<p>I found posting a school list for our eldest son very helpful so I'm hoping for help with son 2. We could use suggestions on matches and if we've assigned schools to the wrong category.</p>
<p>tia,</p>
<p>He has an 87 average which works out to 3.2 unweighted. His gpa shows an upward trend, 3.4 sophomore year and 3.5 last year. He'll have taken 5 APs by the time he graduates as well as honors english. fwiw, the public hs he attends was ranked in the top 120 in the country.</p>
<p>SAT first sitting: M:670, RC730, W:710</p>
<p>I know the sat/gpa gap makes it look like a lazy/bored kid but he suffers from chronic insomnia and has improved how he deals with it over the course of hs.</p>
<p>ECs:
shakespeare club
acting in drams and shakespeare plays
improv comedy troupe
varsity tennis</p>
<p>safe - Using naviance, no one in the history of our school has been rejected with similar stats:
clark
knox
marist
UVM</p>
<p>match
bennington</p>
<p>reach
oberlin (ed)
grinell
bard</p>
<p>far reach
u mich - oddly, parchment shows his chances at ~70%. I know UM is not thought of as quirky but his brother lives in the residential college and it's plenty quirky.
bates - here again, oddly parchment has him at 65%</p>
<p>I think your list is good. You might also consider Skidmore (it may look like a bit of a reach, but it is 60% female so it doesn’t hurt to be a male applicant), and Muhlenberg (less quirky perhaps but good theater dept.). as well. I’m not sure Marist is the best fit (when I looked at it with my S it seemed pretty jock oriented, but that was a few years ago) but it is a fine school in a gorgeous location. Good luck.</p>
<p>Two other things – Based on my experience, I"d put a lot more weight into what Naviance says as opposed to Parchment. And You might want to post this on the College Search and Selection thread.</p>
<p>@quietdesperation, your list looks good, and if your son and mine end up at the same college, perhaps they should be roommates! They sound very similar, except for the varsity tennis thing. Mine avoids all sports, except for dodgeball.</p>
<p>You may want to add Hampshire to your list as a match. That’s on my son’s list, as is Skidmore. He visited Bennington and liked it, but thought it was too small and isolated. Will look at Muhlenberg at @happy1’s suggestion.</p>
<p>Sally Rubenstone from this site also suggested Earlham as a safety for my son (his stats are very high, but he only has theatre as an EC and no sports), but I haven’t read up on that one yet. His reachy reach is Brown, but he will need to write the world’s greatest college essay to get in there, so we’re looking to get him excited about a few more schools.</p>
<p>wes is the right type of school but his brother applied ED with better stats/rigor/ECs and was rejected out of hand so I it’s hard to see how it happens for him. We’ve heard great things about earlham, we’ll take a closer look. A friend’s daughter went to muhlenberg and loved it but for whatever reason it didn’t resonate w him.</p>
<p>How about Ursinus? It’s not exactly what I’d call quirky, but it’s a very tolerant place. I have know some quirky kids who have found their home there and they give great merit for high SAT’s. </p>
<p>ursinus is a good one, definitely on the list of schools to visit. We’re also considering visiting lafayette on the same trip, it would be a far reach for him. He has also rejected wheaton.</p>
<p>^^^I was going to suggest lafayette. I didn’t go on the tour, but from my D’s description it seemed like it might be a good fit, but I can’t get into our school’s Naviance right now to see what the stats are of the kids who’ve chosen it from her school. I know several girls from her class apply to Lafayette each year so I’ll give you a ballpark when I can get back in.</p>
<p>OK - nobody from D’s school who has less than a 3.4 has applied to Lafayette in recent years. 1350/2050 SAT’s seems to be the cutoff for automatic acceptance. I can’t tell from the graph if the GPA has as much significance. There are several 3.6 to 3.8 who were admitted, but they all had SAT’s over the 1350/2050 mark. I should point out that my D’s school is all girls and I don’t know if that affects admissions (I know Lafayette is boy heavy due to engineering).</p>
<p>@quietdesperation - my D is at Lafayette so if you have any questions you can PM me. She was also in her HS Shakespeare club and is involved in theater(both the main college group some kind of “theater underground” group) as well as orchestra at Lafayette . She is also a science kid so Laf has the best of all worlds for her. </p>
<p>I don’t think I would call the school “quirky” but it may be worth a visit. In terms of an acceptance it looks like a reach – applying ED helps at Lafayette but of course that only makes sense if it is his top choice (which it doesn’t seem to be). My D also didn’t like Skidmore and Muhlenberg but it was mainly because she didn’t “feel” that they were science oriented enough for her – is hard to argue with a teenager who made up his or her mind and we had other good choices so we just let those schools go. </p>
