Hi all - great info, but I think one of you saw “public speaking” and thought I meant “debate”. He does not do debate. He is a good public speaker; delivering speeches, taking questions, etc.
^^ my bad!
New Haven gets a bad rap. Visit and talk to students if the city worries you. I was concerned when my special snowflake raised in suburbia traipsed off to New Haven, but she never had a problem, nor did her friends. She acquired some street smarts from the experience which helped prepare her for her current working life in urban Los Angeles.
Safeties are hard to identify and harder to love than super selectives, but they’re out there and your son will find them. I think the first question is still your original question: Are small LACs the right fit for your son? If yes, then the next question is: Should his safety school(s) be small LACs also? But you have to answer the first one first.
I would also try to sit down with your son’s adviser and get an understanding of why he thinks your son should consider LACs. Is it the small classes, the insular close knit communities, the dedicated faculty relationships, the continuing alumni/ae support? These are all good reasons to choose an LAC, but they may be more meaningful for one student than another.
Though schools like Williams/Amherst/Swarthmore/Pomona are highly selective they’re not quite as selective as Columbia and Brown and much less so than HYPSM. I think the kids who choose W/A/S/P based on ratings and prestige as second best to the Ivies that they didn’t get into are the ones who end up dissatisfied. If their real first choice is Brown or Columbia, they may be better off at Georgetown, JHU, Duke or CMU than at an LAC. (I’d also include Chicago, but it has become very selective in the past few years.)
So take it step by step. Use this trip to visit a few LACs get a feeling of where to go from here. Maybe he can do some more visiting over the summer after he narrows in on his priorities and wish list. Based on his profile, my vote would still be Williams and Wesleyan, but the Northeast is compact geographically and you should be able to fit in several.
Your son will be a strong contender at many schools. I would want to exploit the music aspect and submit a performance supplement even if he doesn’t plan to major in music. Music as an EC is more significant at some colleges than at others, though it’s always a positive. Performance opportunities for non-majors also vary widely.
Yes, that’s the end game: A high achieving, non-hooked applicant has to cast a wide net, especially if he’s a Whiteand middle class. If he includes reach/match/safety options in different sizes then the list expands exponentially. The good news is that need-based aid appears to be workable for your family, which makes the search for financial safeties less complex. Think of it as ever-narrowing concentric circles. You may start considering 35, visiting 25 and applying to 15+. The bull’s eye is the one he ends up attending.
About 60 colleges claim to meet 100% of demonstrated financial need.
(http://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/paying-for-college/articles/2014/09/15/colleges-and-universities-that-claim-to-meet-full-financial-need)
Almost all of them are very selective private schools.
Do a little arithmetic to estimate the number of students admitted each year to these ~60 schools.
Brown accepted ~2700 students in 2014.
Colgate accepted ~2300.
So there must be over 120K offers of admission, collectively, from the ~60 “full need” schools (with many overlapping cross-admits, of course). The number of freshman places might be about half that number (~60K enrolled students).
Among college-bound seniors in 2014, approximately 76,000 students scored 700 or above on the SAT-CR.
(https://secure-media.collegeboard.org/digitalServices/pdf/sat/sat-percentile-ranks-crit-reading-2014.pdf)
If we use 76K as a crude proxy for the number of “top” students graduating from US high schools each year, and 60K as a rough estimate for the number of places available in “top” colleges … then it appears that there is a place in some “top” school for most of the “top” students who want one. Not nearly all 76K high-scoring seniors even want (or could afford) one of these places. Plus, there are many more places at colleges that are nearly as selective as these ~60, with financial aid nearly as generous (and many more offers than there are places). All these schools dip well below the ~700 SAT-CR mark to fill their seats; apparently it is not just to give away places to “hooked” applicants that otherwise would go to high-stats applicants. There simply aren’t enough available-and-willing high-stats applicants, apparently, to fill all the places at all these colleges.
Nevertheless, to be on the safe side, most applicants ought to play their cards across a wide selectivity range within this ~60-college space (with safeties chosen from among affordable, less-selective schools outside this space.)
@momrath the data doesn’t back your statement about lacs being less selective. This is an assumption that devastates many students this time of year as letters start to come in.
For a given “top” student, it is unlikely that all 60 of those “top” schools will be good fits (even just considering academic fit, although other factors like school environment, fraternities/sororities, etc. can matter). Also, schools which claim to “meet full need” can vary widely in how much financial aid they offer to a given family financial situation, and such a school may not necessarily be lower cost than all schools which do not make such a claim.
In addition, a “top” student by the SAT CR may not be a “top” student in other aspect (courses, grades, SAT M, essays, extracurriculars, recommendations, “level of applicant’s interest”, etc.).
Katwkittens said this;
“Of the 34 schools he applied to…”
Does anyone think that applying to 34 colleges is rational?
@LakeWashington
Now you know why acceptance rates are a misleading metric in looking at the most visible schools.
I couldn’t afford for either of my boys to apply to 34 schools…
@NCMom14, both my boys attend LACS and really have found them to be a nice fit. My older son attends Hampshire College, which is part of the consortium that includes Amherst College, UMass, etc. He’s really taken advantage of the consortium - the only school he’s not had a class is Smith. The consortium, as others have said, really does offer the best of all worlds. That said, all LACS have different personalities. My younger son attends Bates but wouldn’t have liked Amherst - it just wasn’t a fit for him. It would be important to clarify why his GC thinks a LAC would be best and then to visit if you can.
