<p>I am a junior from Texas and I am very interested in CC but I'm afraid it is a little out of my league...</p>
<p>GPA- 3.83 WEIGHTED(low rigor; only one or 2 APs per year) currently ranked 149 out of 613, I will be taking 3 APs senior year so hopefully that will raise it</p>
<p>SAT- expecting 2150+ for june </p>
<p>EC's- pretty weak: 4 year basketball(2 year letter), 4 year cross country(2 year letter) at a 5A school with 2600+ students, National Merit Qualifier(waiting to see if it is commended scholar or semifinalist, probably just commended) NHS, maybe 60+ hrs community service, and hopefully creating a new club at school.... sadly i think thats it</p>
<p>What are my realistic chances, I do not want to waste my time and money applying if their is no hope</p>
<p>Here is the common data set for 2008-09. Note that rigor is the mostly highly listed aspect. “One or two AP’s per year” could mean 5+ APs over the HS career.</p>
<p>Your SATS are clearly in the high range (middle of the 25th percentile). Top 25% of their HS class is approxinmtly 20% of the CC admitted students.</p>
<p>My sense from your post is that you are underselling yourself.</p>
<p>A joke some of my friends had was that to get into Stanford you had to have already found a cure for cancer. CC is not that kind of school. Your stats & ECs are fine. I think CC really looks at whether you are the right fit for the community, so it is up to you to show that you are.</p>
<p>Visit. Show strong interest. Write a “Why CC?” essay that shows your understanding of the Block Plan, why it is great for you, and why some other specific aspects of CC are exactly what you want.</p>
<p>The application essays give you a chance to highlight 3 different aspects of yourself. Find things that you are truly passionate about and write about those. Use the essays to show your personality— flexibility, depth, good naturedness—whatever is true for you. Be real.</p>
<p>I read somewhere that “Colorado College also has one of the nation’s lowest acceptance rates, at 24 percent, with a very high yield at 48 percent. Furthermore, the median ACT of the class of 2012 is a 31, and one-fourth of the class graduated in the top 1 percent of their high school class.[2]”</p>
<p>onthefly, what source are you quoting? Conceivably, their overall admit rate might have gone as low as 24 percent this year but in recent years, it has been in the low 30s. 31 sounds more like their 75th percentile than their median score. I’d be very surprised if one-fourth of their newly admitted class graduated in the top 1 percent.</p>
<p>The school is very selective but still not as selective as the top New England LACs, Carleton, or Pomona.</p>
<p>Thanks, otf. With a S bound for CC, I’m glad to see their numbers looking so good. Still, I’m skeptical of the article’s “top 1 percent” number. I suspect somebody dropped a zero (that is, one-fourth of the class graduated in the top 10 percent of their high school class).</p>
<p>In my previous post of data set info for last year’s freshman CC class it listed 66% of the class as being in the top 10% of their HS class. </p>
<p>If there was an even distribution of the 66% over the top 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-10% ranking, there would be 6.6% of the CC admitted students ranking in the top 1% of their HS class.</p>
<p>So, it doesn’t appear that top 1% was a typo for top 10%. </p>
<p>25% of 66% means a little over 16% of the CC class is in the top 1% of their HS class That’s not too hard to believe. Remember some large public HS have 1000 or more in a class. </p>
<p>I seem to recall that approximately 1.3 million students took the PSAT my S’s junior year. That means there are MORE than 1.3 million HS grads a year. 1% of that is 13,000 kids in the top 1%.</p>
<p>Well, I should have bothered to check the CC web site before I posted. Because a figure is there for the class of 2012. Yes, “for the 42% of admitted students with official class rank”, 27% ranked in the top 1% of their HS class. So I stand happily disabused of my skepticism. </p>
<p>Now, that figure is for admitted students, not matriculated students. I don’t know what share of students in that 27% have been accepted by other schools that they’ve chosen to attend over CC.</p>
<p>But to put 07DAD’s “13,000” in perspective … if all those kids were distributed evenly only among 100 of the most selective colleges and universities, then the per-college share (130) would not even amount to 10% of the 1,394 students admitted by CC this year. And in fact, they wouldn’t be distributed evenly, and not across only 100 schools. The majority of all students choose national universities, not small LACs. There are over 3000 colleges and universities in the country, most of them larger and much less expensive to attend than CC.</p>
<p>With all this in mind, and even allowing for the fact that many kids are applying to quite a few schools, that 27% figure is very impressive.</p>
<p>As indicated, you are in the range. ALso, you can get a feel for whether you could make it by filling out the recruitment field for Cross Country. Then contact the coach (if he does not contact you). See what he thinks. It will give you some real insight</p>
<p>ED definitely helps. Colleges like to show a high yield.</p>
<p>OTF, you are in range. Unless the cost of the application is prohibitive, just go for it. All it takes is a few hours of your time, and much of your work can be used on other applications anyway. Really, what have you got to lose?</p>
<p>Actually, it was me (07DAD) who suggested the use of showing interest in a sport at which you have some history to see if the coach can give you any insight about whether you could get admitted to CC. And, yes, many colleges have website recruitment and, yes, there is no rule that keeps you from signing on NOW at different schools to see if it generates any interest in you. It is just a tool they use that you can also use.</p>
<p>Canadianmom is suggesting that you can use the CC college application for admission to prepare your “standard” stuff that can be used in other college applications. She is suggesting that unless the applications fees are a significant factor in your personal financial circumstances, applying is the only way to find out if you will be admitted, so “go for it.”</p>
<p>As you probably know, at CC the cross country program cannot give scholarships, but they (the coach and the college) still want as good a team as possible. It is my opinion, based on S’s experiecnce, that if the coach likes your times its cannot hurt your chances of addmission and seems to help your chances. There is nothing that makes you go out for the sport if accepted.</p>
<p>Here is a report on a meet off the CC website to give you an idea whether your times are competitive.</p>