@Tigerkat Have you considered the University of Richmond? It seems to match most of your criteria: meets 100% of need, medium size, suburban, not religious, social, challenging but not cutthroat. It feels more mid-Atlantic than southern.
@yauponredux Thanks, it looks like a possibility. I live less than two hours away and never heard of it, go figure! I was hoping for a school further away but it’s not a deal breaker.
CC-Any other suggestions?
It really depends on what you define as a match. Look at the RD accept rates of your schools. Take into account you are in upper 25% stats wide, a bump for URM. Understand that the school wants some Gender equality—gives you a bump up as a male usually. Also understand the power of small numbers. Realistically assess how much demonstrated interest and effort you are giving a school; these little ones can be far more holistic in admissions and a lot of experienced AOs can smell disinterest, and that they are the safety school a mile away. You have a tremendous math skills and can look up the current numbers for class of 2023.
Using CDS or USNews or other articles does not take into account recent changes. The 2019 US news ratings have Hamilton at a 24% accept rate because their data runs 2 years behind. The CDS runs a year behind. The recent announcements in accept rates are a bit off because they don’t include wait list admits. Some schools have huge waitlists. Then you have special admit programs that muck up exact comparisons but usually those things don’t make that much difference, but more so with very small schools With a class of 500 students, placing 50 kids in some odd category or other is 10% of the population there. For a larger school, that same absolute number might barely make a blip.
For the matches be sure to show interest – they may see your high stats and URM status which gives a boost and practice yield protection. You don’t have to visit all of them b4 applying, but open their emails, poke around their website, sign up for the listserve, follow their admissions feed on IG, etc. And make the “why XXX” college very specific.
It’s a numbers game but you are an excellent candidate, and if you apply 10 to 12 places, including two safeties, I predict you’ll have some excellent choices. But make sure you run the NPC and can afford to go to the reaches where you apply.
Finally, use the College Essays section of this website for any questions and feedback. They play a huge role in differentiating high stats kids. With that in mind, my philosophy is to submit 10 to 12 excellent applications with great essays than 15 or more where you just don’t have time to do each really well…
Finally, if an NPC calculator shows you can afford a college and it meets 100% of need, , don’t be afraid to apply ED to your top choice. It really boosts your chances!
@cptofthehouse I define match as I (my stats) have a good chance 40-50% acceptance rate, not overall acceptance rate. Respectfully, I understand how to do the math but don’t always know the background information behind the figures. For example, you enlightened me about the issue with well known LACs having so few seats that the math can be deceiving.
This is my only chance to get it right. I have all my reaches and safeties, just need target schools. Some people suggest asking GC, but our guidance counselors have hundreds of kids with issues on their caseloads. Student looking for target schools in the summer, not a priority. That’s why I am researching myself using guides and 2023 profiles and also asking the CC community for suggestions of target schools that meet most of my criteria. I appreciate your assistance.
“Match” typically means a good, but not certain, chance of admission. 40-50% (for applicants similar to you) is not all that good, so it may be better thought of as “high match” to “low reach”.
My opinion is you are going to have some good choices even among the reaches. The problem is we don’t know where. Schools can go hot and get a record number of applications; look at Hamilton going from a 24% accept rate to a 16% one in a short two years. I’ve seen this happen a number of times. You don’t know what their “catches” are during their ED season. They may have enough students like you, and be looking for some other things for which they are in short supply. Diversity is the name of the game these days. And though many schools will deny that they reject what they view as overqualified applicants because they are likely to go elsewhere, some systematically do. Or some do, under their holistic review, counting demonstrated interest heavily. It’s hard to be hot about 10-12 schools or more, and give them that love, know them well. The natural tendency is to show the most love to those schools who could not care less. Everyone loves them. They don’t give a ditzel for demonstrated interest and even discourage it beyond what you can fit in their applications and they hate extra attachments.
I agree about University of Richmond being a good target school for you. William and Mary could be a good high match for you, depending on what the NPC shows. They do have merit scholarships, but don’t guarantee full need met for out of state students, so it would depend on what you see when you run the NPC (and if that takes OOS status into account).
@Genevieve18 Thanks for the suggestions. I want to stay with schools that meet full need or UMCP. Only OOS public schools I should consider are ones the have automatic scholarships for me based on stats.
@ucbalumnus Is match considered above 50% in CC? My goal is to apply to two or three targets and get into a minimum of one. Trying to avoid common situation-getting rejected from all reaches and having to attend a safety.
@AlmostThere2018 – what do you mean by admissions feed on IG? and what is the list serve?
thanks
@AlmostThere2018 - Also - can you point me to this area?
really - I did try looking! 
thanks!
You asked about match vs. safety vs. reach. This is just an example of how I saw it two years ago for my high stats kid. He liked small colleges. He had a generous number of match schools lined up. We thought that if he were not accepted to a college in the ED round, there was an increased chance of being rejected from his high matches in the RD round, once there were fewer openings. Hence, he had not only true statistical matches, like Middlebury and Emory are for you (I call them ‘high matches’) but also ‘low matches.’
Thanks to CC, we knew that the ‘holistic’ aspect of the schools listed here as ‘low matches’ meant that they could not be counted on as safeties, even though his stats were in their top 25th percentile. He wanted to have more options than his safeties in the end, and having a large number of match colleges increased that possibility.
His strategy was to apply ED to a reasonable reach, which worked out for him.
