Someone Help Me With My Messy College List

reaches:
upenn
georgetown
chapel hill
brown
duke
notre dame
uva
villanova
bc
william and mary
cornell

safeties:
binghamton
rutgers
Marist
providence
elon

matches:
u maryland
northeastern
gw
penn state
lehigh
colgate
wake forest
u mich

94 UW GPA 96 W 6 APs by the end of senior year 1450 SATs

Lots of ECs nothing super special (volunteer work, sports, work, Student Council, Peer Ministry, NHS, NSHS stuff like that)

New York resident

These are what I think the categories are please correct me if I’m wrong I really wanna cut down my list

Paying for college applications would not be a struggle for my family

Want to major in chemistry (pre-med)

Have you checked the Net Price Calculators at these schools to see if they are affordable?

UMICH should be a reach not a match and Villanova I think is more of a match for you than a reach.

@suzy100 My parents aren’t holding me responsible for my undergrad debt because they know I’ll have a lot of graduate debt. It’s not easy for them but it will be manageable.

For help narrowing your group with respect to pre-med, you can see “The Experts Choice: Colleges with Great Pre-med Programs.”

To assist in ordering your fairly heterogeneous choices by selectivity, you can see “The 50 Smartest Colleges in America,” a standardized scoring ranking by Business Insider.

I would start by cutting out of state public universities from your list (except for Michigan, UNC-Chapel Hill and UVA). If your parents are going to pay a premium for a public university, you should get some value added. UMCP, Rutgers, and Penn State don’t seem qualitatively that much better than Bing to justify the upcharge, IMO. Especially, if you intend to pursue med school.

Georgetown requires 3 SAT subject tests, just in case you didn’t know.

As for the rest, you’ve got everything from small LACs to large state universities, urban/rural, spread all over the country. Do you have preferences with respect to weather, distance from home, size of campus/student population, interest in sports, Greek life, etc? Make a list and see if that helps you to narrow it down. Have at least two safeties you really like (both admissions and cost) and then build your list. Ten well-chosen schools should be plenty.

Your undergraduate debt is the least of your worries, some of the schools on your list are over $60,000 per year. You and your parents should start by running the net price calculator on the website for every school on your list. You can usually find a link to each calculator on the school financial aid webpage.

If i was applying right now, I’d think it’d be

reaches:
georgetown
chapel hill
duke
uva
bc
cornell

safeties:
binghamton
providence
elon

matches:
gw
colgate
wake forest
villanova

but i change my mind constantly so

By the standardized scoring of its students, Colgate places higher than BC, UVa and UNC, a factor to keep in mind when estimating selectivity.

@mamaedefamilia thank you for your response! I really want to go to North Carolina which is why I have Elon, Chapel Hill, Duke, and Wake Forest. My next choice would be DC so GW and Georgetown. The others I just randomly like. I live in a city and go to school in a suburb so location really doesn’t make that huge of a different to me although a campus is a must. I would want to participate in Greek life if the school offered it but it’s not a deciding factor.

@mamaedefamilia The some schools I’m not interested in but my school counselors keep pushing them (such as cornell)

GW may not have much of a traditional campus.

@intparent My parents think they will be able to afford it. They make good money… a little more than I originally thought and education comes first to them so I don’t think they’d have a problem spending it on tuition

@merc81 that’s really interesting about colgate… do you think the fact that UNC and UVa are much harder to get into out of state would make a difference?

@a20171 : Yes, it could make a difference. However, your SAT score is currently ~50 points higher than UNC’s 75th percentile – that’s not insignificant. (Whereas for Colgate, you would place within their middle 50th percentile.)

1450 out of 1600, right? What is the breakdown?

@intparent yes 740 math 710 reading

This source includes all your choices in some degree of perspective: “The 610 Smartest Colleges,” Business Insider.

If you are really interested in Wake, make sure you show interest and schedule an interview with them - sooner rather than later because they fill up.

Given that you’re amenable to southern schools with Greek life, you might want to give Alabama a look. They may increase the SAT threshold for the new test format with respect to merit aid consideration. And I’m not sure how your GPA will translate to a 4.0 scale. But there’s a good chance you’d be eligible for significant merit aid there.