Hi everyone! I am a current junior looking for colleges on the east coast to apply to. I am from California and it has always been my dream to attend a college on the east coast. Does anyone have any recommendations? Preferably a college near/at a major city. I will major in poli sci and I want to go to law school (so undergrad cost is a huge concern for me and my EFC is quite high).
Here are my stats:
GPA UW: 3.8
GPA W: 4.2
ACT: haven’t taken it but predicted to be around 32
APs: 7 + 3 honors classes
Extracurriculars:
-founder/exec director of my own political organization
-national project director of an activism society
-logistics officer for my school’s Model UN
-National Honors Society
-Board member of my city’s teen philanthropy program
-congressional internship
-tutor for three years
-political intern for my county’s democratic party
Seton Hall, 15 minutes outside NYC is very generous with aid and scholarships. They have a very respected law school as well.
Worth looking at, especially with your stats on their higher end.
My personal favorites in the East would have to be Northeastern, BU, American, Duke, GWU, U Florida, or UMD. the DC colleges are really good with poli sci as well
Basically, all that matters for law school admission is LSAT Score + GPA. I would apply broadly at a bunch of schools and see which school offers the best financial package.
^ That is a common misconception. “Prestige” of a college matters VERY little in terms of law school admissions. Law school admissions is very numbers based. Once you’re numbers are above the median GPA and LSAT, you are basically in no matter the college.
Not sure why you say with such authority. Are you a law school admissions officer? The data supports that prestige of schools matters. See College Transitions’ Dataverse. I am going by that. Open to being convinced with other data.
^ Take a look at Law School Numbers (LSN), a popular law school admissions site. Read a few articles from law school admissions experts.
The data shows that law school admissions is surprisingly predictable. Having a certain GPA + LSAT will make you a “lock” for a subset of law schools, no matter the perceived “prestige” of an applicant’s undergrad.
Al’right. Great news! Daughter got a 35 composite on the December ACT and 99th percentile on PSAT so probably some NMST and/or NHS status. She has also decided she does not want a college smaller than say 3000 (ie Holy Cross is the smallest she would consider), which makes sense to me as she is introverted and would appreciate the opportunity to blend in the background at times. She has also restricted to NC, GA, LA, MO, VA, DC, MD, PA, NY (but not NYC), CT and MA. She has settled on humanities or social science with academia, law or policy as career end. Strongly prefers suburb of city or city under 200000. We have trimmed the list to the following but still have too many. She is very conservative socially and morally and liberal politically; introverted, not into partying or going out and very much into performing arts as social outlet only. Enjoys social work with disadvantaged children as well. We are not Virginia residents. Any thoughts and insights appreciated:
Harvard
Yale
Duke
Brown
Vanderbilt
WashU
Georgetown
Tufts
Wesleyan
Villanova
Tulane
Boston College
UVA
UNC Chapel Hill
Richmond
Holy Cross
Wake Forest
William and Mary
Lehigh
American
Thanks in advance for your comments and suggestions.
You know what might be a good exercise? Skim through the COVID-19 dashboards of some of these schools and see which ones were truly socially conservative when the chips were down.
Well, if you include the ability to forebear from throwing parties or attending them for a protracted period of time and to observe social distancing and other mitigation techniques in order to protect others from harm, as a surrogate for social and moral conservatism - you may come up with an interesting cross-index by looking up each school’s COVID-19 positivity rate for the past semester. Just sayin’.
@circuitrider interesting… I would have thought that less restrictions would have aligned more with political conservatism; is that what you suggest happened? More conservative equaled more Covid positivity in reality? Sorry, still not fully following I am afraid.
Oh, no. I draw a distinction between political conservatism and personal conservatism. I thought you meant conservative personal habits like, hard work; monogamy, committed relationships - community responsibility - stuff like that.
I just tried to do a rough run through and while most of the colleges and universities on your list had pretty good rates, many like Harvard, Yale, and Georgetown were either partially or completely closed to large portions of their undergraduate populations.
Boston College had the most cumulative cases spread over a complete semester (440).
Wesleyan had the least (20).
But, the absolute worst infection rate was recorded by UNC-Chapel which was forced to close its dormitories two weeks into the Fall semester due to hundreds of positive cases.