<p>My college list thus far is as follows:</p>
<p>-Harvard (reach)
-Yale (reach)
-Princeton (reach)
-Columbia (mid-reach)
-UPenn (mid-reach/match)
-Brown (mid-reach/match)
-Johns Hopkins (match)
-Northwestern (match)
-Rutgers (safety)</p>
<p>Possibly:
-Stanford (reach)
-MIT (reach)</p>
<p>You should definitely consider the University of Phoenix and DeVry University. The list just isn’t complete without them.</p>
<p>How does your list look? Honestly, looks like you just looked at the college rankings and picked out of the top 15 (besides Rutgers).</p>
<p>The list looks fine, as long as you have excellent test scores, EC’s ,recs and essays I see why you shouldn’t keep that list.</p>
<p>Are there any particular reason why you chose those uni’s. What major do you plan on pursuing.</p>
<p>I find it interesting that you have both Columbia , which has The Core, and Brown, which has the exact opposite.</p>
<p>No matter how competent of an applicant you are, you need more safeties. And more matches. And less reaches.</p>
<p>Your list looks doubtful because it’s just the Ivies plus a few other top schools and one safety thrown in. Besides USNWR, what information did you use to develop that list?</p>
<p>While I am not familiar with your academic and extracurricular qualifications, it is never a good idea to apply to only top schools. Add some safeties too–you’ll feel more assurance knowing that you can have somewhere to fall back on, in case you don’t make it to your reaches.</p>
<p>I see no reason why I should limit myself by applying to schools that I am overqualified for and wouldn’t feel happy attending. Yeah, I could have an extra safety and an extra match but honestly I feel as if Johns Hopkins, Northwestern, and Rutgers are enough. I’m not entirely sure whether or not I’ll be applying to Brown though, but I’m visiting this summer so I just stuck it in there, regardless. My goal is Yale/Princeton. I have a legacy to Penn but I do not find myself using this advantage by applying Early Decision, so I’m applying Regular Decision. I like Columbia just as much as if not more than UPenn. And I just threw Harvard in because you know a lot of people just apply to Harvard for kicks.</p>
<p>Your list looks extremely top-heavy.</p>
<p>Have you spent any time at Rutgers? Do you feel the love?</p>
<p>You can apply to an extremely top-heavy list, but you have to happily see yourself attending one true safety…just in case.</p>
<p>Your idea of a low-reach/match is skewed. As others have said, your list is incredibly top-heavy. JHU and Northwestern may be statistical matches, but with low acceptance rates (even lower once you take into account ED), they’re more of low reaches/high matches. The true matches on your list? None.</p>
<p>Except Rutgers.</p>
<p>I think this is an extremely risky list full of super selective colleges— I guess you must have extraordinary stats to be considering Brown and UPenn as somewhat of a match. </p>
<p>Edit: I see that you’re a rising junior who has only started looking into SATs and college admissions.</p>
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<p>Are you kidding me? Brown and UPenn are matches? Lol. You’re an unhooked, White/Asian applicant from the mid-atlantic. No Ivy League school is a match for you.</p>
<p>You’d be wise to find a few other schools you’d be happy attending and cutting down on your reach schools. I think 5 reaches, 3 matches, and 2 safeties is plenty. Don’t get bogged down in prestige; apply where you really want to go. I also saw that you’re a legacy for Penn, so Penn ED is your best option if it’s your first choice.</p>
<p>Good luck.</p>
<p>visit them all. all the ivies are vastly different from each other…find out which one you like best and then add more colleges that are slightly less prestigious but hace a similar feel to that one. also consider some ivy-caliber liberal arts colleges.</p>
<p>Yeah, as the others said, your list is too top heavy. And the only real match is Rutgers.</p>
<p>You should put more true matches and a couple of safeties too.</p>
<p>You’re a naive fool, making the same foolish assumptions that I did as a high school student.</p>
<p>Brown, Penn and Columbia are not “mid-reach/match” schools for anyone less than an international math olympiad medalist, or someone of like achievement. </p>
<p>You need a taste of fear. Here’s a snapshot of a few students applying from my highly-regarded, New England prep school for the 2006 season:
Myself: top 5%, 2250 SAT (1540 M+CR), 770 Chem, 760 Math IIC, 760 Bio. Legacy at Harvard and Columbia. Waitlisted, then rejected from both. Rejected at Yale. Rejected at Penn. Accepted, ultimately, to Cornell; attend for one year, transfer to Penn.</p>
<p>Friend 1: top 5%, 2230 SAT, 750 on Physics, Spanish and US History. Rejected from Harvard, Princeton, Penn and Columbia. Waitlisted, then accepted at Dartmouth.</p>
<p>Friend 2: top 5%, 2320 SAT (1590 M+CR), 740 Literature, 800 Math IIC, 680 Chem. Rejected from EVERY SINGLE IVY, got into Hopkins, now attends UMich on full scholarship.</p>
