My son is a high school sophomore and wants to major in Wildlife Biology or Zoology. He has been researching schools that he thinks would be a good fit for him – small-to-medium in size, the right major, within our budget, and either selective or very selective in terms of their admissions rate. He is a 4.0 student, a Life Scout working on Eagle and has impressive extracurricular activities including sports and volunteer work in the subject he wants to study. When we apply these criteria, SUNY Oswego and SUNY EFS pop up for Zoology and Wildlife Biology, respectively, as candidate schools. I’m pretty confident he could be admitted to higher-tier schools, but money is a big limiting factor – he will have a sibling in college at the same time he is. Both schools are appealing, depending on what major he settles on, because they are so affordable and in other ways dovetail nicely with what he is looking for. So, my question is whether anyone has any particular insight into how these schools are actually regarded, especially for these majors. College Board rates Oswego as Very Selective at 48%, and ESF as Somewhat Selective at 52%, but I see a lot of other schools rated higher for these majors that are not as selective overall. Thank you for any information you can offer!
This is mostly anecdotal, but I’ve always considered ESF to be a great school for someone interested in that field. Compared to other SUNYs (https://www.suny.edu/media/suny/content-assets/documents/summary-sheets/Admissions_qf_stateop.pdf) it has relatively high stats averages. Oswego in my experience has always been nothing particularly special - it’s where a lot of B students went. I could imagine the acceptance rates are skewed by the fact that a lot of people apply to many SUNYs and see what lands, whereas people applying to ESF are specifically interested in that one specialization.
My daughter graduated from ESF. I think it is highly regarded, and an excellent school. It is very niche, but that results in a class which tends to be close. There is a huge emphasis on environmental issues at the school, which is obvious even just from walking around the campus. There are lots of graduate students and some cutting edge environmental research going on there, and my daughter had classes taught by professors who are very well known in their fields. Classes are tough and rarely curved.
I am surprised College Board ranks Oswego as more selective, because I thought ESF was harder to get into. I don’t know much about Oswego. My daughter eliminated it because of the amount of snow it gets, which is on an order of magnitude greater than even what Syracuse gets.