Going back to the original question, @rjjxv26, the fact that your son was deferred from Middlebury actually bodes well for his chances at some of the other schools on his list. Middlebury accepted 53% of those who applied early, as others have noted, a group that was doubtless heavy on legacies, athletes, and other special cases, but it rejected 35% and deferred less than 12%. What that tells me is that your son’s a kid they considered solidly in the mix. Kids like this sometimes lose out in the ED round because the school is already accepting too many special cases ED from his school, sometimes the school’s just hedging their bets that they’ll get a stronger bunch in the RD round. In any case, he’ll still get another look at both Williams and Middlebury and I think his chances are strong for at least one of the other similar schools with higher admit rates.
Your son already has an acceptance in hand, so I don’t think there’s any need to panic and throw an application at a school he hasn’t visited. If worse came to worse and he suddenly decided he didn’t like Binghamton as much as he originally thought he did he could take a gap year and reapply with more likely schools on his list.
Great stuff, @MYOS1634. Don’t know if a gap year is in the cards for our S but this is interesting reading. We have a good friend who teaches latin at a nearby prep school and she tutored our S for a summer a while back. She goes to a Latin Teacher conference every year at which all participants have to speak nothing but Latin.
If a school were to consistently deny applicants that have strengths and interests similar to those of the OP’s son, it would ultimately not be able to maintain a position of high academic reputation. That’s one reason some of the more discerning colleges that have received his application will be likely to accept him.
My guess is that Bates and Vassar are still matches for OP’s son, and I wouldn’t worry about it too much about getting into a handful of them. A boy who likes classics is a rare commodity (as long as he had a way of showing that talent and interest through his application). He has a good mix of schools and while Williams, Swarthmore, Bowdoin and Amherst are reaches, the rest are well within range. And I don’t know which of those LACs are considered strong in classics, so that may also play into which ones may be better fits.
I’m more interested in what the OP’s thinking was about the college prep class. That seems an awfully strange and time-consuming thing to do in one’s senior year with all the pressure of applications, testing, and with the desire to put A’s up across the board. We don’t have such college prep classes in my region of the country, so it seems like a questionable thing to do to me. Is there some benefit to the application to do the prep class? Does the teacher write a recommendation? I don’t understand why you would trade off the fall senior year grades for some college preparation.
@spayurpets wrote: “A boy who likes classics is a rare commodity (as long as he had a way of showing that talent and interest through his application)”
OP’s post #45:
"Didn’t know about this, I have to say. But the bar is pretty high:
“Candidates are expected to have a strong background (equivalent of four years) in Latin and/or Greek, and significant academic achievement in all other subjects and on standardized tests.”
Our S has one year of latin he took via local college but nothing like 4 years and didn’t take the AP latin test."
If your son has indicated in his applications a desire to be a Classics major yet he hasn’t demonstrated through his coursework and/or ECs that he has pursued that interest in high school, I can’t see an Admissions reader giving that much weight. In fact, that might give the reader pause due to the disconnect.
I don’t think most colleges expect the OP’s kid to have taken a lot of Greek or Latin if it isn’t available at his school. They expect students to change majors in many cases anyway. I don’t think they will assume a disconnect as much as a lack of opportunity. HYPS would have expected him to lead the charge to start Greek theater in his community and take it on to a new national organization, and to not only compete in a national Latin exam but also to tutor underprivileged children to similar Latin success. But Bates & Vassar won’t ding him for lack of opportunity.
You make valid points, @intparent. I know Greek is uncommon these days but didn’t realize Latin might be. So no ding from schools but would you expect any boost from declaring interest in being a Classics major?
It thought it was amazing you could study Latin and Greek to the point of having a GCSE exam (10th grade), that you could continue to advanced level in both, that advanced level in Latin wasn’t questioned at all, or that so many people rallied to saved the Advanced Ancient Greek class!
My kid’s HS had Latin as a non-credit EC (2 years) and that was it. The classics are going the way of cursive, unfortunately. I think just being male is a boost at both Vassar and Bates. Maybe a tiny boost for the classics interest, but LACs don’t really admit by major. If Classics was his “story” (if he obviously had a long term passion for it and had found multiple ways to pursue it in spite of limited opportunity at his HS), that could play well. As it is, I don’t think it helps or hurts.