<p>I agree with happy1 about Marist; it also seemed more jocky-traditional and less quirky when visited with my quirky kid How about Ithaca if you are looking for others? Good theater and music programs and Ithaca itself is sort of quirky. </p>
<p>Muhlenberg has good theater, but my son found it too much like high school in terms of lack of diversity. </p>
<p>Happy1: Interesting about Lafayette. Seems like my kid would have a pretty good shot, based on the enrolled. But think it is too small for him. How does she like the science there? i thought it was a pretty preppy school?</p>
<p>One thing I thought interesting about Marist is the “Priority Point” System. The priority point system at Marist College assigns points to students based on their academic average, involvement with extra-curricular activities, disciplinary history and condition of their residence area. The system is used by the Office of Housing and Residential Life to place students in housing after their entering first year at Marist.</p>
<p>You get points by joining clubs, participating in sports (including intramural), and doing service.</p>
<p>So, does your son prefer small or large schools? I ask because my daughter wanted quirky too (she was more
alternative-music-quirky than granola-quirky, if you know what I mean.) Anyway, we spent a lot of time looking at smaller schools, but sometimes it was hard to match up “her” kind of quirky with the predominant strain of quirky at said school. Who knew there were so many kinds of quirky?</p>
<p>In the end, she found it much easier to find her tribe of quirkiness at a larger school (kind of like your University of MI example.) In her experience, it was plenty easy to find her own critical mass of emo-loving, Converse-wearing colleagues on a large campus. A large school was also useful when she shed some of her quirkiness and moved on to …accounting, of all things.</p>
<p>I think your list is pretty good, except I wonder why you have Bates as a super-reach and Oberlin and Grinnell as mere reaches. In my corner of the world, they are thought to be meaningfully more selective than Bates. Bard, too. Bard and Bates (and Bennington) might have been on the same level 10 or 15 years ago, but Bard seems to have had an upswing in popularity, while I think Bates is still more of an Eastern quirky-preppy cult school. It hardly matters, though, which you count as a “reach” and which a “super-reach”</p>
<p>Based on kids I know, I cast another vote for Ursinus, and express doubt about Lafayette. I have not met a single quirky person who went to Lafayette, unless “quirky” means maybe doing yoga during the lacrosse team’s off-season. </p>
<p>You may also want to take a look at Hobart and William Smith (that’s one college, formed in a merger of a men’s LAC and a women’s LAC), to which kids I know who sound a bit like your son have gone and had their parents be happy with their education. It’s in central New York, right on Seneca Lake, gorgeous setting, not that far from Cornell.</p>
<p>And speaking of “not that far from Cornell,” if you want someplace larger than most of the colleges we are discussing, but smaller than Michigan or Vermont, and a reputation as a good place for smart, arty kids who are not academic superstars, it’s worth looking at Ithaca College. In terms of a community, too, Ithaca the town is a little larger and/or more vibrant than places like Bennington, or Worcester, or whatever town Grinnell is in. It’s more like Ann Arbor (albeit a lot more isolated) or Burlington.</p>
<p>He doesn’t have a preference for large vs. small and in fact, syracuse and tulane might make its way on to the match list. Halfempty thanks for the research, our school’s naviance shows him to be in the top quarter of accepted students SAT scores but tied for the lowest gpa of accepted students…and everyone else accepted had at least a 90 average. So it seems unlikely but if loves it, might be worth a try.</p>
<p>jhs, thanks, I’d guess you’re right about bates and what you say is reinforced by parchment’s probability (grinell and obrerlin are low 40s, bates in the 60s). I’m sorry to keep updating the thread with schools he rejected but there are so many! We thought Hobart would be great for him, he hated it and we still have no idea why. He liked Ithica, we liked Ithica but he likes all the schools on his list more. </p>
<p>Maybe look at Goucher near Baltimore. Clark U. is a great school. Love your list.</p>
<p>Did you look at/read Colleges that Change Lives (Loren Pope) or his other book, Beyond the Ivies? CTCL has fairs too. But you seem to be doing pretty well already.</p>
<p>What about Connecticut College–there are interesting options for kids who are interested in theater to attend the National Theater Institute and the Moscow Art Theater. Also, kids who do an internship can get stipends from the college. My D really liked it when we visited but ultimately decided she wanted to be in an urban area.</p>
They sound very similar, except for the varsity tennis thing. Mine avoids all sports, except for dodgeball.</p>