Our school didn’t have Naviance so I didn’t have those sort of numbers to work with. </p>
<p>Princeton Review has an “Admissions Selectivity Rating” which I found very helpful. You can access these by signing up to their web site (free to create an account) and then clicking the “Admissions” links for each school. </p>
<p>As an example, here are the ratings for some of the schools you listed:</p>
<p>There are a lot of factors that come into play and you have to get a sense of their ranking system before it will make a lot of sense to you – but for my daughter the schools with scores of 97+ were reaches, the schools with scores of 92 or less were safeties, and the stuff in between was a match - in my eyes, of course. (I’ve done a pretty good job of predicting, between 2 admission cycles, however)</p>
<p>Obviously individual factors like gender and other fit factors do come into play. For example, I felt Vassar was impossible for my daughter, whereas Barnard (another #97) was a “likely reach” - if there can be such a thing - because of my daughter’s dance background and a particular academic strength that seemed more in demand at Barnard. So identifying tip factors is useful. </p>
<p>I do understand that its hard when a kid wants urban – I ran into that issue with my daughter, and that ends up cutting off a lot of possibilities. I think the problem is exactly because of the accessibility you are looking for – all the other parents and families are thinking the same thing, and so are far more likely to apply to schools that are located near major airports. Bigger applicant pool= greater selectivity, even when compared to more remote schools with equivalent or even better academic standards.</p>
<p>Mathmom, my kid’s stats are similar to yours, and he did get into Macalester.
He got some merit money. </p>
<p>He will attend Colorado College, not Mac. Colorado College might interest your son (and it has an Early Action option, which was wonderful), but Mac probably would be better for IR. </p>
<p>Connecticut College might be worth checking out as a match if you visit Trinity. </p>
<p>
Yes, we are familiar with those. Some colleges are better than others in offering accommodations. Rugg’s Reccommendations has a list. It includes Boston College, Colorado College, George Mason U., Goucher, and Oberlin.</p>
<p>Apply. If you don’t, you will always wonder…“what if”… especially if you get into other reaches. </p>
<p>I don’t think you will get in. But your chances are 0 if you don’t apply, and maybe you have a small chance- lets say, 10% - if you do apply. So don’t get your hopes up, focus your energies on the other schools on your list – but I think that with your NM status & your high test scores, you certainly are within range to be considered. </p>
<p>One other note – if you need financial aid, drop U Washington from your safety list. My daughter applied to UW as a safety, and got in … but we figured out after she applied that UW does not offer ANY grant aid to out-of-staters. If you don’t need the aid, then it can be a great deal – I think even with out-of-state tuition it’s less than many private schools – but you mentioned “merit aid” several times at schools, so I thought you might want to know the limitations there. (And yes, Seattle is awesome – my son lives there now and is very happy to be there).</p>
<p>I wanted to answer a question for Queen’s Mom that she asked on the “other” B+ students thread about Oxford at Emory. I’m in Georgia and my daughter is at Emory. I will tell you that there are a lot of “A” students that apply to Oxford because the scholarships at Oxford carry over to Emory. </p>
<p>We know of several B+ students who went to Oxford and then on to Emory, As long as the grades are good, there is no problem going to Emory and it seems to be pretty much assumed that everyone will go on. (I do not know what the actual process is.) There is a separate orientation for them at the beginning of the year. I know that they can also consult with the professors at Emory about classes and internships, etc. during their time at Oxford. I know when my daughter went through rush girls from Oxford were allowed to participate. There appears to be plenty of support for the Oxford continuees (as they are called).</p>
