Hi all, my son is a Texas high school junior who just received his latest SAT test scores (Jan SAT). He previously took the exam the first time in November and received a 1970 and this is likely the last time he’ll take the SAT exam. He is going to apply for out of state admission to UVA as a history major. Can you guys honestly tell me what you think of his chances for admission are based on his current profile?
GPA: 3.7 (w)
Rank: Probably top 30%
SAT: 2070 as follows 790 Critical Reading; 590 Math; and 690 Writing (He plans on taking ACT for the first time in April)
SAT II World History Subject Test: 680 (He will take the US History Subject Test in June 2015)
AP World History: 5/5 (he plans on taking the US History & English AP Exam)
Hook: African-American Male
EC: Track freshmen year; Basketball manager sophomore year; and Cross Country junior year.
Part-Time Employment: Since June 2014, he has worked a part-time job working 10-12 hours a week at a fast-food establishment.
Thanks in advance for any advice or input that I receive.
Its hard to tell when you are OOS. My son was OOS and he had a 3.93 W and 5.0 UW, ranked 3/233 in his class. Over 100 hrs of community service, Eagle Scout, President of Robotics club, NHS, Student Council, Works part time and he got flat out rejected from UVA. We were surprised as we thought he would be deferred. ACT: 29. He got into the other 5 schools that he applied to. Good luck!
Thanks @college67, yes I’m understanding now that when it comes to the highly selective schools, there may not be any rhyme or reason for the acceptance/rejection. UVA is currently one of two “reach” schools on his list, the other being UNC Chapel Hill. He’s also looking at Wisconsin, UT-Austin (both my wife and I are alums), Minnesota, Ohio State University and two safety schools - LSU and Alabama (they both offer a ton of guaranteed merit aid to out of state applicants.
I hope that your son is happy with the other 5 schools he was admitted to, given his credentials I’m certain they must be superior institutions of higher learning. Has he settled on a choice so far?
@fatherof2boys, its funny my son had Ohio State and Chapel Hill on his list as well. He also applied to The University of Maryland, NC State and Appalachian State. We are in state for Chapel Hill. He just loved Ohio State and did get a $15,000 from them is still approx. 6,000 more a year than Chapel Hill and we do not quality for FA. He decided on Chapel Hill! We are so excited for him. He did not get any more $ from any schools. Think his ACT being a 29 does not warrant merit scholarships for other schools.
As your son is a junior I am sure he will find his perfect school! Next year will be starting again as my daughter will be a junior and wants to look at totally different schools
Well Chapel Hill is an outstanding institution, that’s why its on our list of reach schools along with UVA. I think its very likely that my son will be faced with a similar dilemma, that is he may get admitted to our in-state flagship institution (UT-Austin) with little to no merit aid; however, he’ll get admitted to some of his out of state targets like Ohio State, Minnesota and possibly Wisconsin with a decent amount of merit aid, but not enough to make up for the out of state premium. In all honesty, even if he could get into Chapel Hill (which is a reach) I don’t know if we could afford the out of state tuition. Based on our household salary, we won’t qualify for any merit aid either. We are in the perfect income bracket where we make too much to get any need-based aid, but too little to be able to easily absorb the costs of out of state tuition.
Did you guys visit OSU? what in particular did your son find attractive about the Buckeyes?
The competition for OOS seats at UVA is fierce. 3.7 weighted is probably not enough even for IS, the unweighted should be 3.7+, preferably top 10% of his class. They might consider him if he has a very sharp upward trend in grades, taking all AP, Honors, and IB classes, but otherwise I think it is beyond his reach for direct admission.
Your son is certainly competitive. There has been some criticism that UVa’s enrollment of African-American students has been decreasing, so the U. will be particularly looking for well-qualified African-American students such as your son.
UNC-CH and UVa certainly offer a plus for out of state students - they are the only two public universities that commit to meet 100% of the demonstrated financial need of US students.
