List of colleges to apply

College Search & Selection
1

Hello,
I am looking at some schools for my son, but because of his low GPA, I’m not sure which ones he should apply. He’s undecided on a major. I would appreciate any suggestion.

GPA: 3.4 unweighted, 3.9 weighted
SAT: 1570 (770 Verbal/ 800 Math), SAT Math 2 - 800, SAT Chem - low-mid 700, SAT Lit - low-mid 700
National AP Scholar (All 4 or 5 on AP tests)
National Merit Semifinalist
EC: some leadership, some volunteer, president/vice-president of some clubs, nothing special. Athletic - track team JV. Debate JV. Research Lab internship. Participate in Siemens competition (no result yet)
Senior year courses: AP Stats, AP Biology, AP Environmental Science, AP Literature, AP US Gov, and 2 other electives.
Pass AP courses: AP Computer science, AP Chemistry, AP Physics 1, AP Calculus AB, AP Economics, AP Lang, AP US History, AP World History
Besides elective courses like Fine Arts and Foreign Language, all other courses in high school are either Honor/AP courses.

His low GPA are due to many Bs in his AP classes. He got only 2 Cs since freshman, and they are from his English 9 Honor and AP Lang (11th grade) classes.

Thanks.

2

What state are you from? What can you afford? Are there other trends in his grades such as year to year, or between subject areas?

Your son’s 1570 SAT sort of screams “this kid has a lot of potential”.

Sometimes very smart kids are not universally smart at everything, or there is a limit regarding how much pressure they can handle. Finding the right balance sometimes is non-trivial. To me at least more information seems like it would be helpful.

3

We’re from Virginia, and the area has a lot of competitions. I am hoping that my son would get some scholarship with the National Merit Semifinalist status. Not sure if he will be finalist or not though. We won’t know until early next year.

He did well in Math classes, A or B+. Science ones are B+/B. English B/C+. Social Studies B+/B. He’s pretty consistent for the last 3 years. More As in 9th grade, but no AP class that time. By sophomore year, adding AP CS and AP World, we see more Bs. He’s also a past chess champion and US official rep for his age group to compete internationally. I don’t think that will help anything with his college application though, and he didn’t plan to mention it. Maybe just in the activities section.

4

I came up with a long list, but need help to eliminate some, or put them into Reach, Match, Safety so we can cross off the impossible/high reach ones:
UVA, VT, GMU, Johns Hopkins, George Washington U, Maryland U College Park, Carnegie Mellon, U Penn, U Pitts, Princeton, New York U, Cornell U, MIT, Northeastern, Boston U, Boston College, Lehigh U, Lafayette, U Rochester, Brown, Duke, Vanderbilt, Emory, Northwestern, UC Berkeley, Rice, Hamilton, Cal Tech

Thanks.

5

UC Berkeley: Reach (GPA low and it will cost your family $60K/year with no financial aid as an OOS applicant)
Cal Tech: High Reach (Again GPA low/97% of applicants were top of their class)

6

Can you clarify your financial situation? Berkeley, for example, will give him no aid, and you’d be paying OOS tuition. I’d say JHU, Princeton, Berkeley, UPenn, MIT, Caltech, and Cornell are probably out of reach. Does his school have Naviance? How do the remaining schools look with his GPA?

7

Based on GPA factors, the first ~two dozen colleges here, some of which appear on his tentative list, may be generally out-of-reach in terms of admission:

http://www.businessinsider.com/the-50-smartest-colleges-in-america-2016-10

http://www.businessinsider.com/the-610-smartest-colleges-in-america-2015-9

His realistic reaches could possibly begin beyond that point, but some GPA-sensitive schools, such as certain state universities, might still be nearly automatic denials depending on their practiced criteria for admission.

He should mention chess as a prominent extracurricular, particularly since he seems to have pursued it with passion and dedication and has achieved an identifiable level of success.

The above noted, I’d personally not discourage an application to a reach school that may be particularly appealing to him.

8

Thanks for the feedback. That will help us cut down the list. We should be able to pay for OOS schools for him. Maybe we also start looking at schools that give merit aid to students with National Merit status. How about schools that like good SAT score ? he got 1570 at first try. Naviance helps but doesn’t tell all since it only shows weighted GPAs, but no course rigor, and we don’t see a lot of his case where SAT is almost at the top but GPA is not.

9

@htimy2015

Your son is a tricky situation because his standized scores don’t line up with GPA all that well and that is relatively uncommon. That said, take published GPA numbers with a grain of salt. There is little consistency on whether the #s being published are UW or Weighted. Naviance will be most accurate.

I won’t give too much feedback on the specific schools in your list - most are high reaches/reaches for anyone anyway, but you son’s SAT and subject are high enough that if he doesn’t mind doing the work to write the application and you don’t mind dropping 100 bucks a pop, he could get into some of the top schools.

I’d more suggest doing a deep dive on what kind of school he wants to go to. Cal Tech is tiny, quiet, has no real sports vibe, is dominated by guys with 800 math SAT and SATII scores. Cal-Berkeley is huge, bustling, big-sports can be a ton of fun or isolating, depending, and can require a real self-starter mentality to thrive. (And chance of admission to Cal or UCLA varies greatly by school and/or major. Many science majors are impacted and very hard for OOS students)

I’d imagine you’ve visitied Lehigh and Lafayette. They are very different in vibe from either CIT or UCB/Cal and from UPenn, BU, and other urbans.

Everyone is different, but I found it most helpful with my kid and some friends we advised to 1st get a good list of the “kind” of school he wants: identify what is important: Size? Location? Strong STEM? Gender balance? Cost (do run the numbers and really add them up, you might be surprised. 200k -300k is a lot of dough), LAC or big U, Arts+science or engin or bus school etc.

VA has such good in-state options, I’d explore those 1st, then I’d next explore schools that reward high SAT with merit money. USC has been known to give decent merit aid to high-stat students. Don’t know how much GPA will deter them. Need to apply to USC by Dec. 1st and show very strong interest. Tulane supposedly as well. Unless you have financial need you won’t get money from ivies etc. and all competitive schools will be a crap-shoot with lower GPA student.

Good news is, he might need to apply to more schools than most, but he’ll find someplace interesting with those stats. Dunno how his HS guidance team is, but he is the kind of kid, if they can contextualize his grades and vouch for him strongly, they might make the difference at some schools.

10

“We should be able to pay for OOS schools for him.”

IMHO UVA and VT are such strong schools that at least to me it is hard to justify OOS prices for anything unless it is academically stronger, and there aren’t many schools that are significantly stronger (and possibly none that are possible with a 3.4 unweighted). If it were me, I would hope that he could get into one of these great in-state public schools. His SAT clearly will help.

11

UVA is our first choice, but it’s not easy to get in, so we want to cast a wide net, just in case. For VT, if he’s into STEM/Engineering, then it’s an excellent choice, but since he’s undecided, we think it’s better to also look at schools that have a variety of good programs.