Match Me - PA resident for English + History, PoliSci & Music. Classical vocalist spike. 3.6/33

I second previous suggestions to look at the University of Denver, which has strengths in musical performance (including vocal music) and is strong across the board in humanities and social sciences. They are generous with aid, including merit, and you’ll likely get additional scholarships for music.

Indiana University might be worth a look, too, and would be a likely admit. Oberlin is not as isolated as you think it is – just 40 minutes from Cleveland (and much closer to the Cleveland metro area), and in a pretty vibrant small town.

I also think that St. Olaf would be a lovely school. I also thoroughly considered a double major with vocal performance (classical) and ended up with a history degree and law school. But I studied voice through law school and was the only non-major they let go to NATS, etc. so I get it.

I know that it doesn’t get much love here, but Luther College in Decorah, Iowa is also an amazing school for vocal performance and humanities, it is very similar to St Olaf and the two are regional choir rivals.

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Unfortunately, she is just not competitive for the reaches you listed, and almost all of the targets are definitely reaches. Putting cost aside for the moment, I would take a good look at @AustenNut ’s list and add about 10 schools from it, and delete almost all of your reaches and targets other than 2-3 “shoot your shot” dream schools. Please encourage her to focus on getting her anxiety under control with a qualified clinician/therapist so she will be ready to launch in a year.

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@arewethereyet.24 Your daughter sounds like a wonderful and very accomplished young lady. I agree with others that your list is way too reach heavy. What concerns me the most with your list (other than potentially setting your daughter up for disappointment) is that you have listed a number of schools that are well known for their stress cultures. Given your D’s history of anxiety, I would investigate both the student culture and mental health resources available. Getting into college is just the beginning, you want to find a place where she will be happy and successful. I am linking a list of the most stressful colleges from College Express - not to malign any these of these schools(my kid attends one), but to highlight that a lot of them are on your list.

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Based on class rank and GPA alone, I think many “reaches” lean more towards “unlikely”, to be frank – although the exceptional ACT scores in English/Reading do stand out. It’s perfectly okay to pick one or two, and aim for the stars, but it would be crushing when 10 or so rejection letters were to come in, one after the other.

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As the parent of a daughter(D22) with anxiety and depression, I would strongly recommend that you concentrate on schools close to home. If your daughter has a treatment team she likes and which has provided good care, she won’t have to change providers. My daughter chose a small school 8 miles from home and I’m really glad she did. She lived on campus but often needed to come home for a break, usually for an hour or two, sometimes overnight. She had a severe exacerbation of her mental illness in March and had to be hospitalized as an inpatient for 8 days. I was able to be with her in the ER and to pick her up when she was discharged. I would also suggest concentrating on schools with a more laid-back and caring culture. College can be stressful, even for the most mentally stable student, but is likely to be much more difficult for students with preexisting mental illness.

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OP, you are getting solid advice here even if it is hard to process.

Do not let your D fall for the logical fallacy that the smaller the admit rate the “better” her peers will be. This is where research really comes in handy. U Maine… probably the best place in the entire US to study Canadian history. Why should anyone care about Canadian history? They are one of the USA’s most important trading partner, strategic ally, and supply an enormous amount of timber, wheat, energy, etc. Canada’s economy, sociology, approach to social welfare, engagement with their indigenous populations, etc are considered a model for many parts of the world. America? We can’t be bothered.

There dozens of examples like this- fantastic pockets of incredible expertise in universities you’d never think of.

Delaware for museum studies? Rutgers in poli sci? I’m not advocating any of these for your D… just pointing out that she has many terrific options once you’ve sorted out the money piece.

Agree to the resounding “no” on discussing her anxiety in an essay. She is who she is…a talented writer and singer with a dozen other interests. If that means her transcript isn’t as impressive as a classmate that’s fine. Her classmate will go in one direction and your D will go in another.

Agree to figuring out how far is your comfort range. Get to her in an hour? A grayhound bus ride home on a Friday when she needs space and quiet? Figure out what works.

You’ve gotten some terrific school suggestions but I’d add the thought to consider Catholic and Quaker. More intellectual vibe than you might expect and faculty who take their teaching mission very seriously.

Your D sounds great!