<p>Historically, my school has excellent placement, and is listed in Fortune and Money magazine as a top-20 high school for successful Ivy League admissions. Unless you go to Philips, Deerfield, or Choate, your guidance counselor PROBABLY has weaker pull at elite colleges than mine did. And in this day and age, that relatively strong influence was too weak to have any real effect. Since I applied, average SAT scores have been steadily rising.</p>
<p>I’ve read your other posts - if your SAT diagnostic is remotely predictive, you’ll have roughly the same scores as my cohort listed above, if perhaps slightly lower. Your academic profile will roughly approximate mine. Will you have better luck? I doubt it, although the admissions process, once you’ve qualified yourself with the initial academic hoops, is fairly opaque and arbitrary. So, I’ve tried to lend you a little perspective. Next May could find you waitlisted at (horrors!) WashU or Hopkins as easily as it could matriculated at Princeton. Respect the spinning, stochastic blades of the elite admissions process, or risk leaving it a jaded, dejected man.</p>
<p>What about this list:</p>
<p>-Harvard
-Yale
-Princeton
-Columbia
-UPenn
-Brown
-Tufts
-Stanford
-Carnegie Mellon
-Johns Hopkins
-Rutgers </p>
<p>I mean honestly at this point it’s me reaching for the stars (Harvard), landing on the moon (Johns Hopkins), or falling back down to Earth (Rutgers). There are plenty of other schools where I could “fall back down to Earth” (for example Boston University, etc.) but I don’t want to waste 50 grand a year on an education that isn’t remotely better than Rutgers, which I won’t have to pay a dime for.</p>
<p>There’s some craziness on this site that “no school is a match” or “nobody is guaranteed to get into some schools.” If you’re happy at Rutgers, you don’t need two or three other Safeties. As long as you’re happy at Rutgers, you can make the list as “top heavy” as you want to.</p>
<p>The only thing you might rethink is that once you start actually filling out the applications, you realize that it starts to get to be a lot of work with all the essays. This year, you’d have written separate essays for Harvard/Yale, Princeton, UPenn, Columbia (short-answers), Stanford (short-answer), Brown, and possibly a mix of the others (I didn’t look into applying to them). You might decide to narrow down your list when it actually comes time to apply to all your schools. I did.</p>
<p>I’m trying to find safeties but I honestly can’t think of any. I’m interested in doing a double major in humanities and Bio, so having strong programs in those two fields are important in a college making decision. I’m not exactly sure if MIT is good with its humanities, so I’m leaving that out to refrain from making my list 100% top heavy. And it doesn’t take common app, right? I looked at Georgetown as a potential target school but it’s mainly political. I don’t like Boston College. Most of the DC schools are mainly political. Any of the PA schools like Drexel/Villanova I have no care for and frankly aren’t too much better for the buck than Rutgers. I don’t want to go to a small LAC. So I’m kind of stuck. I’m probably going to try to transfer if I end up at Rutgers, but right now it’s a premier safety.</p>
<p>If you like Rutgers, and it’s an academic and financial safety, you don’t need to find another safety. You may end up liking another school that could qualify as “safety”, but you don’t need to seek one out.</p>
<p>MIT is an amazing school, but no one will dispute that its strengths are in math, science, et cetera. Humanities, not so much. Do you know what discipline of the Humanities? I believe Rutgers competes with Princeton for the top Philosophy program, so that fits.</p>
<p>You have a ton of great reaches, a solid safety, and honestly, the hardest to figure out is the “match” category. Generally, your statistics need to be a little higher than their “average”, to account for a variety of factors. On your other thread, we did determine you have a 4.0. Once you take the SAT/ACT, that will be a great help, too, in determining “match” schools. For admissions, extracurricular activities and recommendations are important, too. Then, of course, is the critical essay.</p>
<p>Try using College Confidential’s match system. It’s not perfect, but it should give you a nice list of schools to look into. If you’ve taken the PSAT, you can use that as your SAT score for that. I know people that have used that match system and found good matches, and others who end up with a list of ill-matched schools, so take it with a grain of salt.</p>
<p>Don’t just categorize by reach-match-safety, of course, but it’s important to have a few schools that fit the bill for “match”.</p>
<p>“I see no reason why I should limit myself by applying to schools that I am overqualified for and wouldn’t feel happy attending”</p>
<p>How pompous and elitist is that? What exactly makes you so special? Believe it or not, there are actually plenty of students who attend lower ranked universities and have similar or higher stats than yours. </p>
<p>Do you really want to be the guy or gal at say…Rutgers, whom everyone thinks is ******bag because you walk around with your nose stuck in the air because you are “over qualified” to be there?</p>