I think Naviance scattergrams that have your high school’s data can be very helpful, coupled with a conversation with your school college counselor. If his “green dot” is above and to the R of the pack of Lehigh admits from you school, it is a safety, barring something unusual such as most of the other acceptances have been hooked. Still, have a detailed conversation with your counselor to get specific feedback on the chances at each school he is considering.
On CC, it is too hard to know what your school is like compared to a typical school. There are definitely schools commonly listed as matches or even reaches on CC “for everyone” that our kids have been told are likelies or lower matches (and D21 was accepted to all the likelies and matches so the school assessment of chance was correct across the board). We will see how it goes for D23 but in our case our school and the naviance plots are very predictive for the majority of kids. There are sometimes some surprising outliers who get rejected–however when I have asked the answer has been a generic “there were reasons”, so truly a plot with only GPA and scores cannot tell the whole story.
As for course recs: agree with others, have 5 core courses minimum, and if he wants to have the best chance at these reach-y schools he has worked so hard getting in range for, take the most rigorous load he can handle and keep the grades up. Senior year matters.
I would just toss a few ideas out there for him to mull over as he goes through this process.
Why is he looking at schools like like NESCAC for sport if he really wants an UG b-school? Is it because of sports? He should really only be looking at schools for sport that are also academic fits. It’s really easy for athletes to get excited about schools that want them. It’s also easy for kids who LOVE their sport to minimize the role they want it to play in college because they are considering schools where they can’t play. Where/how does this fit in the equation for him?
Look at overall distribution requirements in the programs he’s considering. Make sure those are all represented in his HS curriculum. For business, that is likely to be well-rounded and to include FL… He may even get lucky and get credit or placement for an AP exam. It’s fine to take an easier AP, btw, with the STEM rigor he has. Don’t sweat that.
Encourage your son to try to really tease out how he feels about some of the other points you have mentioned. Why does prestige matter to him? (He can have it, btw, but he should think this through. What will be different about those programs from others and what does that mean to him?) What does he actually enjoy? Kids who feel they should have a certain college outcome because of the work they put in are saying they found it a grind. If they’d just loved the learning for its own sake, college admissions owes them nothing! He may be a less life of the mind person and the practicality of b school could be a great fit. But in particular, the comment about not getting to take an elective he wanted suggests that he has genuine intellectual curiosity outside these foundational areas. College can feed that - try to find places that will keep that open. There is a ton of opportunity in business for people with strong STEM backgrounds and if your S wants to continue to build on that, make sure he can. IME, the STEM folks can master biz skills easily (and businesses hire them). Not always so easy the other way.
Thanks for taking the time to respond. Let me try to respond and make sense of his thinking.
He has played his sport since age 4 and would love the opportunity to play it in college at a pretty high level. He’s done a few camps and it seems high D3 is his level. As for his academic interests, his favorite subject is math and he enjoys economics (as well as science). He believes he could get a great math and perhaps math/stats/econ major in a NESCAC in a small classroom setting. We have definitely made clear to him that we as parents won’t let him limit his education in any way in order to pursue his sport at a school that is not a good academic fit. But at one NESCAC, he was able to meet players and saw himself in the athletes studying math, economics and headed toward finance jobs. If he can’t play his sport in college, the undergraduate B-schools become more of a focus for sure but I think the NESCACs can get him the education he wants and set him up for careers that interest him (as of now).
Thanks. We’re still in the exploration stage but yesterday I had him draw up a rough 15 school list and we began doing exactly what you suggested – looking at distribution requirements, foreign language requirements, AP credit/placement policy, etc. I agree looking at specific school distribution requirements makes this a lot easier.
Again, thank you. Good advice and I agree with all that.
