<p>I'm an upcoming senior with a 2330 SAT and >750 SAT IIs, National Merit (228) and good ECs. I'm also full pay without a doubt. My understanding is that paying 60k a year for school is possible if I get enough private scholarships to lower the price a bit, but a free school would be preferred. This means I have to apply to full-pay reaches, deep safeties, and also the prestigious universities that offer scholarships. As a result my list has ballooned and there's no way I can currently bring it down.</p>
<p>Here are all the schools on my list (sorry lol):</p>
<p>EA
1. Princeton
2. UVA
3. UNC
4. UT Austin</p>
<p>RD
5. Harvard
6. Yale
7. Columbia
8. Duke
9. Penn
10. Stanford
11. Vanderbilt
12. Emory
13. Davidson
14. Washington & Lee
15. Fordham
16. Tulane
17. Wake Forest
18. Brown
19. George Washington
20. UMiami
21. NYU
22. Johns Hopkins</p>
<p>I'm really flexible as to what I like in a college. I loved Columbia but I also liked colleges like Duke, Princeton, and William & Mary. Are there any on this list that you think should get the chop? I'd like to apply to around 17-18 schools.</p>
<p>Davidson and W&L seem like outliers. Also, Tulane will sometimes deny highly qualified candidates if they think the school is being viewed as a safety. On the other hand, if you love Tulane, then keep it on.17-18 seems like a high number to apply to, though.</p>
<p>These are fine schools. We need a lot more info: your GPA for instance, your state, your family’s ability to pay, your interests and possible major(s), et al. 18 apps will drive the people sending out letters of rec out of their minds and will cost your family a thousand bucks. Do try to cut it down. Do your homework. Not every one of these schools is a good fit for you. If they all are, then you should have no problem applying to only one of them. </p>
<p>NYU’s FA stinks, as does JHU’s. Tulane’s, Washington & Lee’s, and Vandy’s are very good and you would qualify for a lot of it, all things being equal. Academically speaking, Fordham, GWU, Miami, Wake, W&L, and Tulane (if you show a lot of interest to Tulane’s AO) are safeties for you. Emory, Davidson, UVA, UNC (oos?), and Texas (oos?) are matches. These are eyeball estimates and not certainties, okay, and based only on your SATs. If your GPA isn’t 3.8+, most bets are off. </p>
<p>Could you do enough research to pull out 3 reaches, 4 matches, and 2 safeties. Safeties will require more work than perhaps any of the others because you have to be certain of admission, affordability, availability of major, and willingness to go there if the safety is the best choice.</p>
<p>Instead of trimming, why don’t you just prioritize and apply to your favorites first. Eventually you will realize that you’ve submitted enough applications – or you’ll run out of money to pay application fees. ;)</p>
<p>“NYU’s FA stinks, as does JHU’s. Tulane’s, Washington & Lee’s, and Vandy’s are very good and you would qualify for a lot of it, all things being equal.”</p>
<p>Do you have any quantitative sources to back up your assertions?</p>
<p>Tulane offers a non-binding Early Notification option, which will include a merit scholarship award. The application has been free in the past. Why not take advantage of that? If you get your application in early, you should hear from them by Thanksgiving, and - if you like their scholarship offer - you could cull some safety schools from your RD list. What state are you in? You are very highly qualified, and you might do better at private colleges than as an out-of-state applicant to public universities. You didn’t mention your GPA. Is it as strong as your test scores? I presume it is if you are applying to Princeton, Harvard, and Stanford. If UNC follows the same timetable next year as it did last year, you will not hear from them until January. That means you will still have to apply to a lot of back-up choices if Princeton defers or rejects your application. I know that some colleges require students seeking merit scholarships to apply by the ED/EA deadline. Is that why you have UT/UVA/UNC down for ED? I don’t know about UT and UVA, but - as I mentioned - there might not be any particular advantage to applying early for UNC. </p>
<p>woogzmama, Tulane offers Early Action. Even though they send out acceptances in a “rolling” fashion, it’s not a rolling action program, so that won’t be compatible with Princeton’s SCEA. </p>
<p>OP, on another thread you say you’re from PA. If you’re really looking for deep safeties, Pitt should be on your list. Rolling admissions, good honors program, could be generous merit aid. Or, start looking at the schools that will offer you generous aid for your National Merit status. I’d be concerned that some of the schools you’re considering as safeties (George Washington?) may not be as much of a lock as you may wish.</p>
<p>And how much do you have to lower the cost with private scholarships? $5k a year? $2k? </p>
<p>I don’t see any “deep safeties” on that list if you are going after the merit money. Pop over to the Financial Aid Forum, and read through the threads on automatic merit-based aid, and competitive merit-base aid. If your grades are in the range of your SAT scores, there are true full rides out there for you.</p>
