Thanks for asking! I think we’ll probably go with AFS, YFU, or maybe CIEE (we’ve had family experiences w/ all three orgs) but I’ll keep Rotary in mind.
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Good point. I think he’ll be okay but it’s worth considering. Oregon isn’t quite so far away.
Cornell College in Iowa is a school worth looking at for students like this. It is a “one course at a time” school with a much easier admit than Colorado College. Each course is 3 1/2 weeks, Pros are that you only have to keep track of assignments for one course and it’s great for kids who get really immersed in things. It’s great for athletes and those involved in clubs as the entire school is on the same schedule. It also allows classes to take road trips and opens up many study abroad opportunities.
Cons are that courses move quickly and if it’s a class you don’t like, 3 1/2 weeks can seem like forever when you have to really immerse yourself in your work.
Kids seem to either love the idea or hate it, but it seems like it may work for the OP. (I desperately wanted S23 to check it out, but he refused). I’ve heard that it’s really easy to meet people and form friendships since you are with the same people every day for 6 hours a day. And every 3 1/2 weeks, you get to meet a whole new set of people. I think there would be many kids with the same interests. And for a kid that likes languages, the classes are pretty immersive since they are all day/every day for 3 1/2 weeks (we have a friend that teaches Russian there and loves it).
If it’s something he wants to explore, Cornell College is a 4 hour drive from St. Olaf.
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Okay! We have a draft list, to be edited after we start visiting, talking to students, etc.
(N.B. we will visit more schools than you see on this list – e.g. when in Ohio we will check out Oberlin; in PacNW we’ll see Lewis & Clark, Reed, Puget Sound, and Willamette; when in Boston/Worcester we’ll visit Holy Cross and Brandeis – but this is my starting hypothesis.)
Reach schools: Macalaster and Kenyon (choose one for ED if it rises above others after visits; at any rate apply EA to Macalester).
Target schools: Clark U (EA), Lafayette, Dickinson, St. Olaf (EA), U. Rochester
Likely schools: Rhodes (EA), Whitman, Wooster (EA)
I’ve eliminated schools that are extreme reaches (e.g. Wesleyan, Carleton) from the mix because it’s not clear to me that the additional value proposition is worth the stress/heartache/opportunity cost and I don’t think my kiddo is interested in a super intense environment (hence no Reed on the short list). If he falls for Carleton when we visit Northfield we may be singing a different tune but I’m trying to focus on showing him reasonably attainable schools where I think he could thrive.
I’m super excited about some of these hidden (to me) gems – Clark has a cool fifth-year master’s program and offers Game Design and Geography majors, which my kiddo finds appealing. Wooster does a lot of independent research and is apparently known for creating scholars from above-average students. Plus, bagpipes! Rochester seems amazing – probably the most diverse/compelling suite of academic options in an interesting setting with diverse classmates. etc.
The list is not super heavy on safety/likely schools but we can add more depending on how he feels about ED/EA options. I’ll report back once we’ve started visiting places and getting impressions but for now, appreciative of the wisdom of crowds and hopeful that my kid will find a firm-but-gentle landing/launching pad.
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That looks like a great working list. I think you are doing this exactly right–there are so many cool special things about these different colleges, and it always seem wrong to me when people define success as getting into colleges that will barely want them. Like, if you really like them, and they really like you, this is a good thing!
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Looks like a great list. I have a senior at Kenyon (she loves it) who was also admitted to Macalester and St Olaf from your list (we only applied to Midwestern LACs with merit) and did her study abroad through a Macalester program. Feel free to pm me if you have any specific questions.
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Regarding avoiding the stress - my S made this decision to lose his very reachiest favorite school too. Of the “LAC type schools with engineering” he was after, he was between Tufts and Lafayette. In October, he had an interview with the Laf AO and afterwards he said, you know, I think Lafayette has everything I need and I feel good about my chances there. He wanted to be done thinking about admissions. He seems very happy with his choice a year later.
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So happy to hear this. I have a quirky ADHD son who applied EA to Trinity for CompSci. We didn’t know it existed three months ago, but have since visited and fell in love. Had a great interview. Fingers crossed!
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I love your list. This is an outstanding collection of top notch schools and you are early enough that you can make adjustments. I also love seeing the interest in SLACs given that you mentioned living in the Silicon Valley. I don’t think that SLACs get enough attention in the T20 obsessed Silicon Valley culture.
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And not to sound self-congratulatory, but I am quite sure that as the process unfolds, this community will continue to be a great resource.
Like, if the observation after some more exploration is, “X and Y were favored target/reaches, but not Z,” then I am sure this community will be great at suggesting likelies for an applicant like that.
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I’m also a fan of your list. We’ve applied to most of the schools on your list for two kiddos. If I may add an observation that our feeling is Whitman is probably more selective than Wooster, and probably a hair more than St Olaf. There seems to be a good deal of self selection there that raises their admit rate. Just trying to help with the selectivity binning. All are great options though!