OP, you aren’t the only one with a kid who applied to LAC’s with a much larger state school as the safety. My D has done the same thing. For us it was finances–our EFC is more than we will be able to pay. We discussed automatic merit schools, and she didn’t like them better than our state schools. She applied to two state universities and a bunch of LACs that she liked and that offer big merit scholarships. We are waiting to see how it all turns out. She has acceptances, but most of those big scholarships are still up in the air. She’s a competitive applicant, but so are lots of other students. She will be happy at the state U and may even choose the honors college once all the offers are on the table. we’d just like her to be able to choose that rather than being limited to it. But it’s hard with our budget and in our region to find an LAC that’s a financial safety.
Good luck to your son. The waiting is hard.
@spayurpets, good question. On paper, the college prep program seemed great. It covers AP US Gov (his HS has precious few non-stem AP offerings; he took the AP World History without benefit of the course), honors english, honors history and legal practicum/economics. It’s just been a bear of a load for him (and all the kids). And, as I said the teacher is a tough, tough grader and controls 4 grades.
On the plus side, his class won a regional constitutional scholarship competition in January and will go on to the states later this month (and the teacher deserves a lot of credit there). They also spent a lot of time last fall in courtrooms and talking to judges, politicians and lawyers. Right now they’re all in internships 3 mornings a week. Our S is working for an international aid agency attached to SUNY and is doing some pretty interesting research.
This has given him substantial material to put into application updates which he wouldn’t have had had he found all his courses back at the HS. He also was able to attach an detailed description of the program to his common app. So I think it’s been an overall positive but it’s put a small ding in his GPA (we just learned his rank dropped by 2, which isn’t as bad as I had feared).
@intparent, that’s about where our son stands. He’s taken 2 semesters at the local CC and got top marks but it’s nothing like a passion that one could play up. On the other hand, he has 4-5 years each of Italian and Spanish (some taken via SUNY) so there is something of a language theme. That said, he is more drawn to the cultural and historical sides of classics, which comes out a bit in his essay.
As pertains to the original group of schools, the American Journal of Philology has been edited from a liberal arts college (rather than a research university) only once in its 125-year history, when it was based in the classics department of Hamilton.
OP, that sounds like a stressful but compelling senior year. I think my kids would have loved it – both took a constitutional law class senior year and got to argue current US Supreme Court cases in front of a mock court of state judges in our state – one of the best experiences of their HS career. Your kid’s opportunity sounds unusual, interesting, and like it has good opportunities for accomplishments. Those are all boosts to his application.
@rjjxv26 Ok, so I see there is some benefit from the college prep, but do those credits/grades go on your S’s transcript and GPA? It does show that your S is trying to strive beyond the limitations of his school, which is always a good sign but if it’s at the expense of a better GPA, I don’t like the trade off. And, as was mentioned above, it doesn’t help your S get much bang out of the classics focus because his coursework and this college prep work doesn’t exactly exemplify it. Oh well, water under the bridge.
All of the Top 10 LACs are a crapshoot, especially regular decision. My D, who was slightly better on paper (a 4.20W/2340 SAT), had mixed success with the same set of schools. She was accepted to Hamilton, Swarthmore, Middlebury; waitlisted by Amherst. (She is attending Brown.)
@spayurpets, very true that this isn’t very classics oriented. It’s far better suited to pre-law or poli-sci kids. But compared to what was on offer in his HS, it looked pretty compelling. We had no idea going into it that grading would be an issue. Kids from his HS who are in a similar program focused on STEM report that their teacher is quite sensitive to the mid-term grades issue. In retrospect, he might have been better served, at least in terms of his applications, by trying to take history & language courses at local colleges. BTW, your D’s success doesn’t look too mixed to me
@Parentof2014grad, I think we’ll be in a similar range for either LAC or state U. This is my first time through so I’m not sure what to expect, but all the financial aid calculators I’ve run through come up with roughly the same EFC figure. In any event I expect that we will have to draw down savings. And the honors college is a nice feature. Good luck to you (financially) and your daughter (academically)!
for someone who likes languages):
But Bates & Vassar won’t ding him for lack of opportunity.