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I don’t know where in Pennsylvania you live. It sounds like you may be in eastern PA, if your daughter is in Pennsylvania Girlchoir. In central PA (where I live), some choices are Gettysburg (match, good for music and history), Dickinson (match), Susquehanna (safety), Elizabethtown (safety), Lebanon Valley (safety), Lycoming (safety), York College of PA (safety). In eastern PA, there are many other possibilities, including West Chester (best PASSHE school, strong music program, safety), Muhlenberg (match), Moravian (safety). Haverford and Bryn Mawr are both excellent liberal arts schools but would be reaches. All of the schools I listed (except Haverford) offer merit aid as well as need-based aid; Haverford only need-based.

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If applying to schools with BM or vocal performance majors, make sure that there are resources and opportunities for your daughter as a non-major. She can also consider finding a teacher and performance opportunities off campus if in an area where that is possible.

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Thank you so much everyone - agree with a lot of the advice provided. I’m not worried about the money, but it would be great to have offers of aid. We would qualify for some aid I think, based on “online” assessments i’ve run, maybe 20-30/year - but a family member has offered to cover half of annual tuition and even if that offer wasn’t there, we’d take loans if necessary. So it was asked about as a “nice to have,” not a necessity.

Several things - her anxiety is social not academic, as I think her over 4.0 weighted GPA with over 2 months of missed school days is testimony to. She had 2 sets of horrific, undermining, social experiences with mean girl “friends” who were inconsistent and malignant. She’s sensitive, and it undermined her, and made school feel like an unsafe space. She did an IOP the summer between 10th and 11th, and has been in therapy for the past 2 years. She did Interlochen this past summer and after a rough start adjusting the first few days when there was no structure - not uncommon there apparently - she adjusted and thrived (even withstanding a boyfriend breakup). We think she may have ADHD, which would be hugely helpful to figure out before college because of the executive dysfunction, which anxiety also causes (but, confusingly, adhd can also cause anxiety). She has been great since Interlochen, taking a local college dual enrollment upper level English class this summer and maintaining an A. In terms of therapy teams, I imagine her current therapist would do telehealth while she’s in college as needed. Given how well she adapted to Interlochen, I’m inclined to think a lot of her anxiety is circumstantial “mismatch for her school environment,” and that given an opportunity to find like minded peers, would thrive there too. Could be magical thinking, but I see real growth this year.

There is much to digest, and analyze, most significantly the effect of “sidestepping,” as someone put it, challenging APs in science/math (she will be taking AP Stat next year - does that help?), whether an opera/music “spike” will help compensate for the lower GPA (we will be applying to all schools with an arts supplement), and factors like stress-level at the school which will and should play a huge role in our analysis. What may not have come through my original post is that she has a deeply embedded sense of herself as an intellectual and Ivy-league quality student. Her family is full of people who have attended Ivies for undergrad and/or grad school and she’s a legacy at Cornell (on both sides of the family) and at Penn (just through me). She had straight As freshman year and was “Yale or bust” for the longest time. We have had to do serious work to improve our list, to seriously consider the Umass Amhersts (over 90% likelihood) and say “I could be happy here” - to visit schools we think would be good matches (I love W&M for her from our visit last year). She absolutely detests PA and wants nothing to do with Penn State and the like (informed largely by the anti-intellectual academic environment and the percentage of her HS that attends these schools). Some of the reaches are there because of their music programs. Some of our deprogramming work with her includes “you’ll get in somewhere and you can always transfer.” HOWEVER, really appreciate hearing from all of you who are clearly experienced in terms of things to consider for their kiddos who struggle. Tuition insurance, for example, was a GREAT suggestion. Reaction to long string of rejections is another - we’ve been looking at those schools as a lottery, knowing very well that many perfect GPA and test score students are rejected each cycle and throwing apps in “just to see” if increasing the applications would increase her chances. She’s a writer so the essays don’t seem like they’d be an issue, but maybe I’m missing something because we are so new to this. And however prepared to be rejected we may be for the small chance of admission, will she really be ok? is something we need to consider seriously.

We posted here to develop our targets/safeties because we know we’re imbalanced - but our sense of what’s what has been informed by our school’s Naviance data and “chancing” data from Niche and Collegedata. (She’s over 80% at American, for example). I’m excited to dig into what you all have kindly provided here. St. Olaf and Univ of Denver are schools that I haven’t looked at and will consider. Elon is another one to keep in our pocket. She really dislikes rural - we arrived at Oberlin and she made us cancel our tour the next day and keep driving home, for example. Please let me now if anything here prompts any other good suggestions for schools that might be a good match.