On a side note, he met with his college counselor yesterday and walked through scheduling. The final schedule they arrived at seems a bit more rigorous than I know I would have taken my senior year of high school. Curious how this strikes people
Multivariable Calc (AP)
AP Physics C: Mech
AP Chem
AP Spanish
English 4 Honors
AP Comp Sci A
AP Gov
My concern, other than the rigor of this curriculum while a kid has his sport in the fall, applications and senioritis setting in, is that our high school has a ton of business electives and he isn’t taking any. Do you think a B-school will question why a kid isn’t taking advantage of business classes if he has a genuine business interest? To me, you don’t need to take an accounting class in high school as you’ll have to repeat in B-school. But would colleges view a kid as not sufficiently business minded if he didnt throw one elective in there. Counselor also suggested replacing English 4 Honors with AP Lit and AP Gov with a business elective. The idea of my son, who has no interest in literature, taking an AP Lit class senior year seems a bit off to me though…
I think kids need the cores first and foremost so math, science, FL, English and history so I’d definitely keep MVC, AP Spanish, English honors, AP Gov, and then they can decide if they want to do both AP Physics C and AP Chem or just one. IMO, a student shooting for business doesn’t need both, nor AP CS. So there is room to drop one or two and still have room for a business elective.
Agree that having the cores covered is paramount. But the OP’s kid does. And as stated in the original post, kid enjoys STEM. So if he wants to, and can handle, I see no reason not to do both physics and chem. With the caveat that both are a boatload of work.
And while we don’t know the kid’s HS, typically those accounting and general business classes are populated by students not at the high end of the GPA spectrum. The kid already has AP Econ, which is the more important business-type class.
That said, if he wants to take an easy elective, that’s fine too. I highly highly doubt that any college will find fault with whichever schedule he chooses.
Thanks. To explain the Physics C and Chem courses, one coach he spoke with is at a top engineering school. We haven’t visited yet and he’s not sure that is the route he wants, but the coach mentioned Physics C is a required course and Chem a course he should strongly consider for that school. He does enjoy the sciences and, as I said, is strongly considering a math major in college. So he’s considering that route to eventually head into finance (or even have the ability to go toward engineering if his interests evolve in that direction). It sounds like this schedule he worked on with the counselor, while very rigorous, checks all the boxes. As I said above, we recognize all the schools he would like to attend are reaches. In scheduling, we’re just trying to give him the balance and rigor that won’t hurt him in any particular school… and in the coming months, as we visit more schools and his recruitment picks up, we’ll hopefully have a better sense of the specific path he wants to pursue. So long as he can handle this schedule (and only he knows that), it appears this is the way to go to leave as many options as possible on the table.
Looks like something strange happened with my post (text moved around right before I hit “reply.” It should have read:
Thanks. To explain the Physics C and Chem courses, one coach he spoke with is at a top engineering school mentioned Physics C is a required course and Chem a course he should strongly consider for that school. He does enjoy the sciences and, as I said, is strongly considering a math major in college. So he’s considering that route to eventually head into finance (or even have the ability to go toward engineering if his interests evolve in that direction). It sounds like this schedule he worked on with the counselor, while very rigorous, checks all the boxes. As I said above, we recognize all the schools he would like to attend are reaches. In scheduling, we’re just trying to give him the balance and rigor that won’t hurt him in any particular school… and in the coming months, as we visit more schools and his recruitment picks up, we’ll hopefully have a better sense of the specific path he wants to pursue. So long as he can handle this schedule (and only he knows that), it appears this is the way to go to leave as many options as possible on the table.
I would recommend AP gov or even an honors gov class if he isn’t interested in AP. Most competitive schools want to see 4 years of the core courses.
I would keep AP Spanish. As you noted, it could get him out of language requirements in college.
I don’t think he necessarily needs both AP mechanics and chem, but my engineering daughter found them both useful preparation for college, but she was firmly shooting for engineering.
Your other question about what top schools are looking for is more complicated. I’m sure you know that every school you listed is a reach, even for the most qualified applicants. IMO, the competition at those schools will have taken multiple AP courses in English and history. Even for engineering, many schools want to see evidence of strong verbal and communication skills, even more so for business schools.
I would recommend that your student starts searching for match and safety schools (which everyone should do). For example, he should be an auto admit to IU Kelley which has an excellent business school.
Thanks. I’m not disagreeing with anything you said and I understand the competitive nature of the highly selective schools but I find the thought that a kid who took 5 AP tests this year, did a ton of extracurriculars (some that had him up working on science research until 1am on weekends with kids in the middle east), all county soccer player, on a club soccer team ranked top 10 in the nation and was tied up with that 20 hours/week is somehow thought to have a deficient resume because he didn’t add 2 more APs. As I said earlier, and we wonder why the kids are all in therapy… apparently the 5 hours of sleep he gets a night is just too many to be successful. LOL.