<p>For good merit aid you definitely need more “deep safeties.” I only see two liberal arts colleges on your list, Davidson plus Washington & Lee – neither one of which is a safety. Liberal arts colleges are frequently more generous with merit scholarships because they so often get overlooked. So, as safeties, I also recommend considering:</p>
<p>Denison University
Allegheny College
Centre College
University of Puget Sound
Colorado College (not U.Colorado-Boulder), but might only be low match.</p>
<p>@happymomof1 Fordham gives full tuition scholarships to NMFs. Paying $17k a year is no problem for my family so I think have a solid safety there. I’ll look into Pitt to see if I could get full ride+ there.</p>
<p>@jkeil911 I think I cut my list down quite a bit. I took off UT Austin, Davidson, Wake Forest, Wash&Lee, Johns Hopkins, GWU, NYU, and UMiami. That leaves me with 14 schools, and as I visit the ones I haven’t yet I guess I’ll elliminate a few more. I think ~15 schools is reasonable since I’m applying to schools that are no guarantee and I also need to include some schools like UNC, which are hard to get scholarship $$$ from. </p>
<p>@NROTCgrad I’m thinking I don’t want to go to a really small school so I’m not really into applying to most LA schools. Thank you for the help though. I have to be honest about Alabama when I say I don’t want to go to school where a strong academic program is unexpected and the prestige is really low. For instance, if you look up “roll tide” on urbandictionary, it’s defined as “The only thing that University of Bama students have to learn before graduating.” I’d like to be able to say prestige and name didn’t matter to me, but it does at least a little.</p>
<p>@Blah2009: Don’t have any statistical info on these schools but I did the research last summer when D was looking at colleges. Looked at all these schools and applied to Tulane and Vandy. Tulane offered her the Presidential S ($30K this year) and they have the Paul Tulane and Deans Honors full tuition scholarships, plus a number of sub-30K awards such that hundreds of people seem to get sizable merit at Tulane. Vandy is known for several full tuition scholarships amounting to over significantly more than 150 awards, as I recall. Washington & Lee throws about 40 Johnson full-tuition awards to a much smaller applicant pool. I looked at JHU among the first considerations but saw they didn’t offer much merit except for some full-tuition awards, I think, and they seemed to go to students of extraordinary capability, so I didn’t take any notes about JHU’s merit and excluded it right away from the earliest draft of a list. NYU was another of these schools I looked at early, like Brandeis, and excluded early because their merit was like Hopkins’. I don’t remember much about NYU other than that, but Brandeis like JHU looks like it’s pretty much foregoing merit except in a few cases. </p>
<p>Question on this statement by a poster at the beginning of this thread: “18 apps will drive the people sending out letters of rec out of their minds.” Now I had thought the teachers wrote the recommendations once and then it was either attached to the common app or the guidance counselor sent it out. Is that not the case? Because how in the world could any teacher send even, say, 5 recs per student if they’re writing recs for 10 or 15 students (as many teachers do in large high schools). </p>
<p>Princeton is SCEA–Single Choice Early Action. That means that if you apply early to Princeton, you can NOT apply early to the other colleges you’ve listed under EA.</p>
<p>^^^What I meant was that there are staff who have to handle the recs submitted on paper and mailed. At some high schools there is no electronic processing of rec submission. I was thinking first of them. Then I was thinking of my D’s old-school GC who thought that 18 apps was just a matter of students unwilling to do the work necessary to get to know the schools and parents who were far too lenient or uninvolved in the process. He felt students should be studying and enjoying their senior year and not applying to 18 schools when they can only go to one. There’s also a kind of trophy hunting that goes on among students, I’ve been told, and among some parents, I’d guess, where students get to say I (or Johnny or Suzie) got into 6 of the ivies. (Think about it: how can one student be a fit for 6 or all of the ivies–as happened this year with a student? They are quite different schools.) This is trophy hunting, and it pushes other applicants out of the admission pool for many schools but plays into the hands of the marketing departments at many of the schools. </p>
<p>@jkeil911 Recs are definitely something to keep in mind, although I think my school is using Naviance this year so that might make it easier. Also I disagree that you can’t be a fit for 6 Ivies. Many students are flexible and find that if you’re looking for an engaging student body most top 20 schools have it.</p>
<p>OP, my D’s stats are similar to yours. She will take a hard look at Alabama. Have you looked into the threads here about how well kids who took the NM scholarship have done in post-grad placements? It’s worth your time I think to look. From reading those threads, I’ve seen kids coming out of Bama getting great placements into med schools and law schools, the latter with $. </p>
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