<p>Not a safety, but Amherst might be worth a look. Know a CCer who had a student there who was math/econ/cs-y and did quite well (at school, and post-grad). Harvey Mudd will require engineering coursework regardless of major. Might be worth it to consider MIT – they aren’t just for engineering any more!</p>
<p>I would focus on essays that bring out his individuality and assembling a resume (both of my kids had good results with that).</p>
<p>Places to consider: William & Mary, URochester, Case Western, Pitt, Haverford, Grinnell, St. Olaf (strong in math) Michigan, UMBC. I would think that if the parents can agree on $$, throwing an ED app to Tufts/Swat/Duke/Dart could be a successful strategy. Rochester, Case, UMBC and Pitt give merit $$.</p>
<p>S2 had a 3.5 UW/4.2 W, 2290 at an IB program – he didn’t bother with Ivies. Focused on schools that were a good match with reasonable odds, given lots of attention paid to those schools’ essays. Also applied EA, which worked well for both my kids. S2 got into UMCP, URochester, Tufts and UChicago EA; waitlisted at Carleton and Bowdoin; rejected at Georgetown and Swarthmore. S did not think that places like Syracuse, NYU and BU were worth the money compared to our flagship – not that they are bad schools, and they would have been good targets for him. </p>
<p>He might like to go to Harvard. I think he’d like it there, if he got in. Doesn’t Harvard do EA now? And I don’t know his UW GPA, but I agree it is the weakness.</p>
<p>I admire your kindness, but I’d caution you to get involved. It could lead to frustration and even a strain on a long term friendship if the student doesn’t get into their top choice(s). You could be the target of blame, scapegoat.</p>
<p>Admission selectivity is not especially reliable as an indicator of the how good the CS offerings are, and many schools with good CS departments are not extremely hard to get in for admissions. For example, Amherst has a more limited CS department than the less selective UMass - Amherst (although an Amherst student can use the cross-registration agreement to “fill in the gaps”). Emory, Tulane, and Holy Cross CS departments are also relatively limited. Better to check actual CS offerings and their frequency of offering.</p>
<p>Alum, we didn’t go the professional counselor route. I had considered it, and then found CC. Eight years later, I’m still here! :D</p>
<p>If your friend’s S has time, he might consider taking the ACT. S2’s IB program recommended that the kids in the program take it, as it covers a wide range of subjects and they tended to test better on it. One of my nieces, a very well-rounded kid, had a 2070 SAT but a 34 ACT.</p>
<p>Harvey Mudd includes one engineering course (introduction to engineering systems) in its core curriculum. The core curriculum also includes writing, core lab, biology, chemistry (3 courses plus a lab), computer science, math and statistics (6 courses), physics (3 courses plus a lab), and humanities / social studies / arts (HSA) critical inquiry. Ten additional HSA courses are also required, including both a concentration and distribution across several subjects. Three physical education courses are also required. See page 26 to 31 of <a href=“https://www.hmc.edu/academics/wp-content/uploads/sites/7/2013/11/hmc-catalogue-13-14.pdf”>https://www.hmc.edu/academics/wp-content/uploads/sites/7/2013/11/hmc-catalogue-13-14.pdf</a> .</p>
<p>My niece was a double legacy at Harvard and no. 3 in a class of over 3000. Her Harvard interviewer thought she was the best student he’d seen in years, but she didn’t get in. I know her SATs weren’t as good as her brother’s, but I don’t know how much less good. (All I know about him was he got an 800 in writing the year it didn’t count at all.) I thought she had a decent chance as an engineering woman the year after they opened an engineering school at Harvard, but it was not to be. All that’s to say Harvard is always a long shot, and I’d say his chances were minimal, unless he surprises you with a brilliant essay.</p>
<p>I never found the US News rankings to be particularly useful in figuring out chances among the colleges. When you drill down past the elite and mega-selective universities, there is less of a correlation between ranking and selectivity. However, US News does have a “table view” for colleges and universities, and in that mode you can rank the schools by acceptance rate. </p>
<p>The resource that I found most helpful for figuring out relative likelihood of admission for my kids was the Princeton Review admission selectivity rating. This is available from their web site with free registration, or from their annual 300-and-something best colleges book (which really was a favorite for both of my kids, I think mainly because the format makes for easy browsing as well as the insight given into lifestyle and campus culture). Anyway, they have a numerical score for that rating – for example, Dartmouth gets a 99, Northwestern, 98. </p>
<p>Obviously that still requires some divining to make sense of the numbers – but I was able to give my d. some guidance as to how to relate those numbers in terms of reach/match/safety - and I think that helped her develop a sense of where to apply. </p>
<p>The process has gotten far more competitive over the past decade. Colleges that would have been clear safeties for the BWRK’s when our kids were applying are now in the high-match range… so it is a lot tougher. But I think the process for figuring out where the kid stands is roughly the same – it’s just gotten a lot harder to find a match-level school. </p>
<p>Also for high stats kids there just aren’t really match schools. You go straight from reach to safety. CMU would have been a match for my older son if he’d applied to other programs, but he only applied to CS which had an acceptance rate in the teens even then. For my younger son his acceptances aligned with the college acceptance rates. (Counting only the EA acceptance rate at Chicago, not the overall one.) I think he needs to find a couple of schools he’s likely to get into and that he can afford - after that he can apply to the more selective schools if that is his preference.</p>
