Thanks for the suggestions. I’ll check them out. She wants to dance at college as part of her college social life not just take classes in a city.
Heads up for those who are thinking through TE lists based on comparing kiddo’s stats with the school’s stats (like using the 75% percentiles the baseline for an app that is reasonable to send in), you might want to take a look at Common Data Set as well to get a richer feeling for ACT scores (and other things). CDS gives the percent of incoming freshmen for a given year who are 30+, 24 - 29, 23 - 28, and sub 23 (same for SAT). Might be helpful, if you want to dig that far in the weeds. In most cases, it confirmed what the normal 25, 50, and 75 % ranges suggested, but in other cases it provided a deeper picture (sometimes good, sometimes not).
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F&M is tiny. We drove around it and ruled it out. FYI: I also think they don’t give many TE awards and only need-based financial aid, but check me on that. That kind of thing can change.
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To add on to this, the CDS will show what’s considered most important in the application.
Most rank GPA and rigor as the highest.
Some consider class rank, essays, scores, ethnicity, interviews, talent, and character as important or very important. Others don’t consider some of those at all or rank them lower.
What about letters of recommendation?
I know this is the Tuition Exchange thread but we also have CIC TEP.
Two weeks ago I found three schools I wanted to add to our list on CIC. Today, none of those three is on their list! This has me thinking, what happens if mid-college, the school stops participating?
Another thing I noticed digging deeper- don’t be discouraged by low percentages of scholarships given according to the TE website. TE says Bucknell granted less than 10%
Bucknell website says: 144 TE candidates applied to the school. 67 TE applicants were accepted to Bucknell. Of those 67, 32 were offered TE and 10 enrolled. This means IF you are accepted to Bucknell, then ypur chance of also getting TE is closer to 50%.
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That’s a good point, but I don’t necessarily think that they offered it to 32 outright. They might have set aside only TE 10 scholarships. In that case, they would offer to 10 initially, and then to more people as some of those original 10 declined.
These numbers would be exactly in line with what an AO at Rose-Hulman told my son. He said that they have 3 TE scholarships to give out. They usually get about 20 applicants that get accepted to the school. They make a ranked list. They offer it to 3 students, and then as each of them decline it, they go down the list until 3 students have accepted the offer. He said they usually end up offering it to 10 students to get the 3 that accept. My son was pretty stoked to hear that.
You could say that’s a 50% chance of getting TE, which would be true! But that’s dependent on other students declining it, and I’m sure there’s weird years where some of the first students accept all the spots quickly, and other years where they get farther down the waitlist. So the reported percentage would be 3/20 applicants I suppose (~15%), which is all they can really promise since they don’t know how many students will decline.
This impressed upon us that it would be courteous to decline a TE offer as soon as you know you won’t take it. While this is true of large scholarships in general, I think it’s extra important for TE because there are a lot of kids that get offers late, after they’ve already settled on another school. These are big $$$ make-or-break. As the TE offers roll in, we’ll likely make our kid keep a running rank of his 1 or 2 favorite offers and promptly decline all others so that they can be awarded to other students.
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I should add that we’ve already visited all but 3 of the schools he’s applying to. If he gets TE at any of those 3 and he’s seriously interested, I’d consider letting him keep those offers open until he has a chance to visit. Two of them are Delaware and Pitt which are long shots for TE anyway so I’m guessing we’ll be faced with 1 at most.
It would be so nice if schools provided data about their TE applicants, even basic data! So many provide nothing (it’s all a big mystery), some provide vague info. In Bucknell’s case, it’s hard to say - it could be that they literally offered 32 TE, but only 10 took it (I presume some applied to Bucknell as a safety, or just took other similar offers). Some schools, like Conn College, offer 1 - 4 TE, but others (even ones of comparable size) offer far more (like Skidmore).
ColdW could be right, might be a waitlist issue and they capped TE at 10. Maybe not. Might be a good idea to reach out to their liaison.
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Oh, yes, they list those. From what I have seen, the importance varies.
One school we visited said they don’t ask for them, because the letters were always so positive. As a result, they didn’t find the letters useful .
I have found some articles that say letters of recommendation are most important to small liberal arts colleges with a holistic acceptance process. This makes sense as some larger and less selective schools don’t even require them. I am in the camp of, if it’s a selective school, everything is important, LORs, grades, test scores, activities, awards, otherwise how do they differentiate between so many excellent applicants. And maybe some letters aren’t useful, when they read like a generic form letter because a counselor has 500 kids.
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Does anyone have suggestions for TE schools in the northeast in or near cities of 75,000 - 150,000 or so people or more?
I think 23 may reject Bucknell for being too small, and I’m struggling to find others.
One of you mentioned filters on the TE site. I had not noticed those before, so I will also look to see if I can filter by city size.
South Carolina and Tennessee both offer a good bit of merit money and have excellent honor college programs. Honors college or special scholarships might provide excellent opportunities for your bright and accomplished D!
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Also check out University of Richmond
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Just a bit west but Xavier?
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Thank you. Xavier is religious, I think. DC has had a lot of religion and feels ready to go somewhere low-key about the topic.
I’m pretty familiar with Xavier (don’t work there but have been on campus several times). As a Jesuit school, the religion aspect tends to be much less than a Catholic school. My DS23 felt that Villanova was too religious, and also wasn’t sure about Holy Cross–and isn’t applying. He felt comfortable with the amount of religion at Xavier and Boston College, as it was much more subtle and optional.
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Can you share what felt too religious? We were only able to do a self tour so couldn’t get that vibe.
Thanks for sharing that! I’ll give it another look.
I think it was the way they talked about the religion classes in the curriculum during the info session? It was also brought up briefly on the tour. I didn’t feel like it was too much, but it made him a bit uncomfortable.
Boston College, Fairfield and Xavier also have religious studies requirements but he felt more comfortable with how they were talked about.
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