Thank you to everyone who took the time to reply - I really appreciate it!

If she’s intellectual, she is more likely to enjoy st Olaf (especially with Enduring Questions or other “Conversations” + music involvement) than Elon (more preprofessional).
Has someone mentioned Bryn Mawr? Sure it’s in PA but on the Mainline and, most importantly, within visiting distance to Philly. Nothing in common with some anti intellectual/rural districts (has she read Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home? She’s from Bald Eagle but kids from Wilkes Barre or Mercer county would probably recognize what she’s talking about, or Thomson’s Blankets about rural WI or Haddam’s Living Witness . Nothing about this would be her environment at Bryn Mawr or other similar colleges.

Wooster is another college that’d be a safety yet a good environment for an intellectual kid.

How would she feel about UWisconsin Madison as a large university target for her majors? State capital and college town rolled into one.
Wondering if UNC Asheville might appeal to her (safety).

Wrt math: the expectation for Ivy+ and such is some form of Calculus, except for clear Arts/Humanities kids who may compensate with AP or post AP foreign language (or 2 Foreign Languages at AP level) -not a direct “exchange” but another way to prove rigor for this profile, generally with Precalculus&AP Stats.
Wrt science, there’s a hard rule on taking Bio, chem, physics (possibly AP physics 1) plus 1 more, which for a Humanities/Arts kid can be AP environmental science or AP bio or sometimes another honors science depending on the school’s offerings.

How used to sending kids to highly to most selective colleges is her school? Not Penn State but Penn/Haverford/BMC/Dickinson/Bucknell/F&M/Lafayette etc?

@MYOS1634 there are definitely exceptions to the “hard rule” on sciences, and for typical math rigor, for a kid with musical talent and achievements.

  • Classically trained vocalist for 7 years, studied opera at Interlochen and would like to continue, but also participates in highly selective youthchoir and enjoys choral singing. Possible music minor/dual degree in college - not because interested in performing professionally per se but because enjoy it.

I have heard over and over again that social media is affecting mental health in a big way for many kids.

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Agreed. My D23’s strengths are in environmental-leaning sciences and humanities, with strong spike in environmental work and journalism. She did not have physics at all, and her only AP science was Enviro (others were honors). For math, she had no calculus – took pre-calc and AP Stats, which made more sense for her. She still got into a number of schools (in the RD round) with overall 10-20% acceptance rates. It really does depend on the kid, and not every kid has the same strengths. (I should add that she might have had a better shot at schools with <10% acceptance rates if she had taken calculus and physics, but is really it worth making your kid miserable just to get a few meaningless notches higher in the rankings?)

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My kid did not take Physics, took online environmental science, no precalculus at all, just AP stats, and music got her in to what is now a <5% school. It depends on a lot of factors and is hard to predict. But definitely do a music supplement.

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Schools with a great critical mass of intellectually oriented students which are not rural:

Brandeis
Wellesley
Holy Cross
Bryn Mawr
Rice
Chicago
Connecticut College
Tufts
Vassar
Sarah Lawrence
Hunter

There are lots more but these are the ones that readily come to mind. The only two that may be described as “intense” and not a good fit for her anxiety might be Wellesley and Chicago (but both are likely reaches anyway).

I hear you on the social issues…but would encourage you to continue to consider her mental health as being more important than anything else.

Will think of other places to explore…

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I would add Smith to this list. Northampton is a bustling town – not big, to be sure, but not rural. And the college is right in the middle of town. It might be a slightly less anxiety-provoking alternative to Wellesley. You could add Wesleyan to this list, too.

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Again, Barnard?

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We’re taking AP Stat in 12th, and took Trig in 10th grade. This year would have been AP Calc and she just couldn’t sacrifice things of high interest to do it. Thank you for this - it matters more than you know!

She really likes Barnard actually.

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Smith is on her list, Weslyean is not because it’s too “innovative” for her comfort. She’s skews traditionalist, and wants to learn and study classically before challenging the classics. The chaos of Wesleyan’s architecture on campus became a metaphor for how she viewed the school…

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