Having a 4.0 and 8 APs doesn’t necessarily make you a top student. That’s why we have holistic admissions. There are many other factors that need to be considered
I guess I’d quibble that top grades and test scores including a large number of AP courses is exactly the definition of a top student.
It may not make her a top applicant, which I think is your point, and I agree that academics alone doesn’t cut it. But the question and worry is about the academic side of things (as silly as that may sound to some) and I didn’t post her full resume with this question.
Gotta look at ECs and essays and whether she is ORM at particular schools. Top hard stats alone can lead to unexpected results.
For high stats kids, the trick is to look at acceptance rates to classify - basically, regardless of stats, anything 20%ans below is a reach, 25-35% would make for a match, above that safeties. And the second trick is interest.
Since they’re above the top 25% threshold for most colleges in terms of stats they may forget selectivity. And since those stats will clearly be above their norm, they’ll suspect ‘safety/won’t attend’ so she needs to start expressing interest at all matches (fill out request info form, official visit with interview if you can…)
For your daughter, it means several safeties with excellent honors colleges (UTD and UH then) as well as universities chosen just for the honors college (top honors colleges include Michigan LSA, Penn State Schreyer, USC Columbia Honors). Then you have schools known for favoring top scorers: WashU, Vanderbilt, for instance. Then you have women’s colleges (sustained interest will be important).
If money is no concern, NYU has the Courant institute and D3 swimming.
Among all the ones I cited, she WILL get a few acceptances at least. And since the boarding school application experience is still painful, you want to make sure she applied EA to schools she’s allowed to. This way she’ll be reassured she does have a few acceptances early on. I think Apply Texas opens in July.
I think that at Stanford the major she’d be interested in (if not found yet) would be Symbolic Systems.
I would caution against thinking that being a potential athletic recruit and female is sufficient to increase chances of an MIT admit.
My sense is that MIT looks, more than many other schools, for a certain type of student – proven to be intellectually curious, someone who likes to tinker and build things, etc. – being female, high stats, and an athlete doesn’t show this.
@jmtabb
Have you looked at D3 swim team rankings?
https://www.collegeswimming.com/division/3/teams/
Some schools in the top ~10 may be too small (Kenyon), too selective (MIT), or both (Williams) to meet your “match” and other criteria. Maybe check out Emory and Tufts. Or NYU.
In the next 10, you have the same problem … plus a few more schools that may not have the intellectual atmosphere you want. Down a little farther, at #34, is Case Western (which seems to push the right buttons).
If you’re willing to relax your size/location criteria, the top 40 includes a few other ~match schools that a nerdy athlete might find attractive. Like Kenyon, Bates, Occidental … and maybe Gettysburg, Dennison, or Connecticut College. But those are all LACs.
On paper, Emory, Tufts, NYU, and Case Western would seem to be in your match zone (more or less … without getting into hard-to-measure factors like “demonstrated interest”). If you don’t care so much about the quality of the swim teams, maybe have a look at Rensselaer and Brandeis.
Regardless of admission outcomes, a student with a 4.0 and 8 APs is certainly a top student. If you mean top candidate for a super elite college, that may be a different story. That doesn’t take away from the fact that she is a top student, and is an excellent athlete as well.
There are many schools that seem like “matches” for her stats. Yes, a few may practice “enrollment management” but with the Ivy etc. admission rates below 10% not sure if that is as much a factor these days. Demonstrated interest through visits, contact with the coach, etc. would certainly help.
She has to decide how important swimming is to her vs other factors. The schools others have suggested seem like a great starting point. I find it hard to believe that she won’t have some good choices next year at this time.
Beat me to the punch. I went through this last year with a son who was a runner…good enough for some D1 but not necessarily the ones he wanted…and a good student but not nearly on par at all with your daughter. I would suggest looking at the rankings for the top D3 programs (https://www.ncaa.com/rankings/swimming-women/d3). Then figure out the following: city/suburb/college town/small town and big/medium/small. And what she wants (or thinks she wants to study). Then you need to dig in and come up with a list. (I took this on for my son…made a spreadsheet).
Good luck!
