I’m simply going by the US News ranking, in which the top 10 publics are:
Berkeley, UCLA, UVa, Michigan, UNC, W&M, Georgia Tech, UC-SD, UC Davis, UC-SB.
But substitute Wisconsin, Texas, Illinois into the top 10 publics for any of those if you like.<br>
That wouldn’t substantially change my point:
America’s top colleges have plenty of places available for America’s top students.</p>
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I think it remains to be demonstrated, with numbers, the extent to which this is true. I don’t doubt that to some extent it is true, but I’d like to know by just how much. It’s certainly true that at many of the top 50 colleges, ~25% of students have SAT scores below 2100. Yes, this may mean that, to some extent, low-scoring “hooked” students are displacing high-scoring students from the admit list. Or … it may mean that not enough high-scoring students are applying to all of these schools.</p>
<p>For the sake of argument, let’s say that someone with a 2100 but no hook might have a 75% chance of getting into one of the top 50 colleges (however you define that group). Or maybe as low as a 65% chance of getting into one of the top 60. At any rate, the chances are much better than the admit rates might suggest. Your point is well-taken that this assumes the applicant “strategizes smartly”, and that money is not an insurmountable obstacle. </p>
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Fine, but the list you generate isn’t all that different from the USNWR 20+20+10.
For purposes of <em>this</em> discussion, I think it makes more sense to define “top 50” by selectivity. The USNWR rankings correlate pretty strongly to that. If you want to substitute slightly less selective schools into the top 50, or expand 50 to ~60, then the resulting set should be that much easier for a high-scoring student to find a place.</p>
It’s much easier to get in to the bottom schools of that top 50 than the top schools in that top 50 (2100 SAT and no hook has almost no chance at the top of the list and a pretty good chance at some in the bottom if they can afford them).
The opportunities are generally not the same at those schools.</p>
<p>That’s what makes schools like UMich/Cal appealing: many of the same opportunities as an Ivy but generally easier to get in to (if you can afford to go).</p>
<p>BTW, if you want a catch-all top 50 list, just use Forbes. They mash all privates, publics, and LACs together.</p>
<p>Finally, the schools that evaluate holitically definitely do take kids who have attributes they’re looking for over kids with higher stats all the time. Not sure why that is hard to believe.</p>
<p>Astrophysics is not a very common undergraduate major so you definitely should keep physics in mind as a starting point. An astronomy degree is quite different from astrophysics, the latter being more physics oriented as the name implies. These days with high energy physicists looking more and more toward extra-terrestrial sources of particles, there is a lot of crossover from physics into astrophysics.</p>
<p>You should probably expect to go on to a Ph.D. if you want a career as an astrophysicist (but being the child of a faculty member, you probably already know that…) in my experience as a physics professor, a strong physics education can be obtained at many universities, no need to go out on a financial limb. The students we graduate at Illinois Tech do extremely well in graduate programs and are often as well or better prepared than students from other programs (even so-called “elite” ones). You can get a solid physics education at an LAC as well as at one of the CSUs and probably at your father’s university as well. Two of my children have studied at my school and it has worked out fine. The other went to a state flagship where the tuition and room and board were affordable out of pocket for us at the time.</p>
<p>Getting into graduate school is more about doing the right things to prepare yourself than what school you graduate from. You need to get involved in research either at your university or in REUs over summers (or both) so you might look for a university that has a graduate program in physics as well but most LACs understand that research is important and they now make it available. You also need to take the most physics possible at your university. A full year at the Junior or Senior level of each of Classical Mechanics, Electrodynamics, and Quantum Mechanics will serve you well. This is where a small school sometimes is at a disadvantage because they cannot offer all these courses every year.</p>
<p>The bottom line is that there are lots of places that can give you what you need in a physics or astrophysics education at the undergraduate level, find the one which best suits you and makes sense financially to your family.</p>
<p>Might look at fellow Jesuit school Holy Cross great combination of academics and athletics. Holy Cross has strong school spirit and great alumni network.</p>