Simultaneously, he EA’d to his safeties. I say the word ‘safeties’ with full respect for the colleges, which are many people’s top choice colleges and where I think he would have been quite happy. He was not considering any “auto-admit-by-stats” safety. What mattered to him more than anything was smart peers, so even his safeties were highly competitive colleges (such as Maryland- College Park is for you). By applying to Binghamton and Clark early action, he would have had time to adjust his strategy if he had experienced a surprise rejection.
High reach: Brown, Princeton.
Reasonable reach: Amherst, Bowdoin, Johns Hopkins, Wesleyan, Williams (ED).
High match: Bates, Colgate, Hamilton, Middlebury, Vassar. (One of these might have received an ED2 if he had not been accepted to Williams ED1.)
Low match: Brandeis, Connecticut College, Franklin & Marshall, Lafayette, Skidmore. (In retrospect, he has stated that he would not have applied to F&M and Lafayette in the end. He loved Skidmore, and it, along with Brandeis and Conn, matched his personality better than the other low matches.)
Reasonably safe options: Clark, SUNY Binghamton
An extra, greater safety possibility that might have been added if he had experienced some rejections in the EA/ED1 round: SUNY Geneseo.
What people are suggesting to you is that your matches carry some risk because they are competitive. To almost guarantee yourself an option to weigh against College Park in the end, add some ‘low match’ colleges.
Note that college admission decisions are not independent events. So it is not safe to assume that applying to two 50% chance schools means a 75% chance of at least one. Also, in many cases, you may not have any idea of the admission rate for applicants like you at colleges where the admission process is holistic and opaque.
I would not consider a school a match unless you have good information that applicants like you have about a two out of three chance of admission. But good information for this purpose may not exist for many highly selective small LACs.
@TheGreyKing I do understand, I have seen what can happen with a list of just reached and safeties. I am trying to be strategic and figure out low matches like your son without doing more than 10 applications.
My cousin with amazing stats (perfect SAT, grades, rigor, valedictorian, voted most likely to attend an ivy etc.) ended up in a safety. She’s so smart and studious, we were shocked. She’s ok has a 4.0 and is on track to graduate early with research experience (plans to attend medical school) in a honors college.
I am going through the list of 100 percent need schools. It’s not easy to find ones that are medium size or part of a consortium that are low matches. Everyone wants grant money. Problem is I get to a point that the schools don’t satisfy my criteria and academically are not any better than UMCP so there’s no point to applying.
People on CC caution me to not go too low because I’ll get rejected (AO doubt I’ll enroll). While others warn that every school, no matter if I am 75%ile or above, is a reach. So what’s up?
Reach
Duke ED Really liked the campus and vibe
Brown legacy
Dartmouth
Vanderbilt
Wash U
Rice
Target
Emory
University of Richmond ?
Lehigh?
Safety
UMCP (Chance of some merit scholarships)
U of Alabama (guaranteed scholarship)
@bgbg4us
One way a student can demonstrate interest is by going to their admissions page and looking for a link to sign up for college admissions emails. The student can also follow their Instagram account – usually there’s one for the college as a whole and one specifically linked to admissions. They can look the account names up on Instagram directly or on the admissions web page.
Here’s the College Essay discussion: http://talk.qa.collegeconfidential.com/college-essays/
Hope this helps!
@bgbg4us Be prepared for more mailings, it’s like Harry Potter.
Good luck to you. You are doing a nice job of developing a balanced list. Given your excellent GPA, class rank, and test scores, and your Hispanic ethnicity (plus legacy status at one top school), I predict that you will have some great options! (Or get into your top choice ED). Try to enjoy the process of searching for the school that will be your “home” for the next four years!
I get what @ucbalumnus is saying about admissions decisions not being independent events and I absolutely hold to that when it comes to the reach schools. But I think for the target level , it’s about as close as can be to being so for you, given your profile
If you were my kid, I’d feel confident that you’d get into at least 1 out of 4 match schools. I wish you’d gotten schools around 25-40% accept rates. Emory is at 15% RD and ED combined this year account to the class of 2023 news releases., which makes their Pure RD rate close to 10%. Even those target schools acceptances are independent events , do the math. I give you a better than average chance of acceptance because I think you are in the upper range of applicants.
I pretty much figured my youngest would either get into his first choice reach school ED and/ or get into at least one of his 4 Target/Reach. schools. He had 3 solid safeties that he liked just fine, so he was set. All 8 schools were early. Had he not gotten accepted ED, he would have played the lottery with some reach schools.
Your stats are better, you have legacy for Brown , URM advantage. However, you have an oversubscribed major, a school not as used to selective school admissions. I wish you had a few EA matches— those seem to be disappearing, both as EAs and as matches these days.
Another issue here is that selectivity appears to be a feature important to you, which it was not with my son. That makes it very difficult in finding schools that are matches because of the selectivity issue. Also Catholic schools tend to be EA, and those are off your list.
So, looks like you’ll do an ED paired with two safeties. If accepted ED, you’re done. If not , you have your safeties and you can play the lottery with highly selective schools and also look hard for match schools that you’d prefer to your safeties.
@TheGreyKing thanks for your reassurance. I really am trying to be reasonable in my choices. I tried to not be so ivy heavy. The more visits I do, the more I realize that ivy is just a sports league. So many great schools out there. Just hard finding ones that meet need.
@ucbalumnus My accomplishments so far have been all me. No tutors or prep, just me. Often advocating for myself. For example, getting permission to take certain AP classes as a freshman that are usually reserved for upperclassman. I am pretty independent. With checklists and my parents’ help, I can keep my school on track. If it helps, I dont mind going undecided for selective schools. I just want a chance.
CC-One question can a very active prominent alumni (offered to help) increase chance of admission or have those days passed?