<p>My S is a Junior in a suburban NJ public school (#23 of 386 in NJ).
His GPA is 3.5 unweighted (should go up to between 3.6 & 3.7 after this year). He's taking 3 Honors classes and AP English now. He will also be taking a mix of all H and AP classes his senior year. He blew 1st semester of his freshman year, and has been climbing up ever since.
He's taken the SAT's once so far - 1290/1920 - 650M, 640CR, 630W - he's taking them again in May and thinks he can go up to 1400 on M/CR.
Taking SAT II - Math I, Math II & English in June.
His high school does not do ranking.
His EC's aren't that great -
Community Service - 60 hours
Chess Club 10, 11 (and will be ) 12th grade
Works summers and weekends selling at a fleamarket.
Will have a summer internship this year as an assistant to the VP of Sales at an apparel company(pretty famous national brand).
He is attempting to start a community service organization at his school, but is having a hard time getting a teacher to agree to act as an adviser, hopefully this will happen before the end of the school year.
He wants to major in Finance and has identified his reach schools and target schools -
NYU Stern - insane reach
Carnegie Melon - high reach
Villanova - reach
Fordham - target ?
TCNJ - target
He needs help finding some safety schools. He refuses to consider Rutgers - we live 10 minutes away and that's just too close to home.<br>
Any suggestions for a safety that offers Finance as a major and is within driving distance from NJ?<br>
Also, do you think he has a shot getting in to any of his reach schools?
Thanks in advance for your help.</p>
<p>How much can you pay?</p>
<p>How much will the colleges think that you can pay? If you don’t know, run this calculator, and find out: [FinAid</a> | Calculators | Expected Family Contribution (EFC) and Financial Aid](<a href=“Your Guide for College Financial Aid - Finaid”>Expected Family Contribution (EFC) Calculator - Finaid)</p>
<p>What do you consider to be “driving distance”?</p>
<p>Three good search engines that he can run to find places that match his criteria and your family’s budget are:
[College</a> Search - Find colleges and universities by major, location, type, more.](<a href=“College Search - BigFuture | College Board”>College Search - BigFuture | College Board)
[College</a> Search - College Confidential](<a href=“http://www.collegeconfidential.com/college_search/]College”>http://www.collegeconfidential.com/college_search/)
[College</a> Navigator - National Center for Education Statistics](<a href=“http://nces.ed.gov/collegenavigator/]College”>College Navigator - National Center for Education Statistics)
Each of these includes different factors when searching, so your son should run all three of them.</p>
<p>We’ve saved enough for him to do 25k - 30k/year, so if he does get in to his reach schools, we’ll have to take out loans, but it will be worth it. I’ve run the calculator on this site and it shows the colleges will think we can pay 42k/year. We would not qualify for any need based aid at all, so if he ends up at his target schools I would love to see him get some merit based aid. </p>
<p>Driving distance would be no more than 6 hours (Carnegie Melon is 6 1/2 hours away and that is the farthest I’d like him to go).</p>
<p>He has done the collegeboard.com college selector, but after I’ve read the posts on this board, what we thought could be safeties for him (Fordham and TCNJ) based on the stats, turned into targets.
I’ll have him run the links you provided too.</p>
<p>What do you think of his chances at the schools already on his list?</p>
<p>^ How much you can pay is the key. NYU, even if he gets in, will probably offer no aid. $60K/year on you parent.</p>
<p>please help</p>
<p>You might want to take a look at the University of Delaware, although I’m not sure whether it could be considered a safety school.</p>
<p>It seems from his list (other than TCNJ) that he likes city schools. Please correct if this is not the case. How about pitt or american. I think Suny bing also has finance but is not in a city.</p>
<p>Not really sure if he likes city schools, they were just the schools that seemed to have a good rep for Finance. We visited only Rutgers and TCNJ so far. He loved TCNJ. We are visiting Fordham today, Carnegie Melon and Pitt tues. and wed, also I have a friend at Temple who got him an appt to talk to the dean of admissions and arranged a private tour of the Fox building. This should be an easy in for him, however, I grew up in Philly, so not to keen on Temple.<br>
I’ll have him look into the Univ. of Delaware.</p>
<p>If your criteria is highly ranked finance programs that are within 6 hours away and are easier to get into to look at Penn state, babson, Bentley, BU, SUNY Binghamton and James Madison. These all are ranked in top 50 business programs by business week.</p>
<p>Villanova and CMU both turned down kids with stats higher than your son’s this year, for their business programs, so they would definitely be reaches unless there is something that is not in the picture that is obvious to see. So, yes, they are very much reach schools unless your son gets those stats up. Even then, this year, it was a tough go for kids.</p>
<p>Flyaround has some great schools listed, and I would UDelaware, Pitt, Gettysburg, Duquesne, Fairfield U, UConn, UMD, UMBC, Elon to your list. These are some of the schools my son considered for business and he really liked what they had to offer. Providence is working to get their business program off the ground, and might be a school to get a look-see as well. Northeastern has some great programs, would be a bit of a reach, and so does Drexel.</p>
<p>Bryant University has come up on these boards before, and I would guess that would be a safety (haven’t checked their admissions statistics, so I don’t know for sure).</p>
<p>Ohio State is just a little farther west.</p>
<p>Have you considered Baruch? Great Bshool, no housing, but for the price (about 14 out of state I think), you should be able to figure something out.</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.baruch.cuny.edu/undergrad/housing.html[/url]”>http://www.baruch.cuny.edu/undergrad/housing.html</a></p>
<p>Freshman profile</p>
<p>Baruch College
88.3 1237 27 </p>
<p>Honors</p>
<p>92.8 1410 32</p>
<p>Thanks all, we just got back from our Fordham tour. Both my son and I just didn’t get that “this is the school feeling”. Can’t really put my finger on why. It was a gorgeous day, the campus looked great (tree’s and flowers blooming). The tour was informative, and it seems like the school has all the separate components he’s looking for, but…
Oh well, hopefully we’ll like CMU and Pitt tomorrow.</p>
<p>How about Bentley?</p>
<p>We’re done with our spring break school visits. To no ones surprise, my son’s favorite was CMU, however I highly doubt he’ll get in.
Pitt’s presentation was excellent, and if we were in state in PA that would be our choice, but I don’t think it’s rep is worth paying double what we would for Rutgers or TCNJ.
He liked Temple too, the Fox School of Business building was almost brand new and very impressive. I just can’t see myself being comfortable with him living in that neighborhood.
I thank you for all the suggestions, we will be vising more schools in the summer.
In the meantime - if he gets into TCNJ - would you choose that over Temple? They use the weighted GPA at Temple, they told us he would have a good chance of making it into their Honors program.</p>