I’d let go of the idea of a match school. Find a couple of safeties she likes - apply to schools with EA and rolling admissions.
One suggestion is to look at some of the tech schools - they are often looking for women and many of them have good offerings in economics. For example RPI would be likely to offer merit money, has economics (including at the graduate level). Another possiblity would be Carnegie Mellon - it offers economics both through arts and sciences (DC 22% admissions rate) and the Tepper Business School (TPR 17% acceptance rate). https://admission.enrollment.cmu.edu/pages/undergraduate-admission-statistics I don’t know what swimming is like at either school.
I think the worry about yield protection is exaggerated.
@fendrock Not sure I agree. Two kids from our local HS, both great students and athletes with good stats but not perfect ACTs are at MIT - one running track and one playing tennis. Neither are URMs nor were they tinkerers as the sports was their main EC.
It seems that you should email the NESCAC school swim coaches. Campuses and vibe is different so if interested you should visit your top choices to find fit. Look at each swim teams times and see where your daughter would help the most.
good luck
If you are looking to get in the highest ranked schools look at WashU, Vandy, Rice and Chicago and Duke to a lesser extent. They like perfect scores and GPAs and full pay though she’d also have a chance at merit at all of them. She might be able to swim at WashU but there is always club if not. If the end game is Wall Street then you might consider ED at Duke.
As a Washington resident, you can participate in the WUE, western undergraduate exchange. go to another state school for the 1 1/2 times the in state tuition rate. https://www.wiche.edu/wue. The states involved include Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, New mexico and the states west of them.
If you look at the list of schools, the most popular ones aren’t listed for some states, such as UW, UCLA,Berkeley. However, they do have University of Utah and CSU, Colorado State University. So if your daughter could swim a DIV I program and attend a big school if she wants. Colorado School of Mines is not part of this program which is a good engineering, math and econ school.
A lot of the discussion here seems to be based on the premise that the OP and her daughter will make a list of colleges, apply to them, and let the chips fall where they may. But that’s not realistic.
First, all the discussion about “hard stats” and being a “top student” vs. being a “top applicant” is of questionable relevance. The student under discussion here already has a major other leg to her presentation – her swimming – in addition to a bunch of other ECs, and really good stats. Assuming she can write competently and present herself at least non-offensively, she will be attractive to many, many colleges, especially those where her swimming times make it look like she will be a team leader.
If the student (a) is willing to pass up on the hyperselective (and hyperprestigious) colleges like Harvard and Stanford, and to focus on DIII swimming prograns, (b) is not especially cost-sensitive, and © is willing to do her research and to make an effective commitment early, I suspect she will have a great outcome. That outcome will arrive via an ED acceptance somewhere with the enthusiastic support of the swim coach. But the process has to be happening now (and apparently it is).
There are many colleges – maybe not dozens, quite, but more than a dozen – that would seem to fit the student’s academic/social interests/needs perfectly and come close, at least, on her athletic goals. They include some schools with extremely low acceptance rates (Chicago, MIT, Pomona, Williams) and some that accept a much higher percentage of applicants (Reed, Smith, Rochester, NYU) and many in between. But overall admissions rates are irrelevant to a recruited athlete applying early decision with the full support of a coach. (Except maybe at MIT. Maybe.) The student’s stats ensure that she no admissions committee is going to deem her unacceptable per se, so if a college is one where the coach’s support is given any meaningful weight, she will be in. A total reach for anyone may be her match. Not every coach will want her, but I bet she will have some great options (and by “great,” I don’t necessarily mean hyperselective).
What’s less likely – although not impossible – is that she can “play the field” through the RD process, asking coaches to support her without committing to them, and still wind up at a high reach kind of college. She should see which coaches want to recruit her, do her homework on her fit with the colleges, coaches, and teams, and then make a decision and stick to it.
If she doesn’t take this advice . . . from a pure admissions standpoint, Berkeley, UCLA, Michigan, and UVa out-of-state certainly qualify as matches – and pretty darn good ones. Most other excellent public universities, with the exception of UNC, will be safeties, and not worse places for her because of that. She won’t have trouble finding her “tribe” at any of them (and she may find that her tastes in tribe get a little broader as she ages). On the private side, look at the ones I listed above – NYU, Reed, Rochester, Smith. Plenty to love there.