<p>Again, that is a matter of semantics and definition. Does it mean that a high stat kid (whatever that is) who graduates in the top 8 percent and not the top 7 percent jumps for a safety school to a reach when looking at the UT at Austin? </p>
<p>What does a rate of admission of 50 percent mean for high stats when this places them in a top decile? Should we assume that the explosion of applications at all schools is fueled by overly qualified students? Or can we assume that the greatest growth has come from the “what I have to lose” applicants. Has the admission game REALLY changed in the past decade at Michigan, PSU, or Wisconsin? For an applicant from Texas with a 3.9 UW GPA and a 3X700 on the SAT, at which level does a school such as ASU or Tulane become a safety or a match? And look where such schools are ranked among several thousands colleges! When does Nebraska or BYU turn into … reaches? Or most of the Nascar Football conference? </p>
<p>As far as I am concerned, there are still plenty of MATCHES, and especially for what we call “high stats” students. Matches are NOT a proxy for guaranteed admissions but they are also not in the range of the HYPS single digit rates. </p>
<p>And, fwiw, I believe that except for the tumbling rates of admissions at the highest ranked schools, not much has changed for the pool of students that are labeled high stats. Doubling or trebling the number of auto-rejects does not make much difference at a school that rejects 60 to 90 percent of the applicants. </p>
<p>I agree, the extraordinary explosion in sheer numbers of applications has made it very difficult to know exactly what’s going on. Without insight into the admissions offices workings, even data scientists, our heroes here in Silicon Valley, are at a loss:).</p>
<p>I suppose my oldest could have found a college for which admissions chances were in the 50% range, but the fact was that both WPI and RPI (with the middle SAT range of 1240-1470 and 1270 -1460 respective) were safeties. Why look for colleges he liked less? There was no need to go to Michigan or CA (very expensive out of state) when he could get a top notch education at a school he was guaranteed to get into. In fact RPI let him in early even though they don’t officially have EA. It might be different for a more humanities oriented kid. </p>
<p>My younger son had less stellar stats, but still didn’t really find any matches he liked better than his safety.</p>
<p>At any rate, my point is really that you should just apply to school you like as long as you don’t forget to have some safeties.</p>
<p>ucb, my point (which I should have made better, but hey, it was late…) was that for someone who’s on the econ/math/cs end of things, all the physics/chem/engineering requirements may be more than he/she wants to bite off. </p>
<p>If the school has Naviance, that can be very helpful at putting one’s numbers into the local context. S1 and S2 were both at highly selective public specialized programs where the admissions rates were in the low teens. It gave us some confidence that less-than-perfect grades could result in good acceptances, given expressed interest and loving care on the essays, and it also showed that even tippy-top kids at insanely tough programs got rejection letters.</p>
<p>I’m also firmly in the camp of applying only to schools which you’d actually like to attend. There were a lot of excellent “match” schools my kids nixed because the vibe wasn’t what they wanted. And there is no single perfect school…both my kids have come back with criticisms about their schools and their experiences there.</p>
<p>“Match” is a tough category. Kids who are “matches” in that their numbers are in the upper 25% of admitted student at highly selective school, can’t really call those schools matches for them since the chances of admissions is still so low. There is that sliding scale of selectivity where the most selective schools are even more selective than their straight out accept %s are due tot the high stats kids in their admissions pool.</p>
<p>I like to say a match school is one where a kid has a 40-70% chance of getting accepted, and that kids applying to, say 6 match schools should bet into 4-6 of those schools, but the problem is, that may happen on average, when the large numbers take over, but it’s still possible for a kid to get turned down by all of his matches when we are talking single digits of schools. It gets preposterous to apply to enough schools to make the numbers work out. Most people expect their kids to get into their match schools and so their kids feel too. The safeties are consider sure things. </p>
<p>Gotta say, we looked at that way in the Dark Ages too. Those looking at selective school admissions, tended to have a sure thing safety, one match school that they were sure they’d get into and maybe the lottery ticket school that they did not expect to get accepted to. I was unusual in my day for how I positioned my odds. Though in reality all but one of my choices were reaches because I HAD To get a lot of aid or scholarships to go to any of them. </p>
<p>Though it’s great to be firmly in the camp of applying only to school where the kid actually wants to attend, it does not usually work that way when there are financial or other restriction involved. Also, there are a lot of kids out there who have unrealistic wants and wishes, parents too, and through the process have to temper them. It’s big problem when you only want to joint the clubs that don’t want you. Each year, I see kids going off to school where, yes, they are settling. It wasn’t what they wanted, but that’s what accepted them. There were really no other choices better likely to have accepted them, to which they could have applied. This is a result of wanting to go to a highly selective school to the point that it is the most important thing about the colleges.</p>