<p>Has your son thought about Pitzer? Statwise, it’s a match. The Claremont schools are pretty cool. My daughter is at Pomona and she says the Pitzer students are her favorite as a group of all the schools. And I expect you already know about the consortium, though if you haven’t seen them, you may not know that unlike the Western Mass and Philly schools, no bus rides are involved to cross-register, since they’re right across the street from each other. The town is a little sleepy though certainly not as much so as the isolated midwest schools (not Mac!) or, for example Middlebury, and anyway greater LA is nearby. Pomona and CMC would be reachier, but worth a look as well.</p>
<p>I have sort of thought about the Claremont Schools. I really wish we’d visited Harvey Mudd when my oldest was college hunting. He applied, but we never saw the school. I lived in Pasadena for three years when dh was a grad student at Caltech, so I know southern California pretty well (and love it). I have looked at the map so I do know just how close they are to each other - just don’t have that good a sense of the flavor of the different schools within the Consortium.</p>
<p>Unfortunately for B+ students, Pitzer is one of those schools that has gotten much more selective in recent years. So while it was a very reasonable safety for my son back in 2001-- it is a “match” at best – with an admission rate in recent years of under 27%. </p>
<p>So, to mathmom: its not worth flying out to California in a hunt for safeties – unless you want to try visiting Occidental or Chapman. Hmmm… Maybe Oxy is worth a look? It wasn’t such a bad place for at least one very smart guy I know of to get a good educational foundation while he did some growing up, making up for what was probably a less than perfect high school GPA. I think it still admits about half its applicants, and your son’s SATs would probably give him an edge on admissions.</p>
<p>Oh yeah, and then he transferred to Columbia, went to Harvard Law, was head of Law Review… and then what happened to that guy? I lost track of him. ;)</p>
<p>Sorry for coming in where I’m not welcome, but I just saw a post on another thread that in some schools the weighted GPA can go all the way up to 8.0! I had never heard of that.</p>
<p>So you think we’ll soon have threads like “the thread for parents of students with GPAs between 6.5 and 7.0”? </p>
<p>Unfortunately I won’t belong there either…my D is just another boring 3.9 to 4.5 kid.</p>
<p>Re W vs UW, our high school doesnt weight Regents courses, only 1.05 for Honors & 1.1 for APs. I wonder how common it is in NY to weight Regents courses.</p>
<p>Payfors school GPAs are weighted for this comparison, not sure about mathmoms:</p>
<p>mathmoms Naviance stats / payfors Naviance stats
Syracuse: 92.37 GPA 1850 or 1220 SAT / 90 GPA 1660 or 1225 SAT
American 94.39 GPA 1910 or 1277 SAT / 93 GPA 1908 or 1290 SAT
BU 95 GPA 1934 or 1284 SAT / 93 GPA 1860 or 1300 SAT</p>
<p>Interesting that the stats are generally lower for our school, especially for the Syracuse & BU 2400 SATs. I double-checked our numbers just to be sure, but I guess there could be all sorts of reasons for the differences, including input errors. Still, makes me wonder . . .</p>
<p>I noticed our hs uses single SAT scores for these statistics, but even the combined average SAT score for Syracuse was only 1682/2400.</p>
<p>You wrote: PayFor, your son sounds rather like mine, who was in that small group of NMSF who didn’t advance to NMF.</p>
<p>Based on your experience, do you think a 91% W GPA will knock a kid out of NMF eligibility? What about 90% or 89%? (This has not been a stellar year for Ss grades, were just hoping his GPA doesnt drop.) I think his UW GPA is around 87%.</p>
<p>Payfor, I think the slight difference in the way our school does weighting accounts for the difference in GPAs. I think your 2400 Syracuse SAT probably has an error given that second one is pretty much in line with ours. I’ve found that in general Writing score seem to be in same general range as the average of CR and M. Our high school definitely doesn’t try to superscore SATs, they take best single sitting from each student.</p>
<p>I don’t plan to look in CA for safeties, unless there are some in SF area and we end up visiting mathson sometime this summer. He’s got an internship in Silicon Valley.</p>
<p>Just to clarify: I see Pitzer as a match, not a safety. But judging from their most recent Common Data Set, mathmom’s son should have an excellent chance of admission.</p>
<p>Re the 5Cs (a little stereotypical, but still):</p>
<p>PayFor, I can’t generalize about advancing to NMF. We’re homeschoolers, so all Fang Jr’s grades were college grades. He had one D, which I think sank him. It’s not even on his record now, since he retook, but it was then.</p>