Hello, please suggest some reach, match, and safety colleges for me from the list below.
UVA, W&M, VTech, JHU, Duke, Georgetown, UPENN, Brown, Yale, UPitt, PSU
My SAT is 2140: CR 750 M 720 W 670
GPA: 4.5 W, 3.95 UW Class Rank: 5/310
Virginia Resident
What are your criteria? Money no object? What do you plan to study or career are you interested in? What would you want in your college experience? Does it have to be east coast? Urban? No LACs? Give us some guidance.
The only schools that are not reaches on your list are W&M, UPitt and PSU. I don’t know enough about these three schools to know whether they are Safeties or Matches, it would seem that PSU and UPitt would be closer to Safeties, unless you were applying to a particular selective program within these schools.
I believe UPitt can be quite generous with merit aid.
The other schools on your list are reaches for practically everyone, they are extremely selective schools.
You have done incredibly well with your academics in High School, congratulations!
I completely missed VTech. Sorry! I know nothing about them.
Thanks N’s Mom. I have not locked in any career yet and want to go to college as undecided. I want to explore options in Engineering, Computer science, Business, pre-med or Liberal education.
So I am trying to shortlist good overall schools and my academic reach and match as of now from the schools I have visited. My parents used net price calculator of these schools and said they can pay for these schools provided they admit me. I would avoid applying to schools that are out of my academic reach.
Any suggestions? TIA.
Thanks @GreatKid. I’m just trying to narrow down my list of colleges and save both time and money by not applying to schools that are out of reach.
Cookie97, the challenge for you and so many students are that your academic credentials are “good enough”, UVA, Duke, Georgetown, Yale, UPenn, and Brown are all extremely competitive schools from an admissions perspective. Depending upon the rest of the story for you, meaning your EC’s, your letters of recommendation, your essays and whether or not you have hooks like Legacy, First Generation College Student, URM etc. will dictate your likelihood of admission. You also would want to throw your SAT II’s in there as well. If the combination of the rest of these things are compelling you are a viable candidate for any one of these schools. And, these particular schools have very low acceptance rates, sequentially I would guess that from highest acceptance rates to lowest it would be UVA,Georgetown, Duke, UPenn, Brown and Yale. If at Georgetown you were applying to their school of foreign service their acceptance rate would be considerably lower. All of these schools are near or less than a 20% acceptance rate with the vast majority of them being less than 15% with Brown and Yale being lower still.
Does UVA give preference to in state applicants? It would seem like if you were strong in the other area’s mentioned you should have a reasonable likelihood of admission. UVA is a great school as an in state resident perhaps more affordable.
It really seems like you have the academic credentials (I don’t know about your AP’s or the rigor of the courses you took) it will be about the rest of your application. Our daughter who is a rising Sophomore at Harvard had it all and didn’t have it all. She applied to 15 schools with 8 of them being reaches, she was admitted to three of the reaches with two of them she was accepted off the wait list. What didn’t the other 5 schools not like about her? She was Wait listed at 3 of the 5 she wasn’t accepted at. It is very difficult to determine why one great school and not another.
Apply ED or EA if you have a clear preference and your family is okay with the ED considerations. From a statistical likelihood perspective applying early at UVA would seem like your greatest probability of acceptance, this of course is from my very limited perspective.
Work really hard on your essays, they are the window to who you are, be authentic and genuine in them. You may want to go on the College Data website or each of these schools Common Data Sets to see how the rank the importance of your essays. Any school who has a holistic admissions process will place a high value on essays. I do not know whether UVA does or not. You are fortunate to live in Virginia with such a strong State school system, William and Mary is an excellent school as well.
Wishing you the best of luck!
pitt is amazing
@GreatKid Thanks for the advice. I will apply UVA early action. I am trying to add two or three reach schools … that’s where I was looking for help. I will check Common Data Sets for these schools.
I Was just looking on the CollegeData.com web site and I saw a couple of things about UVA that were interesting. One is that their overall acceptance rate is right around 30% and secondly there didn’t seem to be an advantage in applying early. The acceptance percentages were nearly identical EA versus RD. I have not confirmed that by looking at their Common Data Set and I will check that out as should you. If there is very little difference EA versus RD it may not be advantageous to apply EA and you may be better off applying else where EA or ED to gain acceptance advantage.
Since UVa is a public university, there’s no reason NOT to apply EA. It shouldn’t prevent even SCEA at the high reaches that offer that option. I’d go for the early notification rather than wait until March to hear from all your schools.
Have you considered Lehigh? Colgate?
Nice catch SlackerMomMD! I believe you are right and that provides a nice opportunity for this student.
Look at Lafayette College.