Other extracurriculars in order of priority/participation are drama (various roles in tech - put in tons of hours and is passionate about it), tutoring (tutored for a a few hours every Sunday at the local library), SAGA (also known as GSA - kind of vanilla member), Model UN (just vanilla member)
Summers in order of importance - JSA Summer School at Georgetown U. (took 1 semester honors class on media and politics, met lots of senators and other VIPs), ACLU Summer Institute (1 week in Washington DC getting training on civil liberties and activism by the ACLU), Washington Business Week, Speech and Debate program by Education Unlimited (2 years). This summer she'll just get a part-time job at the local supermarket and work on her essays.
Demographics - Half Asian (Japanese mother, Caucasian father). Gender fluid. US Citizen.
Probably not worth mentioning, but she has hydrocephalus which is treated with a shunt. The shunt malfunctioned when she was in 7th grade, which required 2 emergency surgeries, and she had a very rough recovery. She's totally fine now and doesn't consider the experience core to who she is, so she probably won't even mention it on the application.
Won't qualify for financial aid
She’s interested in liberal arts colleges, since she wants the focus on undergraduate education (not being taught by grad students), small class sizes (no 400+ person lecture halls), lots of writing and debate as opposed to filling out scantron tests. She doesn’t care much about the region, though she would prefer not to be in a city. She also would very much like it to be a cooperative environment rather than competitive. She’s looking for a place that will challenge her intellectually but not be a pressure cooker where everyone is stressed out for 4 years. She also prefers an open curriculum (i.e., no required classes or distribution requirements) but is ok with some distribution requirements as long as it’s stuff she would probably want to take anyway.
Right now her top choices are Bowdoin, Wesleyan U., Oberlin, Haverford, Scripps, etc. She hasn’t really looked much at Williams, Amherst, or Pomona since she doesn’t think she has a shot. (And she’s heard that Swarthmore is a pressure cooker, so she’s not as interested in that.) Prestige is a factor for her, but it’s a minor one. She would much rather be at a place that will be a good fit intellectually.
Any thoughts on her chances at some of these schools? Any that should be on her short list that she may not be considering?
Are you fine with being full pay? I understand that you said “Won’t qualify for financial aid”, but it is not always the same thing.
We looked at Bowdoin, but what I saw from touring and from looking at the little scatter plots doesn’t help much other than saying I suspect her chances are reasonable but it is NOT a safety. My guess is that it is either a match or a slightly high match as long as you are fine with being full pay.
I’m resigned to paying sticker price. I would be incredibly happy if she got some merit aid or scholarships, but I’m prepared to pay full price if need be. That said, if she had to choose between a full ride at a very good LAC and paying full tuition at a higher ranked one, I think we’d want to have a serious conversation about how much better the latter one really was.
^^Agree Bowdoin is definitely not a safety, class of 2022 acceptance rate (10.3%) is lower than both Williams (12%) and Amherst (12.8%).
Look at the CTCL schools, Grinnell, the remaining NESCACs, Denison, Davidson. You might also consider some larger schools like Bucknell, Richmond, Lehigh - the arts/sciences schools are LAC like. Hopefully she can find several that she would be happy to attend that also satisfy reach/match/likely categories.
There are five traditional LACs that are in a class by themselves in terms of financial resources. Four of them are eliminated in the quote above.
Grinnell is the fifth.
Many top LAC applicants avoid Grinnell, because they can’t imagine going to school in a small town in Iowa (small towns in New England or upstate NY are OK, but apparently not Iowa). If your daughter has more geographic flexibility, and doesn’t care about urban access, then Grinnell is a significantly less competitive option than the four other wealthiest traditional LACs.
In my experience, the most isolated LACs (such as Grinnell) tend to have the strongest senses of community.
Grinnell is one of the top “open curriculum” LACs. There are no required classes, except for those needed for the major (as at any school) and a single first-year tutorial (for which there are many options).
Not a “traditional” LAC, but you might also want to look at Soka University of America in Orange County, California. Very small and relatively young LAC, rising fast in rankings. Does not have traditional majors, but does have mandatory study abroad. Fantastic endowment (maybe the highest in the US on a per-student basis), amazingly good financial aid. Affiliated with Soka University in Japan, largely funded by Japanese donors. Particularly popular with female students from Japan or of Japanese descent.
