The OP doesn’t have a sub-3.4, she has a 4.0 with a 1600 SAT.
At our high school, using the last TEN years of data (highly suspect), only one person with an SAT above 1500 was rejected at NYU. The rejected student had a 1530 and 4.1 WGPA (~3.8 GPA). About half of the others above 1500 SAT were waitlisted so that’s a watchout. Demonstrated interest may help at any of your reaches.
Good stuff @dimkin . Did Horace Mann girl apply to NYU? Wild that a LI top public kid with those stats didn’t get into a math major. CS/BME maybe, but math.
Have a friend from Texas whose kid was denied at TCU but got into Wisco. Full pay. One parent is Hispanic.
My friend from LI post-factum asked a college consultant to take a look at his application, and the feedback was that his son looked like a “typical high stats brown kid” (he is indian). “And those are dime-a-dozen” … so fcked up …
A bit off OP’s subject but what do you attribute the less then stellar or typical results for NYC preps?
I have heard similar anecdotal results across preps with parents and GCs asserting numerous factors but test optional as a major likely contributing factor.
Apparently there was a “social justice” pivot at TOP20s this year. A significantly higher % of underprivileged students got admitted. Which caused a domino effect.
So look for Pell Grant and URM figures to pop for class of 2021.
US News has also been focusing more on Pell Grant access and success in recent years. I know of at least one university trying to move up the rankings that is focusing more on underprivileged recruitment and retention vs. further increasing admitted student test scores.
For the OP, keep the list diverse. See which schools your parents are willing to full pay for. If not schools in the 30s, like NYU, then don’t go for them. Would they full pay for UCSD, USSB or Santa Clara? For the DC area, Maryland would be great as a match. Solid CS and probably have a good POLS department given its location. Maybe they have an honors college too. Since the south Asian high stat (near 4.0 and 1560) kid from Long Island got into Michigan and Wisconsin. What about those for full pay? My daughter’s South Asian friend got WL at Michigan but got into Wash U ED (business). Approx. 1500 SAT and very good grades. Lots to think about and discuss.
There are many suggestions here for safeties. What would your parents pay for them? All have respectable CS departments, but may not be “prestigious” .
I would suggest you take a look at Rutgers University. Great CS and Poli Sci depts., and on a commuter train line to NYC. You would be good candidate for their honors college (avg SAT is 1530 for Rutgers Honors) and they are interested in expanding their OOS population.
Also, with smaller schools, non-academic non-financial fit aspects may become important. For example, would the OP prefer or dislike the fraternity / sorority heavy environments at Bucknell and Lehigh?
I am not totally sold on honors colleges at flagships, especially for CS kids who are more into CS and less into all the “interdisciplinary” or cross-major formations with extra (major-unrelated) coursework. Sure, some colleges provide “first dibs” on course selection (huge for CS) and some (but really mostly unrelated) honors courses, but in many schools these honors colleges are more of a nuisance.
Yep, I think of Honors Colleges in terms of the benefit of special housing with peers, early registration and access to special advising and some small, interdisciplinary classes. Many colleges have an honors program for show. I was impressed by the HC at Purdue. My alma mater has one that’s so good it can be found at thehonorscollege.com.
Maybe the UMD transfer wasn’t in Honors College housing or in a Learning Community with like minded students. The large classes and access to professors is certainly a valid concern. I’m glad he’s found a good home at NYU and he sounds like he can comfortably afford it.
With your stats, I think the chances are pretty good that you’ll be admitted to at least one of your matches or reaches. And honestly, if you’re admitted to UW for CS that’ll be very hard to beat. You always could supplement the school year in Seattle with summer programs or internships in NY, DC, Bay Area, LA.
WSU and WWU seem like the obvious safeties. Utah, Oregon state, Montana state have good CS and are likely admits. Quite a few PNW kids find UBC to be a great option. In California you might take a look at Santa Clara and Cal Poly SLO (neither of which are safeties, although admission to Santa Clara seems pretty likely).
I’ve actually heard that the honors college at Rutgers is pretty good (my 3.9 UWGPA 34 ACT kid didn’t make the cut, it was the only honors she didn’t get into). It’s relatively new, wasn’t there when dd18 graduated.
Thank you all for the replies! I’m really excited about UMD as a safety after looking at their Honors program as well, and the only drawback about it that I can see is how huge the school is. I am planning on applying to UCSD but was considering it to be a match and I will look into Rutgers. I did consider UBC but decided not to apply because I’d like to stay in the states.
This hasn’t been DD’S experience; she has a lot of choices of honors classes at her flagship Honors College, from Dynamics, circuits, mechE seminars, research/capstone to physics, calcs, chems, etc. They offer a lot of fun honors seminar classes to fill their gen ed requirements as well, but many of her honors classes have been in her major.
There is a line where “weed out” turns into “bait and switch”, and UMD appears to be over the line with its re-apply process for CS. Letting kids into a program where there is clearly not enough capacity to pull all the kids through borders on unethical. The school should just decline the excess kids, and let them go somewhere else. CS is a field where the school reputation matters a lot less than the underlying knowledge base a kid graduates with. I am sure most of these kids would rather get a CS degree from a less prestigious school than be forced out of the major after their freshman year.
I wonder how much of this is happening with the popular majors across the country.
We dropped UMD from our list, also eliminated all “pre-engineering” or “1-st year Engineering” schools from our list (VTech, Penn State, Ohio State, NCSU)