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Yeah, it’s hard to figure out quite where these schools fit in. I’m attempting to triangulate using Naviance (which has more data on some schools than others), CollegeVine, and data from the schools themselves.
I was just debriefing with a friend whose daughter got into NYU and waitlisted at Berkeley but dinged by San Diego State. I think our approach with likely schools (as opposed to true safety schools, of which there are admittedly many) would be to apply to five or six and hope for at least one. I kind of hate that by gaming it out this way, we’re making it more expensive/time-consuming and less predictable for everyone involved. Where does it end?!
Too bad schools can’t just use the common app and common financial aid structure and then come up with an early decision matching system similar to residency programs.
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My guess is you will find most of the colleges on your final list do not “yield protect” meaning they will not reject applicants that are very well-qualified that they assume are very likely to go somewhere else. This tends to be a problem only for certain colleges, and in fact usually just colleges in certain popular locations.
Like, San Diego State got 77,250 applications in its latest CDS, for what were ultimately 6,573 enrollment slots. They still had to admit 30,331 people to fill those slots, which is only about a 22% yield. But it is plausible that among the 47,000 or so people they rejected were many where their yield model said the chances of a yield were way, way lower than 22%, and they did not want to bother admitting them only to have to replace them off the waitlist.
OK, so around here, you would get the impression that St. Olaf is an incredibly popular college–and it should be! However, the fact of the matter is it is not in fact in San Diego.
OK, so St Olaf got 5,524 applications, and they admitted 3,116 of those, generating a class of 869. They have ED, though, so backing those out (and assuming all the ED admits enrolled, which may not be quite right), you get something like 5,190 non-ED applications, of which they admitted 2,874, and enrolled around 627.
Interestingly, that is almost the exact same yield percentage as SDSU, just under 22%. But St. Olaf did not have to reject 47,000 applicants to get there. I suspect, in fact, St. Olaf might have essentially rejected no one they thought was “too qualified”. Because I don’t think St. Olaf gets so many applications where their yield odds are incredibly low, I think it is mostly just people who have found places like CC and are actually legit into St. Olaf. And maybe those CC-types apply a few other realistic places they like as much or better, which gets St. Olaf’s yield down to that 22%. But not usually a lot lower, because I think most such people will either have St Olaf at least pretty high on their list, or not on it at all.
OK, so personally, I would say that given the path you are on, you are not in fact going to have to do a lot of applications. I actually think it is entirely possible you could do something like as few as 6, a couple likelies, a couple targets, and a couple reaches. Or maybe a couple more each of targets and reaches, or three more targets and one more reach, or vice-versa. But I think you could still probably do 10 or fewer.
And I think that is because if you are really choosing among these sorts of colleges, there is not going to be much if any San Diego-style yield protection. It will be more just a matter of having good enough numbers and writing good applications, and then if you love them they will love you back. And maybe they won’t all love you back, but enough of them will love you back to actually have multiple good choices.
And then your average yield among those multiple good choices will also be close to 22%. Except at one it will be 100%.
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I’m excited to see how your list will end up. We have very similar lists (well we also have large schools on our list, but many of the same LACs). We also have Lawrence and Davidson (hard to get merit at Davidson, so it is low on the list at the moment). My kiddo wants physics/theater.
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I removed both of these from our list as well. Richmond - too preppy and lack of diversity and Fordham - seems students aren’t that happy, academics only mid and not good at STEM.
How Christian feeling is St. Olaf? It seems like a good fit in many way for my D other than the religious aspect. If she sees it described as a “christian-school” as it is on Niche, my daughter won’t go for it at all.
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Although nominally Lutheran (in association with a rather liberal wing of Lutheranism), now less than 20% of students are Lutheran, and over 40% have no specific religion:
https://wp.stolaf.edu/admissions/students/community/faith/
Obviously each individual needs to assess all that, but personally I would not be at all concerned about being non-Christian, or non-religious, at St. Olaf.
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Our tour guide, an international student, commented that her father is an atheist activist and that she felt perfectly comfortable on campus. There is a religion class requirement, but there is a wide range of options, including such classes as “God at the Movies,” and “Buddhist Meditation Traditions.”
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Why would you assume SDSU has yield protection? Like other CSUs, SDSU has a purely numerical formula for admissions, based on GPA cutoffs with a few bonus factors (eg working more than a certain number of hours per week, leadership role in school clubs/sports, etc.). You don’t even write an essay. The cutoff is set based on the previous year: too many accepting their offer makes the cutoff go up. Then they take from the waitlist in batches to fill spare slots.
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Davidson is a school my family knows well – my brother and father both taught there and my sister is an alum. I wonder sometimes if familiarity breeds lack of interest – to me it feels really small and I don’t love that part of NC. But it’s undeniably excellent academically. I doubt my son could get in.
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I was basing that suggestion of plausibility (not certainty) on the observation someone got waitlisted by Cal and admitted by NYU and rejected by SDSU. It is, of course, also possible they do not yield protect and something else explains that.
To me, the important point is it is unlikely St Olaf yield protects.
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