@Corbett - Grinnell is definitely on the long list of LACs she is planning on reading up on. I don’t know if she realized that Grinnell has an open curriculum, so that will definitely bump it up a notch. I also didn’t realize that it had such a large endowment. ($1.8 billion, according to Google.) That is definitely good to hear about. I actually went to Oberlin, but one common topic of discussion among the alumni is the financial difficulties the school is facing and how professors aren’t being paid competitive salaries. It’s nice to know that Grinnell isn’t in that situation. Geographically, being in the middle of nowhere Iowa probably isn’t any different from middle of nowhere Ohio. I do get what you mean about the sense of community when the school is isolated from the rest of the world!
I didn’t mean to “rule out” Williams, Amherst, and Pomona per se. I just thought that her chances are so slim that it’s probably not even worth considering. She’ll probably apply to 1-2 of them as a super reach.
@Mwfan1921 - Yes, I realize that Bowdoin is a bit of a reach. I assumed it was less of a reach than the WASPs, but I could be mistaken. We visited Bowdoin over the winter, and she really liked it. That’s probably her top high-match/reach choice as of right now.
The two schools are not in the same ballpark in terms of financial resources. Then again, there are probably only about a dozen LACs or private universities in the US that are competitive with Grinnell by this measure.
Yet Grinnell gets relatively few applicants, despite its financially elite status. The acceptance rate for Fall 2017 was 29%.
Sorry, but, I’m sick of hearing this endowment per capita factoid being used as a significant qualifier. Every penny of endowment income that isn’t being used to keep a college’s costs down (i.e., within reach of a family making ~$180,000 a year) is pure window dressing. Readers would be well advised to run the NPCs (net price calculators) on any college they may be applying to - and, compare them.
Of course you should run the NPC and make comparisons. But don’t be surprised if it turns out that schools with larger endowments per student tend to offer better financial aid.
For example, US Dept. of Education’s “College Navigator” lists the average net price for both Grinnell and Oberlin, and further breaks it down by five different income levels. Grinnell’s net price is lower in every category. I don’t find this to be surprising.
We visited Grinnell–I loved loved loved it and all the opportunities. If I could live my life over I would easily trade my Northwestern undergrad experience for 4 isolated years at Grinnell. My daughter would not seriously consider it: much too small and academics too serious. She found her bliss elsewhere, but I still smile at the thought of Grinnell. Check it out!
As stated above, your daughter might want to consider LACs with flexible curricula, notably Smith, Grinnell, Hamilton and Amherst. One or more of these colleges may suit her general criteria as well. Vassar would seem to be another school worth looking into. As a less selective alternative to Wesleyan, Connecticut College could be appropriate for her list.
With respect to Kenyon, their list of overlap schools can be helpful for students looking for colleges of this type and selectivity: http://www.kenyon.edu/admissions-aid/admissions-statistics/#companywekeep. You may notice a few schools you could have otherwise overlooked, including Kenyon itself of course.
@dla26 I first thought Oberlin and Wesleyan when I read your post but you already have them on the list. Oberlin offers merit of up to 30K depending on major (science majors get a slight bump). You also might look at Macalester, which is in a very nice suburban area not far from the Mississippi River in St. Paul, MN. Top merit was 20K when my daughter applied in 2017. It emphasizes global citizenship, study abroad, and I believe the IR program is good. Somewhat less competitive are Earlham College (IN), which I believe has good offerings in Asian Studies/Japanese and Dickinson, in Carlisle, PA. Dickinson has a semester away in DC program and an active career/internship program with links to DC, Baltimore, and Philly. It also offers an unusually high number of foreign languages for a school its size (maybe 13?). Dickinson more middle-of-the-road politically than Mac, Oberlin, or Wesleyan.
Kenyon, mentioned above, is an idyllic campus in a small village, great for writers (obviously) and offers some merit-based scholarships.
I actually went to Oberlin (I don’t think I mentioned that in my post?), so I’m also hoping the legacy status can help her. We visited Wesleyan, and she really liked it. I’ve always had a bias against Kenyon, since when I was a student at Oberlin, I always thought of it as the inferior Ohio LAC. Of course, times have changed and Kenyon seems to have gone up and the rankings while Oberlin has gone down some.
I’ve looked a little into Macalester and was also interested in Carleton. I know of Earlham from my days studying Japanese, but my daughter isn’t very interested in pursuing Asian studies or Japanese in college. It’s part of her cultural background, but she doesn’t want to major in it or anything.
I would be incredibly happy if she got some merit aid or scholarships, but I’m prepared to pay full price if need be. That said, if she had to choose between a full ride at a very good LAC and paying full tuition at a higher ranked one, I think we’d want to have a serious conversation about how much better the latter one really was.
Of course, times have changed and Kenyon seems to have gone up and the rankings while Oberlin has gone down some.