Thanks @Charliesch for your comments. My son and I attended a recruitment seminar that UNC and UVa held in Texas and we learned about their 100% demonstrated financial need policy for US students. That’s very admirable especially considering the fact that their peers (Cal, Michigan and UCLA) don’t do so, at least with respect to out of state students. That’s one of the reasons we’ve identified both schools ( UVa & UNC) on our list of “reach” schools. Also my son believes that both states have promising economic futures and thus they might be good prospects for where he’d start his career.
I think that we are going to go ahead and still apply to both institutions. We’ll just have realistic expectations regarding our chances for admission - slim odds. My son is a fabulous writer and I expect that his essays will be great. He had a slump during his freshman year that’s really been a drag on his overall GPA. We expect that he will do better on the ACT than the 2070 he received on the SAT. With some intensive prep over the summer a 32 ACT score is a very real possibility based on his performance on the diagnostic tests.
I just feel like we’ll always have this doubt if we don’t at least apply. Also I recall reading an article by an admissions officer at a selective school state that schools who practice holistic admissions are looking for the best class overall. Maybe that includes a student from Texas who wants to major in history with 3.5 GPA and 2070 SAT/32 ACT. We’ll roll the dice and see.
That is a good perspective. A 2070 SAT is a great score that will help get admittance to 96% of colleges. However, it is a common score among out of state UVa applicants. Yes, make sure he puts lots of thought, time and effort into the essays. UVa does treat them seriously. One person said, the goal of the essay is not to write an academic term paper with big words, but instead to get the admissions officers to really like you. Look for topics that provide insight into a student’s personality. Try to avoid topics that everyone else writes about.
My daughter ended up doing much better on the ACT than the SAT. They are very different tests.
An entering history major can be rare. My son said it seemed everyone started at UVa wanting to go engineering, comm school, computer science or pre-med. However, many students develop different interests after their first semester. UVa has a great history department.
I wish him the best of luck. Just remember that there are loads and loads of excellent OOS applicants, the competition is really fierce. Last year UVA received almost 22k completed OOS applications and offered admission to just over 5k of them, 22.9% (to fill some 1200 seats). So he needs to be better than 4/5 of the OOS applications,as a rule of thumb. http://avillage.web.virginia.edu/iaas/instreports/studat/hist/admission/first_by_residency.htm
^^^^@fatherof2boys, your attitude, perspective, and outlook going into your son’s college search is refreshing. Not often seen in some of these postings. He sounds like a talented young man and he’ll find his spot. Take some risks in the application process…nothing to lose but some time and a few application fees. Best of luck to your son!
@fatherof2boys def have him do the applications for Chapel Hill and UVA. There is nothing to lose! The reason my son just loved Ohio State was because of Columbus! He loves big cities like that and also Ohio State was right in the middle of Columbus. It was also a lot further from home which he liked as well. He was very excited for Chapel Hill as well! He is really excited about being a Tar Heel!!! Your son will get plenty if offers coming his way!!!
Thanks @robertr, I think we just have realistic expectations. My son always insisted that we have an equal number of “safety” schools along with the “reach” schools and a core group of institutions where he had a good chance to get admission into. Our reach schools as I stated above are UNC and UVa. He probably only has a 1/10 chance of admission. On the other hand, the two lock schools are LSU and Alabama. There is nothing particularly endearing about either of those schools at this point (we haven’t visited either yet) other than the fact that his test scores guarantee him a lot of merit aid making them quite affordable. At this point he would get $15,500 a year from LSU and $16,716 per year from Alabama to offset the cost of OOS tuition (if he can raise his SAT score by 20 points more or secure a 32 on the ACT exam, Alabama will give him a full-tuition exemption worth $24,950 per year).
The core group of schools we are looking at are, in order of difficulty, the following: Wisconsin; UT-Austin; Ohio State and Minnesota (I’m not certain which is more difficult to get into between OSU and UM as it appears that OSU may have a lower admit rate, but UM has higher SAT/ACT test scores). We estimate that my son has at least a 50% chance of admission, or more, with the those four schools and, depending on a variety of factors such as affordability, one of them may likely end up being his ultimate destination.
