He can’t blow off homework and stuff, especially in engineering, because he views it as busywork. My brother did this his first year in engineering school and almost didn’t make it. He somehow managed to turn things around and graduated and is now quite successful. He still views many things as “busy work” but at least no one is grading him anymore!
Large flagships are efficient “student movers”. As long as the student understands that they need to be proactive and can keep up with the conveyor belt, it’s all good. If they flounder somewhere along there, like my brother did, then it becomes more difficult. This can also happen in a smaller school, but not to the same extent. I know there are are a lot more supports now at the larger universities than when my brother or I attended, but students still need to take charge to a greater degree.
You are welcome. I should have mentioned earlier that the list I linked is a list of CBNRP-friendly engineering schools. They are a subset of NMS-friendly engineering schools, and I suspect that those schools would overlook the somewhat low GPA of a student with a 1500+ SAT score as they hope to go up the rankings by attracting students with a high SAT score.
Not looking at specific budget- UIUC is right around $40k per year. That would be doable. Don’t have much saved up in a 529, so will come out of current income mostly
ASU.
He will get some sort of scholarship for his SAT and he will be a guaranteed admit for Mechanical Engineering. It is a great school that is ranked highly in engineering (I believe no. 41).
If he likes the weather there and if the budget is around 30K a year, that’s definitely a choice that I’d look into.
Think some of your suggestions might be extremely overly optimistic.
GPA of 3.24 would put the applicant in the bottom 3% of admitted, enrolled students at Boston University according to their latest common data set.
Northeastern doesn’t publish GPA data, but based on higher metrics for SAT and class rank, it’s likely that the applicants ranking on HS GPA is no better if not worse.
Bottom 3% GPA for any unhooked applicant makes those schools a super high reach. For an Asian male STEM student the odds are virtually nil.
Possibly extremely overly optimistic but we do not know the GPA scale of the high school, and how attractive the 1570 SAT score might be to the universities, especially the ones that are NOT need blind, provided student can afford full sticker price.
You should look at Alabama, Ms State, LSU, Mizzou + Missouri Science & Tech, and Alabama Huntsville.
I personally don’t see your son getting into Rose Hulman. I know he’s not interested but everyone was mentioning. If he wanted smaller I could see Dayton.
@tsbna44 Thanks for the list. You’re probably right about Rose-Hulman. They were very interested 2y ago when we visited. Of course, back then, his GPA was 4.3+!
Any suggestions for closer to home (IL)?
I wanted to ask about how GPA is reported. His high school only reports weighted GPA, and doesn’t officially give a class rank on the transcript. So his will be reported as 3.88/ 4.0 Weighted. So when looking at stats, should I assume the school will recalculate? Course rigor is considered high, and while my son hasn’t taken every AP he could have, he will end senior year with 14 APs.
If budget weren’t a consideration, would you pick differently? And I’m not looking for the prestige as much as the education, though with Engineering I understand they may go more hand-in-hand than with other disciplines.
Bradley…you can see the scholarship on their NPC. IIT. DIrectionals such as SIU. Iowa and Loras in Iowa. Evansville, Cincinnati, Ohio U, UK a bit farther. Marquette ot Milwaukee School of engineering and Missou. I’d look at Bradley. Good rep. Low cost.
UAH is a smaller school - like 10k students. While it has various majors, engineering is a huge focus of the school. Huntsville the city is like the second NASA city along with Houston.
Bama is just your larger, more well rounded, flagship school.
Both are solid and cost effective. Big school vs. little school, a bit more quiet…I’d say.
