Definitely take the time to visit VA’s schools to see if she prefers large or small, urban or rural, etc. You have everything from Va Tech (my Alma mater) to W&M or privates like U Richmond (and more, of course).
In the meantime, as others have said, get a lock on your finances. Do a free FAFSA projection from the gov’t site and see if you find the resulting number affordable or pick yourself up off the floor after fainting. If the former, you’re either full pay and it’s fine or you want to try for good “meets needs” schools. If the latter, you want to look for merit aid. She has the stats to get some.
One other thing to do with finances is run the NPC at Brown (for an Ivy I think she’d like) and see if that’s affordable. Some of those schools (also Yale, Harvard, etc) tend to give more money than typical schools. Since they do it out of their own pocket (aka endowment) they don’t have to stick with FAFSA numbers. Many other schools do.
Note that schools that have need based aid also don’t have to bring your cost down to your estimated cost from FAFSA. They can’t just go lower than that while you’re still getting fed dollars of some sort. There’s no law, rule, or custom that says they can’t go higher with your cost.
Once you know what you and she are looking for, it’s much easier to make suggestions. There are literally oodles of schools that fit what she’s looking for right now, all across the US. The options start to narrow once she figures out what she likes and you figure out (or let folks here know if you already know) if cost needs to be factored in.
So the question becomes how to integrate her interest in doing something creative with something more practical and academic.
Carnegie-Mellon University has just such a program. It is called the BXA Intercollege program, based on the belief that academic disciplines and the arts are not antagonistic to each other but rather the different lines of inquiry from different disciplines inform each other… In her case, their BSA (Bachelor of Science & Arts) might be of the greatest interest. This would actually be excellent preparation for medical school and would help to differentiate her from all of the other pre-meds.
Following this line of thinking that her best opportunity to thrive will be in an environment where she doesn’t have to make a choice between science and the creative arts, one to the exclusion of the other, but rather to find a way to integrate the two, I think that you might consider colleges where the approach is highly individualized and personalized with a lot of faculty guidance and mentorship. Two schools which take this approach are Brown University in Rhode Island and Grinnell College in Iowa.
Thank you so much! I’ll definitely look into that. These schools and programs sound fantastic. Not sure my daughter has stats like that, but they seem to match and integrate her interest in science and arts very well. She does have Brown and RISD in mind and she knows it’s super hard to get in.
I don’t know if she has the numbers for these schools either, but admissions at these schools go beyond the numbers, and I think she has the numbers to get considered. Your daughter sounds like a unique and special young lady, and if she can communicate that to the colleges to which she applies, I think that she may be able to get admitted to one of these schools. CMU really values it’s BXA program, but I don’t know how many applicants show an interest in it. We know that they get a lot of engineering and applicants and that they get a lot of theater and drama applicants, but students with interests in both Art & Literature in addition to Science are rare, so I wouldn’t underestimate her chances.
Grinnell is a really special place. It’s not the kind of location she’s looking for, so it may be a non-starter on that basis alone. But I think that it’s a place where she really could thrive. Her chances for admission would be enhanced by the fact that she’s from “ some place else” rather than the immediate tri-state area from which they draw 1/3 of their students. The most recent data I saw showed only 3 students from Virginia. They’re also not top heavy with women (53%) or Asian Americans (<10%) like some colleges.
Brown is Brown and is a reach for anyone. My GD was rejected with a perfect 36 ACT, straight A’s, and good EC’s, so I understand that. But on their Common Data Set, they list talents/abilities in the most important column for consideration for admission, just as important as grades, test scores, and class rank. Check out this link for guidance on writing a winning essay to Brown:
Here’s another suggestion. Tufts is not so impossible reach or hard March. Interdisciplinary studies is the hallmark of a Tufts education. They have superb opportunities in Art & Literature as well as majors in Biotech and Neurology (found within the Cognitive & Brain Sciences Dept. With their own medical school, they have excellent pre-med advising. They are surrounded by the biotech industries in the Boston area. Their location in a residential neighborhood with easy access to Boston and Harvard Square seems to be the kind of location she’s looking for.
With in-state acceptance rates being what they are, UVA, W&M, and VA Tech would all seem like good targets for her.
Thank you again. I will be beyond happy if she can land on any of these schools. I need to do more research and hopefully get her interested, especially the ones that will challenge her in science and keep her creative in art and literature. I believe once she has her eyes on them she can write some killer essays.
I hadn’t seen anything from this year and I don’t know how accurate preliminary reports are until they find out their yield and know if they have to dip into their wait list.
But this is good information to know. I was going off their 15-16% rates of recent years albeit a dip to 11% last year. The annual increase in high school graduates and accompanying increase in college applications is certainly making college admission a moving target at all colleges every year.
This is a top student with an interesting combination of accomplishments and interests. I believe that she would get strong consideration at Tufts.
Is this true? I think you can get work study money if your Net Price is below your EFC. Not sure what happens for partial Pell grant recipients. I always thought that the federal money (Pell) was independent of what the school could do. For example if the federal formula gave you an EFC of 2k, you would be eligible for a 4k Pell. The university could still give you enough financial aid to make your Net Price $0. But I could be wrong.
Someone more experienced that I would have to say for sure. I’m just repeating what we heard at a couple financial aid info sessions and the only details they went into were about appealing if there were special circumstances allowing them to shift those numbers - things like medical needs, or one time income changes (selling a house), or similar.
I would take a look at Wesleyan. Gives a student a lot of flexibility to explore different subjects, and punches above its weight in science and research.
Also thought of University of Rochester- but that’s a long trip for her.
Another college you might want to consider is Davidson. I’ve heard good things about its incorporation of science & arts (including this article from SciArt magazine). There are a number of majors that seem right up her alley, too.
Just an observation. OPs child obviously has excellent qualifications. There are also some flags (unhooked, over-represented minority). OP comes with a first CC post asking for recommendations and almost every school recommended so far is a reach or worse in the current admissions climate. Then this time next year when OP comes back lamenting a brutal set of results, the board will admonish OP for the list being so reach heavy.
If, as the boards seem to suggest, many regular posters are frustrated with the hyper focus on prestige, T-20s and the same set of excellent students applying to the same schools, perhaps we need to dig deeper and look beyond that set of schools when recommending. Perhaps we could try to purposefully also include targets and likelies whenever offering up a reach as a recommendation. The topic of the importance of including targets and likelies is not rare on CC and posters have plenty of targets and likelies to offer up when specifically asked for. But if someone with seemingly high qualifications simply asks for recommendations the same reaches seem to appear frequently.
Just trying to avoid perpetuating the same unfortunate trends we lament.
OP, didn’t mean to hijack and hopefully this is informative to you as a first time poster. Peruse the admissions posts and you’ll get a flavor of how hard it is to get into many of the schools mentioned in this thread so far, even for excellent students such as your own.
@pishicaca, your points are very well made. We should include more targets.
I do think that there is value in highlighting some better known programs which have distinctive features, because they can serve as examples of what to look for at colleges where admissions are less competitive but which still offer excellent educational opportunities.