<p>I will be a senior in the Fall. My SAT score is 2350. I attend a competitive prep school and took advanced courses. My AP and SAT Subject test scores are 5 or 800. I will be editor in chief of our school newspaper. I've spent summers abroad doing service work. I have other leadership positions in school clubs.</p>
<p>However, my GPA is 3.65. My low grades were in my Freshman Year but my grades got better year by year. </p>
<p>I know going to the best schools is out of the question.</p>
<p>With so much competition for admission, are my chances for 2nd -tier schools also a stretch?</p>
<p>I am interested in History.</p>
<p>Do you have any suggestions for Liberal Arts-focused schools that might be interested in me? I prefer smaller colleges.</p>
<p>Sure, your GPA isn’t AMAZING, but it sounds like you have an extremely difficult course load. I definitely think you could get into some difficult schools as long as you have quality extra curricular activities as well. Best of luck!</p>
<p>And have good essays. A LOT of Asians apply to top-tier schools, and I’ve read countless articles about admissions officers saying they’re tired of reading applications from primarily male Asians who have no personality. So a combination of strong ECs and an essay can make up for your GPA, which isn’t awful.</p>
<p>Take a look at the mid-western LACs. As an Asian, you are a URM - at Grinnell, for example, you may be eligible for merit aid (your test score qualifies - not sure about your GPA). Other midwestern LACs - Carleton, Oberlin, Macalester and Kenyon. All highly regarded with strong history depts. </p>
<p>There are also LAC-like schools that you might want to consider: Rice and Brown come to mind - both reaches with your GPA.</p>
<p>Other east coast LACs that might make sense (assuming you can afford them): Vassar (if you are male, you will have a significantly better shot due to an imbalance in the applications), Bates, Colby, Middlebury, Hamilton, Haverford.</p>
<p>Reaches? Bowdoin, Swarthmore, Pomona</p>
<p>The south might also have some interesting options: Davidson, Hendrix, Rhodes</p>
<p>Thanks for all your helpful suggestions. Your providing specific names of schools I did not even consider is really valuable advice. Thanks again!</p>
<p>I’d be very surprised if your prep school didn’t have excellent college advisors who can help you identify great colleges to which they can support your application. I would not panic.</p>
There isn’t even a “2nd tier” designation now. Obviously, you should apply to wherever interests you, make sure you have some safeties, and get on with it.</p>
<p>Some colleges will discount freshman grades. A few may throw them out entirely. Improving grades are much better than declining grades.</p>
<p>That said, grades weigh pretty heavily, as they should. You might apply to one or two super-reachy schools just for the heck of it, but I think looking at LACs also makes a lot of sense given your interest in history, which LACs generally do pretty well. Williams, Amherst, and Swarthmore are going to be reachy, too. But at Oberlin–a very good LAC–the average HS GPA is 3.6 and the middle 50% is 3.4-3.9, and your test scores are well into their top quartile, so I’d rate that as probably a match or “high match.” Some other schools like Carleton and Grinnell don’t post their entering class HS grades, which makes me suspicious that they’re not all that high or they’d want to boast about it. </p>
<p>Also, being Asian won’t hurt you at most LACs; for whatever reason, many Asian or Asian-American students will only apply to, or choose to attend, research universities, so with rare exceptions LACs tend to have far fewer Asian students. Oberlin is about 4% Asian. Middlebury, Carleton and Grinnell are about 6% Asian. That contrasts with 24% Asian at MIT, 18% at Harvard and Stanford, and 39% at Caltech.</p>
<p>A final thought: high test scores coupled with grades that don’t match those test scores are often a red flag for admissions officers, because they suggest a student who is smart but lazy, unfocused, or undisciplined. It doesn’t sound like that’s the case here. I think a lot will depend on your teacher recs (choose carefully) and your GC rec (and it might be worth having a conversation with your GC about this very issue early on in the fall). But it might also be worthwhile to try to schedule on-campus interviews once you’ve identified some LACs you’re especially interested in. They really matter at a lot of LACs because they like to see signs of interest, and scheduling an interview even where it’s not required as part of the application process speaks pretty loudly. But it may also be an opportunity to explain to an admissions officer why your freshman grades were subpar, and to point out how they’ve improved. They’ll see that on your transcript anyway, but if in the interview you come across as someone who is hardworking, focused, and disciplined—i.e., a good student who is doing well academically and can be expected to continue to do so at the college level–it may do a lot to influence how they view your application later on in the process.</p>
