I concur. For a broader range of selectivity, the same source’s site for a component field, political science, offers more accessible choices:
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@Ben111 You’ve gotten a lot of replies! Hopefully I can add a few other thoughts.
First, are you a junior or a senior?
Regarding paying for school, you mention that you’d need financial aid for your senior year. Since that is the case, I strongly suggest you look at schools where your stats make you a contender for merit aid, so that your 529 funds can supplement the gap and ideally you’d have quite a bit left over for law school. You do NOT want to be saddled with law school debt. It may be hard to imagine now, but having loans of $250k or more for law school would put a definite crimp in your lifestyle, no matter where you live and what you make out of college. You want to look at financing both undergrad and grad school now, if you expect to attend right after graduating and you plan to go full time.
Villanova is definitely a stretch. Have you thought about a lower ranked school that is also in or near Philly? One good candidate is St. Joseph’s University, aka St. Joe’s. With Georgetown and Villi on your list, I’m guessing you’d do well in a Jesuit school environment.
ADHD runs in my family and I know it’s challenges well! Another advantage of SJU or another lower ranked school that offers aid is that because college is a huge adjustment, it can be advantageous to be in a college environment that is not full of striving overachievers. Don’t get me wrong, SJU has excellent outcomes and plenty of students have gone on to become lawyers, but you would have a bit more breathing room to help you get the excellent grades you’ll need for law school.
There is a decent Hispanic population at SJU, including many students from Puerto Rico. Good luck to you and keep us informed of where you end up!
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Your list is way too top heavy. You’re going to get big stack of rejections, and your acceptances will be very limited. And those acceptances might not be affordable if they’re out of state, or if you get a poor financial aid package. The list is kind of all over the place. What’s your home state? I would focus on a handful off good affordable schools in-state as your foundation. Then put in a few dream schools and see what happens.
You want to be realistically optimistic about your chances. Always start with proper safety in terms of acceptance and affordability and that you would like to attend. As the acronym represents, your high score will strongly indicate to many schools on your list that you have the Scholastic Aptitude to handle the curriculum.
Tell the story through your applications of some of the challenges you had with COVID, ADHT, and other personal issues on how they affected some of your grades. Your upward trajectory is positive, and you have rigor in your courses. Of course, try to finish your Junior year as strong as possible.
A couple of suggestions: consider UNH and URI a likely match and a safety, respectively. Also, you probably would receive some merit from both of these schools. Another good strategy for finding a safety is to look at schools with Rolling Admissions, like the University of Maine, as an example. Here is a link.
Complete List: Colleges With Rolling Admissions
Rolling admissions is like a “Bird in the Hand” approach. You can apply early and have an acceptance back way ahead of all your other deadlines. It can’t be a better safety than the one you already have the acceptance. Good luck.
Beyond paying an application fee, there is no harm in some reach applications.
But realistic expectations are important. Those elite schools are looking for the best of the best. They reject plenty of 4.0 students with tons of AP 5s. A 3.5 GPA student isn’t going to get serious consideration without something REALLY special. If you’re good enough to be a star football of lacrosse player for Dartmouth, if your published research paper won a Nobel prize.
I agree with others – Your reaches are moonshots. Your matches are really realistic reaches. Your likely list is matches. Your safeties are likely.
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