Thanks again all! Lots of things to think about getting posted here so let me update a bit:
Yes, at this point swim is a priority. She’s a DIII swimmer, maybe low level D1. Ivies are a bit fast for her to be competitive or be recruited and she hasn’t been excited about the idea of attending an Ivy for some reason. That’s fine.
We are talking with coaches at some of the schools mentioned here, have explored and decided against some others for a variety of reasons. And there are some schools that haven’t been on our radar at all that I’m looking forward to checking out further in the next few weeks.
I’m reassured that we’re getting lots of comments that our concerns about yield protection may be an overreaction. Adding athletics into the mix to find the “right” school definitely adds to the challenge!
One thing to consider when she thinks of swimming at a DIII school - if she is recruited by the school (and so is expecting a boost in admissions probability), she will be expected to apply ED. For some schools and some sports, if the athlete will not apply ED then the roster spot is no longer guaranteed.
Colleges participating in the WUE tuition discount are generally less popular less selective ones that would be safeties or near-safeties admission-wise for a student with a 4.0 HS GPA in hard courses and top-end test scores (though bigger scholarships may be match or reach level).
My D1 had 35 ACT, 800s on SAT II Math, Physics and Latin, 5s on 5 hard APs by application time, and registered for 5 more APs along with Math and a new foreign language at a college. Her lowest grade was a single A-. She was not Val or Sal because college courses don’t give A+'s, but she didn’t care.
ECs were not spectacular.
I round the probability of admission to the nearest 10th and consider 30% and under to be a reach, 40%-90% to be a match and 100% to be a safety.
We found Naviance to be extremely helpful. The results for her suburban public Boston HS did not correlate exactly with national admissions rates. There were schools that nobody got into (ex UNC). There were schools that were clearly extremely difficult to get into even for the top students. However, there were schools including certain Ivy league schools that anyone would ordinarily consider a reach that were really matches given her stats.
D made a list of 10 schools and ranked them and sent them her transcripts, recommendations, etc. She applied to University of Wisconsin as an OOS public safety in September and was admitted in October. So she had a safety bagged before her early common applications were due.
Her top 2 choices were EA so she applied to those early. She was admitted to both and eliminated all but one Ivy and one top LAC from her list. She then completed those last two applications and got denied by the Ivy and waitlisted by the LAC, but she had done overnight visits to the two EA schools before she heard, and she deposited to her top choice EA school on April 1 when the last rejection came out.
My point is that Naviance was really helpful in distinguishing schools that seem to really like our HS and schools that were just too reachy.
If you are mathematically inclined, and you can use the Naviance data to estimate her probability of admissions, treat them as independent, and can rank the choices. You can then calculate the probability of attending an institution as the product of the probability of getting into that school multiplied by the probability of rejection of more preferable choices. If you do that, you can quickly see that if the 5th choice has a 10% of getting in, then the probability of attending there is infinitesimal and probably not worth the time spent on an application. The key is to identify some schools that may have very low admissions rates, but are matches on your Naviance for your D. It’s also important to find match schools that she likes. Her top 2 or 3 choices she should apply no matter how poorly the predictions look. People do get admitted to these schools.
Your D has a great profile, and you should be proud regardless. Also important is not to make college admissions good or bad into a reflection of her self-worth. She’s worthy of any of them. Are they smart enough to select her? She will have great options.
If she is serious about wanting to swim at a D3 school, I suggest she scour the swim rankings (and visit the schools’ athletic web sites to find times) to see where she might fit in and then start to contact the coaches at possible schools. Once you consider geography, size, and academic rankings/majors, I think you will find that only a handful of schools will fit the bill.See https://www.ncaa.com/rankings/swimming-women/d3 and https://www.collegeswimming.com/division/3/teams/
If she doesn’t have to be on one of the coasts, Grinnell seems to fit what you’re looking for. Lots of smart kids who like to study and are there to learn. Good swim team (usually win their conference) with outstanding facilities, but they recognize school is the priority while they are there. DD decided against going there, but she really liked the swim program in general and the coach specifically.