Had my son took care of business his first year of high school, or studied harder for the Math section of the SAT he wouldn’t be here with a 3.7 weighted GPA and a 2070 SAT test score. We dug that hole ourselves and these are the options we are dealing with. I wish his options where better; however, the choices we have are pretty decent. All of the schools that that he has a good chance to get admission into are respectable state flagship colleges and I’m certain that he’ll get a quality education at any of them.
In any event he’s planning on being a History major so its not as if he isn’t going to have to go to graduate or professional school anyway and maybe having learned his lesson he’ll take care of business from day one as an undergrad to have better options for graduate school. I am a lawyer and no one asks me where I went to undergrad, but they do want to know where I went to law school.
Thanks @college67 for your response above respecting OSU. I think my son would enjoy being in an urban setting as well so its good to know that was something that your son liked about OSU after your campus visit. However, as good as OSU is (and believe me I think its a great all-around school). There’s no doubt that UNC has a greater academic reputation. Congrats to your son on his acceptance.
We’'ll roll the dice down here in Texas and still apply to UVa and UNC. My son did an online chat with the UVa admissions counselors a few months back and he asked a couple of questions which he received encouraging responses on. One was about his SAT II World History score. My son did not feel good about a 680 score, it was the very first standarized test that he took at the end of his sophmore year after he had completed the class. He really did not prepare as well as he should have for that exam. In any event, he asked the counselor if he should consider re-taking the test since he scored a 680. Now there were alot of students on this chat, and the counselors only answered a few of the questions which they selected because they thought they were interesting. However, they chose to provide a response to that question and the UVa counselor stated that there was no reason for him to re-take the test and 680 was a good score. The second question he asked that the counselors responded to was whether UVa would take into consideration AP test scores for admission purposes. He asked this question because he received a 5/5 on the World History AP test and he thought that score might rehabilitate his World History test score. Again, the admissions counselor choose to reply to that question and stated that it would certainly be in his interest to point out high AP test scores because as apart of the holistic admission process the admissions committee would look at them. My son has a few other AP history courses he is taking in high school right now and so there’s an opportunity for him to get 5’s on those exams as well.
All hope is not lost on this end, the worse that either UNC of UVa can say is no.
In our out-of-state top public school district, students are being counseled not to even visit UVa, because not one kid has gotten in over the past five years who wasn’t athletically recruited. My own D, a HS junior, was very interested in UVa and got counseled right out of her interest by the college center.
@ReadyToRoll I’m sorry to hear that. I was accepted Out-of-State during the EA round this year and I’m only the second student to have ever gotten in from my high school. So the moral is, even though acceptance in unlikely if your D has interest in the school she should give it a shot (assuming she has a balanced list).
From NY, my kid’s Naviance indicates a pretty high average accepted GPA for UVA; my son is applying, and GPA is his weakness, also, so I looked it up. But NY probably sends more applications to UVA than TX. Another school my son is looking at (he’s also a prospective history major) is College of William and Mary, also very good for history, a little bit easier to get into, I think, but I don’t know about their FA.
I’d also look at some moderately selective private colleges that meet 100% of need. Some may offer net lower net costs and smaller class sizes than UVa.
Also, I’m surprised you’d look at LSU when you are in-state for UT Austin. Louisiana by the way has been slashing their state funding of universities - even more than most states.
@marysidney, W&M is a highly selective school and not easy to get into. Like UVA, it keeps its enrollment to about 2/3 instate, 1/3 out of state. It may be slightly easier for a male student to get into W&M than a female student. The reason for this is that W&M receives so many more applicants from females, and it tries to keep its student body ratio 50:50. Each year at my kids’ high school we hear about students who get into W&M and not UVA, and students who get into UVA and not W&M. There are also cases where students get into both and cases where students are denied at both.
Both UVA and W&M pride themselves on their holistic approach to admissions. Both have good financial aid, but the FA process has undergone some changes at both. Best of luck to your son!