Addressing the 34 applications:
As a single mom with kiddos’ EFC of $0, getting admitted to college wasn’t as much an issue as were the resulting financials. And as we found out in the spring, the ensuing financial aid packages varied as much as $15,000 per year at meet full need schools. 3 of his acceptances were at 3 service academies which require service as repayment of cost. Three schools needed to accept his ROTC scholies, merit aid combined with need also needed to be considered. In addition were the consideration of his 17+ AP courses totaling 72 units a t some universities and no units at others, only for placement purposes.
We were concerned about admit/deny scenario, gapping and “preferential” packaging which did occur. Applying to specific programs such as Penn’s M & T, Georgetown’s SFS and select majors at MIT and other engineering programs also added to the total.
Of note this was before Chicago and others went to the Common App. Most, if not all, his application fees were waived. SAT waivers for college apps, Venture Scholar app waivers, NASAC waivers, recruitment waivers, online app waivers were all utilized to minimize fees. Same with SAT prep, all done with library resources. Those where college is determined by financials rather than acceptances this mode of application remains a route to attendance.
So whether one is on the hunt for merit, need or a combination a wide net needs to be cast. On the financial aid forum here on CC this is discussed at length. And for good reason. Every April there are hundreds of posts lamenting the acceptance of desired acceptances only to have decline due to lack of finances. Or worst yet, taking on debt as a family that is a burden to say the least.
And it was good preparation for med school apps, (25+ can be the norm) and then ensuing residencies where competitive specialities (ROAD + surgery) can require 100+ applications during the match. Not for the faint of heart, again this reflected over on the Pre-med forum on CC.
Hope this helps!
Kat
No. If you put an equal amount of effort in to researching and applying to only 6-9 schools, I strongly believe you have a much better chance of admittance to your top choices.
katwkittens, did the amounts vary less at schools that did not make “meet full need” claims? And were the offers better from any schools that do not make those claims? If so, were they need-based or merit grants?
I’ve run quite a few Net Price Calculator comparisons for a variety of scenarios (from very low to upper middle income), for “full need” schools up and down its selectivity spectrum. I find that the “full need” schools frequently meet or beat the alternatives (including state flagships and sometimes “big merit” schools). This becomes less true the farther up one goes on the income scale.
Below is one example.
Assumptions
CA resident
$76,000 family income (split evenly between married parents)
$20,000 in financial assets, all in cash/checking
$5K paid in income taxes
No home equity
3 children, 1 age 14, 1 age 17 (HS junior), 1 18 or older (already in college); 5 exemptions
GPA=4.0, SAT M+CR=1500
Fall 2015 admission
Estimated Net Costs of Attendance
$39,899 Purdue (OOS)
$31,700 Virginia Tech (OOS)
$23,843 Carnegie Mellon
$18,018 RISD
$16,422 CSU-SJ (in-state)
$15,405 Cal Poly Pomona (in-state)
$16,141 University of Southern California [“full need” school]
$14,909 Alabama (OOS; appears to reflect merit aid, but may also reflect most expensive R&B plans)
$14,617 Holy Cross [“full need” school]
$12,172 UCLA (in-state)
$11,280 Harvey Mudd [“full need” school]
$9,405 Brown [“full need” school]
$6,955 Vanderbilt [“full need” school]
$6,782 Olin College of Engineering
$4,589 Yale [“full need” school]
So in this case, yes, the offers from “full need” schools did vary by more than $11K.
However, the variation is still much less than the variation among schools that do not make the “full need” claim. Perhaps more importantly, 6 of the full need schools come in below the net costs of the in-state public schools or the one “big merit” school. Even the worst offer from a “full need” school is much better than many of the alternatives (including some in-state public schools).
katwkitten’s kid applied before Net Price Calculators were available. I’m guessing if the kid were applying now, they would have eliminated some of the colleges on their list.
My older kid hated the application process so much I can’t imagine getting him to churn out so many applications! The younger one enjoyed it, but he spent a lot of time rewriting essays and tailoring each application to the different colleges.
However, all of those “meet full need” schools with lower prices than UCLA are “reach for everyone” schools. The ones which are similar or possibly slightly lower in selectivity compared to UCLA cost more (and none of these is a safety for anyone).
In other words, getting good need-based financial aid means getting past highly selective admissions gates. Not every student will have a choice to attend such a school.
As I work on the list to propose to my son for tours this break I wanted to thank everyone for continuing to share your experiences and thoughts!
When a student is undecided about a major, a point in favor of going to a larger school is that
there are more majors from which to chose.
I would also suggest Reed, if solid academics, non-traditional, and the west coast are part of your criteria.
I canʻt recall the article, and donʻt quote me on the methodology, but I remember reading that Reed (Portland, OR) and and Trinity U (San Antonio, TX) had the highest student, per capita, admission rate to medical schools. Again, this was probably from 5-6 years ago, but it does provide some indication of the ability of these LACs to translate to professional school admissions.
I strongly second the Reed suggestion- it attracts many highly intelligent students who also apply to U of Chicago type schools- It has the core LA curriculum, and it also requires students to write a thesis paper- much like the U of Texas Honors program.
http://www.reed.edu/about_reed/
This report shows where Reed graduates stands in relation to graduates from the most rigorous U’s and colleges in acceptance to PhD/ Doctoral programs:
Undergraduate Origins of Doctoral Degrees http://www.reed.edu/ir/phd.html
Reed ranks 4th behind only CalTech, Harvey Mudd and Swarthmore .
Very impressive for a not so well know LAC.