I’m a rising senior looking for safety schools with strong academics. I’m interested in a liberal arts education, with 1500-6000 students in a school.
GPA: 3.97
ACT: 35
SAT: 1510
Need safeties with >30% acceptance rate.
Current schools I’m looking at include Brown and Pomona. I have Lewis and Clark as a safety but I don’t know about others. Please help!
What is your budget?
Location, budget, major? FYI, I wouldn’t consider a school with a 35% acceptance rate to be a safety - that’s more a match. Lewis & Clark looks like a good choice for a safety as long as it would be affordable - I’m sure we can suggest others if you give us more details. You probably want to look at some match schools as well - Brown and Pomona are both reaches.
It really depends on the financial aid individual schools are willing to give me. I’m looking for general suggestions right now, before I can plug my numbers into a financial aid calculator.
Sorry, yes, I meant to say target/safety. I just have too many reaches in my list right now.
I’d like to major in natural sciences.
What is/are your state school options? Start there.
Need a budget too.
How about these:
Muhlenberg
U of Rochester (target)
TCNJ
SUNY Geneseo
Hobart and William Smith Colleges
Quinnipiac
Instate school
I would use the NPC with your parents. It’s difficult to choose schools without a budget. The schools I listed might not be affordable.
A safety school needs to be affordable. It’s hard to give you suggestions without knowing your annual college budget. What are your parents willing to pay. That matters more than any NPC result.
Look at the Colleges That Change Lives. I think you stand a good chance for merit aid at some of them.
The first step in this process is sitting down with your parents and asking them what they can spend each year. Once you have an answer from them you can begin to craft a reasonable list.
I listed some options but you don’t know if they are affordable. You could get merit as well if you apply wisely.
You need to have a budget in mind before looking at schools. Once you have that number you can start looking at NPC’s to see which schools could potentially get you to your number (whether through need-based aid or merit aid).
That’s not an accurate answer.
You have to give a price.
For LACs at a public level you might be as low as $25k. Private - $35k and up. That assumes full pay.
But you can potentially go to a highly ranked school if full pay for $90k.
Would you rather go to a renowned name for $90k or a great name for less than $50k?
Is there an area you prefer - you have NE and NW?
As a simple exercise, you can go to US News LAC rankings and pull any school say 30-50 as a target and below 50 as safety.
Some give merit. Some don’t. There will be some exceptions. Reed is not an easy admit despite its rank for example.
You should define what you want beside LAC. Location. Urban. Rural. Weather etc
Many schools out there pay for kids with your stats - assuming you are more than just stats.
Add Brandeis to your list. Very strong in sciences, and you’d get in.
You really need to talk with your parents about money. You need a number from them on what they can kick in annually for college, and you need to run the net price calculators to get an idea of what the schools would expect your parents to pay. Your grades and scores are high enough that you could get substantial merit money at certain public colleges and 3rd tier private liberal arts colleges.
Would your family qualify for need based aid? You can run a few net price calculates for a general idea. But keep in mind, right now they are set for students starting college fall 2023. It’s possible there will be a delay in resetting these due to the changes in the FAFSA that are upcoming for the next academic year.
The amount your family plans to contribute is a far more important metric than what the net price calculators say.
Ft Lewis is Colorado’s ‘public LAC’ and has a lot of natural resources courses. Plus it is in a beautiful setting.
Hendrix College might be a good safety for you. It’s a great liberal arts college (one of the colleges that change lives) with a pretty high acceptance rate. I believe natural sciences are fairly strong there.
Based on your interest in these schools, this site may offer you further ideas:
Bard, Skidmore, Hobart, Union, Connecticut College, Furman, Rhodes, SMU . . . There are a ton of colleges where it is likely you’d be admitted. I did not check admit rates to see if they were above 30%, but I believe you’d have a good shot at admission to any of them.
The affordability question is separate.
So two quick background concepts:
Personally, I am more comfortable with the concept of “likelies” rather than “safeties” (at least outside of college that have fixed qualification standards that you know you will meet). The good news is that whether a college is a solid likely for you is not really a direct function of their generic acceptance rate, as your profile can potentially put you on the high side of the admit pool for many great colleges, and in that position you personally will probably have a significantly higher chance of admission than their generic acceptance rate. And in fact, generic acceptance rates are in part a function of regional application patterns and other things that do not necessarily factor into actual selectivity.
Second, there is obviously a rather large selectivity range between Brown and Lewis & Clark, and so I think you could reasonably be considering not just solid likelies but also solid “targets” to fill in that gap. A good combination of solid likelies and targets would potentially serve you well, and indeed whether a given college was technically a target or a likely for you would not necessarily be all that important as long as collectively you had a good range of schools.
Combining these thoughts, in your position, assuming you took rigorous courses and such, I would think anywhere your SAT/ACT put you above their reported 75th percentile might be at least a solid target, possibly even a likely, even if their raw acceptance rate was under 30%.
OK, so a few schools I think you might look at include Rochester (1520/34), Richmond (1500/NA), Macalaster (1490/34), and Rhodes (1450/32). The numbers in parens are their 75th SAT/ACT from their latest Common Data Set. The first three or so of those are maybe more targets than likelies, but again all should fall well into the selectivity range below Brown but above Lewis & Clark, and could potentially fit what you said you are looking for.
Of course there are many such schools, but I also know all those schools have fairly robust merit aid programs in addition to needs-based aid.
Macalester, Whitman, Lawrence, Wooster and St.Olaf are all quality schools with happy students. Schools “off the beaten path” in terms of location often have acceptance rates that are higher than the same quality schools in more popular geographic locations (the Coasts.)
Another vote for Wooster. Also Kenyon as a target.