<p>Keep Princeton as well as Michigan! Both great schools and programs. While Cornell engineering dept. is much larger than P, the college experience at P is so great: beautiful campus encompassing so much of colonial history, great social emphasis, climate varied but not as brutally cold as Cornell, and easy train access to NYC.</p>
<p>Michigan: great eng. program, rah-rah Big Ten games in the Big House, friendly natives ;),
but very cloudy and wintery after the beautiful autumn.</p>
<p>Wow . . . 21 schools . . . since these schools are so different from each other it makes me wonder what his criteria are for applying to them in the first place.</p>
<p>For example, take your first 2, Brown and Columbia. The first has no core requirements, the second has a strict Core program. Pedagogically, they could not be further apart. Does your son have no sense about whether he would thrive better in a structured or unstructred curriculum?</p>
<p>I guess there’s no harm in applying to 21 schools as long as you have the money - some kids don’t have very well developed opinions of where they would thrive (e.g., in the midst of a big city or in the classic college town; schools w/30k students or a school with 5k kids; driv ing distance to home vs. far away) - but at some point it would be helpful for you to encourage your child think about where he would best grow and prosper. </p>
<p>Might be a good idea to ask him not which schools he wants but rather the big/small near/far questions . . . the result: may whittle this list down for you . . and it might get away from questions about the identify of the school to the more important questions about him.</p>
<p>Kei</p>
<p>P.S. This will make for a very interestying next April . . . good luck!</p>
<p>Is there a particular reason you left Caltech off your list? One advantage is that you don’t have to declare major first year or apply to a particular school, as you do at CMU.</p>
<p>Just an FYI, although they use the fully weighted GPA for the ELC calculation they only count a maximum of 8 weighted grades for the UC GPA so it might be lower.</p>
<p>CalAlum,</p>
<p>Princeton/Northwestern have better engineering than Columbia, Duke, and Rice, at least according to USN.</p>
<p>Of course this is Columbia SEAS you are talking about. It doesn’t follow the same core requirements as Columbia College.</p>
<p>OP- how important is the ME experience vs. other aspects of the academics? All of these schools have strong and well-regarded engineering programs but the pecking order for ME may or not matter for him depending on how focused his interests are.</p>
<p>Re: UCs. I don’t think UCSB was a guarantee for ELC students in the most recent years. You need to double check the list…</p>
<p>UCSB was an ELC school for my 09 daughter, as was Davis.</p>
<p>There is no reason to eliminate UCLA and UCSB from his list because he has to write the UC essay anyway, so if the cost of applications is not an issue, why not just check off those 2 boxes also? I think having the UCSB guarantee eliminates the need for lots of safeties. (I forced my dd to apply there so I wouldn’t go nuts worrying about her top-heavy list!)</p>
<p>I’m gonna go bold here and say he could eliminate all the out of state publics from his list. He has solid safeties and matches already in CA with excellent engineering programs. Unless he’s just absolutely crazy about the Big 10 sports scene? I just don’t see those schools to be worth double the tuition of a strong UC, or quadruple?? the cost of Cal Poly.</p>
<p>I think the unifying factor I can see in his list is the type of students those reach schools attract. I respect that just as much as a strong preference for a certain location or size of school. He can focus on the reaches that he is most interested in and that have the strongest engineering programs. He may find after writing the first 8 or 10 supplementals it becomes much easier to cull the list!</p>
<p>Sometimes students with strong stats have a list of schools that is very reach-heavy. And sometimes it makes a lot of sense, as long as the few safeties are pretty sure bets and are schools the students would be happy to go to.</p>
<p>One other note-I don’t know if your son is considering early action at Stanford, but I would try to gather some very good info before I went that route. At our high school, the tip-top of the class applied early and were denied, and the students in the regular round had much more success. Maybe that was just a fluke I don’t know, but my gut feeling is that non-legacy, non-hook students might be better off with regular decision there. At least if he gets denied, he’ll have lots of other acceptances at the same time. to soften the blow.</p>
<p>My opinion:
He’ll be in at UT. A proportion of the engineering admits are saved for “holistically evaluated” admits, and he looks good in all of the areas UT factors in for holistic admission.</p>
<p>I’m with 2boysima … if you want to make the list shorter whack the bottom of the list not the top … if those are true safeties and matches cut each to 2 then your list is down to 15 … whack a couple with lesser engineering and the list is a reasonable length for a student aiming for highly selective schools (10-12 schools)</p>
<p>Has he visited these schools? That may really help him eliminate some and identify which ones he prefers.</p>
<p>Thanks so much for all your thought-provoking posts. I really got some great information from all of you. If UCSB does happen to be the ELC school that is offered, I do not think he would be happy having it as his only safety school. He is concerned about the robust party scene there and it just barely made his list for this reason. Cal Tech was not considered because my son felt the enrollment was just too small. He has visited all the schools except for Princeton, Columbia, Duke, Texas, Washington, Wash U, and Wisconsin. He attended college fairs for Princeton, Columbia, Duke, and Wash U. Not the same as a visit, but better than nothing.</p>
<p>
I agree. I also tend to agree that with the California U’s instate you don’t need to apply to the out of state public choices unless you really love them. Does he have any sense of preferring urban to bucolic? Columbia and Princeton couldn’t be more different! </p>
<p>But I know sometimes these engineering kids really care much more about the quality of the program than what’s beyond the campus. That was certainly true for my oldest.</p>
<p>RPI, by the way, has changed a lot since your uncle’s day, but I think he’s already got safeties via the CA rules.</p>
<p>Just wanted to say: good luck. I’m with you. This could be us next fall. I just did a quick scan of the list of schools either my S or I or both think might be good places for him to apply, and there are 21. Hope that - by subtracting more schools than we add - we can winnow the list down to 14 or so by the time he’s applying next fall. (D applied to fewer than 10 schools, I think.)</p>
<p>We visited RPI in July 2009. Like many engineering schools, they empahasized the collaborative student enviroment (which matches the real work world). This is much different/better than when husband took classes there in the 1970s.</p>
<p>Harvey Mudd seemed collaborative, but it is extremely intense academically. Mostly techie, but lots of humanities too. Admissions are very selective. </p>
<p>The MIT app is very time consuming, and it requires two MIT-specific teacher apps. They accept only 9% of applicants, and they many highly qualified applicant. If a student is only mildly interested in MIT, the time factor should be a consideration.</p>
<p>
Rice will be really good for him if he is into participatory sports at the club sport/rec sport level. Lots and lots of enthusiastic student participation… not so good if he is into watching great football (but great for baseball). IMHO Rice should have gone D3 or dropped football years ago! He might have a shot at merit aid at Rice also…</p>
<p>My daughter is in a similar position with her reach heavy list, and like your son, she is also engineering focused and is ELC. One thing to consider is that UC Davis is also an ELC school this year, as it doesn’t have such a “party” reputation. </p>
<p>Using the UC Statfinder program, I did a search and found that for an engineering major with ELC and SATs 2100+, the freshman acceptance rate for UCSD is 96%. If I remember correctly, the same data input yields a 92% acceptance rate for UCLA and 83%acceptance rate for UCB. So, with that in mind, and knowing that she would be fine with a top UC, her list is remaining very top heavy.</p>
<p>UCSB and Davis were ELC guarantees for my 2010 daughter. For Davis, that meant automatic acceptance to first choice major. It wasn’t clear if ELC guarantee at UCSB included automatic acceptance to engineering program, although she did ultimately get that as well.</p>
<p>I re-read your first post and see that you listed only one subject test, the Math II. I assume he has a second SAT subject test in a science subject also, right?</p>
<p>Just checking!!</p>