<p>If your family can afford to be full pay I think you might find some very good choices. The top 10 midwest LACs are a good place to start–Carelton, Grinnell, Kenyon, Oberlin, Beloit, etc.</p>
<p>I’m in a really similar situation. Asian, low GPA especially due to Freshman year, pretty good SAT scores, decent extracurriculars, interested in similar colleges. Would you happen to know your rank? My school gives rank but doesn’t send it to colleges, and I fear that this is going to hurt me. I’ve heard that if you’re a decently high rank, at least top decile, and with your stats, then you’re really only excluded from the very very top schools with sub-10% acceptance rates.</p>
<p>Class rank can matter, partly because US News says it matters. Colleges are very sensitive about their US News rankings these days, even though they’d prefer not to be; they’re caught up in a competitive game, too, so they need to pay attention to the factors that go into their score, and one of them is percentage of freshman class who were in the top 10% of their HS class. So if you were in the top 10% of your HS class, that helps them, so it helps with your admission; if you’re not in the top 10%, it will hurt them somewhat and so it hurts your chances of admission. Unless, if course, they don’t know, either because the school doesn’t rank or because the school won’t tell them; then it doesn’t affect their US News ranking one way or the other. That’s one reason a lot of prep schools with strong student bodies have stopped ranking; class rank was hurting some of their (very strong) students who fell outside the top 10%, even though they might be just as strong or stronger than candidates who were in the top 10% at weaker schools. GPA is in a certain sense just window-dressing; schools report it, and prospective applicants look at it, but it doesn’t directly affect the college’s US News ranking, so in that sense it may be less important than class rank (where available). But absence of a class rank shouldn’t hurt you; that’s just neutral, as far as the school’s US News ranking goes.</p>
<p>At the tippy-top LACs, almost everyone who reports a class rank is in the top 10%. At Williams, for example, 90% of those reporting a class rank were in the top 10% of their HS class; but only 31% of the entering class reported a class rank. At Amherst, 87% are in the top 10%, and 52% reported a class rank. But as you go down the list, the percentage in the top 10% drops off. At Grinnell, for example, only 62% of the entering class were in the top 10%, and 63% reported a class rank. At #40 Lafayette, 57% were in the top 10%, and 42% reported a class rank.</p>
<p>How much is cost a consideration? Have you run the net price calculators to estimate need-based aid at each school?</p>
<p>You may also want to consider some low cost (even for out of state) public LACs as academic and financial safeties:</p>
<p>State University of New York - Geneseo
Truman State University
University of Minnesota - Morris
University of North Carolina - Asheville</p>
<p>Also, there are some huge merit scholarships for your stats. For example, University of Alabama Huntsville (which has about 6,100 undergraduate students although it is not a LAC) gives almost full rides to freshmen applicants with GPA of 3.0 and SAT CR+M of 1490.</p>
<p>In terms of your interest in history, you may wish to browse schools’ course catalogs to see what areas of history they offer courses in (e.g. history of specific areas or countries, or history of specific subjects like history of science and engineering, military history, economic history, etc.) to see which schools may be the best match for your history interests.</p>
<p>Other LACs that aren’t posting GPA distributions in their Common Data Sets include Williams, Swarthmore, Pomona, Middlebury, Bowdoin, Wellesley, Claremont McKenna, and Haverford. That rounds out the US News top 10 LACs (other than Amherst, whose CDS I cannot display).</p>
<p>It sounds to me that you may be a very strong applicant. The grading standards at some of the competitive prep schools are tougher than at most schools. A 3.65 might be an excellent GPA for your school. Ask your college advisor where students with similar records have gone to to college. Apply to colleges that know your school and you should have some fine choices next April.</p>
<p>Many of these schools seem like the type of schools whose admissions committees don’t bother calculating GPAs but just holistically look at the transcript to see a most rigorous course pattern (available in your high school) and all or nearly all A grades, so it would be extra work to actually calculate GPAs for the purpose of filling in the CDS boxes. Using GPAs off of high school transcripts would give useless information, since high schools report differently (weighted vs. unweighted, different weighting schemes, different subsets of courses included in GPA calculation, etc.).</p>
<p>Oberlin’s CDS shows an average entering GPA of 3.61.
The University of Maryland (a perennial “top party school”) claims an average entering GPA of 4.01. Oberlin may be admitting more students from private high schools with less grade inflation.</p>