<p>NYU's engineering program is a 3/2 dual BS/BSE degree program with Stevens Institute of Technology.</p>
<p>Are you really a parent and not some student trying to pull our legs?
None of the schools on your "safety" list are safeties for much of anyone.</p>
<p>None of the UC's are safeties even for in-state kids. If out of state, put them on the far reach list. Rice? Safety?<br>
I'm afraid that you are just reading the stats of admitted students (maybe even years old out of some book) and figuring if your D has those scores, she's in.
Safety/Match for a top-stats girl in engineering would be a school like UM/Rolla (wonderful engineering - sends grads to impressive list of firms and grad schools). Match/reach for one with top scores, maybe Harvey Mudd?
Get over your obsession with names that will impress the neighbors/relatives.</p>
<p>To be fair, this list and classifications was compiled by the CC, not the OP.</p>
<p>anxiousmom, that's what I thought! GC who suggests Tufts as a match... Hmmmm... </p>
<p>dragonmom, the OP has been around asking a lot of questions on Ivy acceptance maximization techniques, so he's not a troll.</p>
<p>When I think of engineering, I think of CalTech, MIT, UCs, Stanford, RPI, Harvey Mudd, Georgia Tech and other tech. schools, not Ivies (especially Dartmouth or Brown). Are you sure that your D is absolutely certain about engineering as her major? Are you a California resident?</p>
<p>Another question: does your D want a small, mid-sized or large school?</p>
<p>By the way, NYU just merged with Brooklyn Polytechnic to offer engineering, so maybe the Stevens deal is out. More to come as events unfold.</p>
<p>To the OP: The definition of a safety has two parts: 1) The school must admit more than 50 percent of applicants and 2) the candidate must be in the top 75 percentile of applicants. Using these criteria, you can cross some schools off your "safety" list and move them to the match or reach list.</p>
<p>What is your home state?</p>
<p>And do you have a financial safety on your list, or are you able and willing to pay full freight?</p>
<p>
[quote]
Ivies + SMC
[/quote]
</p>
<p>This is patently the Ivy League colleges </p>
<p>Ivy</a> League - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia </p>
<p>plus Stanford, MIT, and Caltech (as another reply has also suggested). </p>
<p>A girl who is a Jack Kent Cooke Young Scholar or who has similar credentials might be applying to quite a few of those colleges, although I've never quite seen the rationale for applying to all eight of the Ivy League colleges for anyone who is applying to less than a dozen colleges in total.</p>
<p>A safety college is one that </p>
<p>1) is pretty much certain to admit the applicant, based on its known behavior in acting on recent admission applications,</p>
<p>2) has a strong program in an area the applicant is interested in,</p>
<p>3) is affordable based on its known behavior in acting on financial aid applications,</p>
<p>and</p>
<p>4) is likeable to the applicant. </p>
<p>Lurkness,
Ok on NYU -- I had checked the NYU website and the Stevens dual info was posted under engineering. Guess they haven't updated yet.</p>
<p>For Engineering - none of the Ivy's are ideal, but if you want the rest of the package, especially if you are less than positive about engineering you might want one or two on the list.</p>
<p>Assuming your child is similar to mine (top 1% of the class, 750+ scores on SAT1s and SAT2s), decent ECs. I suggest: </p>
<p>reaches for everyone
Harvard (maybe - look into how fast engineering is really expanding), Columbia (Fu is respected), MIT and Caltech (visit both - Caltech especially is very quirky), Olin (free tuition!), Stanford, Harvey Mudd</p>
<p>reachy matches
Carnegie Mellon, Rice</p>
<p>Fairly safe
RPI, Worcester Polytech, U of Md (pick two)</p>
<p>Don't know where they are on the scale, but worth considering: Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, Georgia Tech, Rose Hullman, University of Rochester</p>
<p>You should be able to whittle the list down to 6-8 reaches (that would be matches if they weren't so darn selective), 2-3 matches (excellent schools, but not quite so ridiculously popular), and 2 safeties.</p>
<p>Think about size, location (geography and urban/suburban/rural) as a way to cross schools off the list.</p>
<p>Out of the Ivies Cornell would make the most sense for engineering...</p>
<p>Other obvious reaches are Stanford, MIT, Caltech, Harvey Mudd, Olin.</p>
<p>I am not sure CMU and Rice can be counted as matches either.</p>
<ol>
<li> ParentofIvy: You know perfectly well that the counselor thinks your daughter is wonderful. You may not like the message this list gives, but if she were a less impressive student it would be a very different list. The fact that the counselor considered Rice and CMU as "matches" means that your daughter is an extremely strong student. </li>
</ol>
<p>Given that she is such a strong student, it's not unlikely that she will be accepted at several of the colleges to which she applies, maybe even most of them. Some students are. On the other hand, every year recently there are a few students who are extremely impressive who apply to many of the colleges at the top of your daughter's list, with the same kind of expectations, and are shocked to discover that the competition for places at those schools is much, much tougher than they imagined. There isn't room in the whole Ivy League for the top two or three students at every school in the country, and they don't select their classes just from among the top students. So do yourself a favor and get comfortable with the notion that there are probably 20-30 colleges that offer opportunities on the same level as the Ivy League colleges do, and most of them are somewhat more likely to accept a strong student.</p>
<ol>
<li><p>How about Michigan as a safe-ish match? If it is still doing rolling admissions, if you apply early enough you may hear by early December, which is as good as ED or EA. An added bonus is that you can do it and still apply to Stanford SCEA if you want. Michigan is a world-class university with (I think) a respected engineering school, and it tends to be pretty predictable based on SATs and GPA. If your daughter had an acceptance there in hand in December, there are lots of colleges that she might not bother applying to.</p></li>
<li><p>RPI, by the way, is Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, an old (older than MIT, I think) and respected engineering college in Troy NY, near Albany.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>Drexel is an engineering- and business-focused university (that also has a medical school and a brand-new law school) in Philadelphia, adjacent to Penn (literally across the street).</p>
<p>SIT is Stevens Institute of Technology, another old, famous, small engineering college, in Hoboken NJ (?).</p>
<p>Muhlenberg is a small college in central Pennsylvania. "Trinity" may mean the college by that name in Hartford CT, or San Antonio TX. I don't know anything about engineering at any of them.</p>
<p>The rest you should probably have heard of.</p>
<p>To be fair to OP, the D's stats are excellent and thus make her competitive everywhere, keeping in mind that reach schools are reaches for everyone. Its the list that is baffling, not the ambition of the student or her parents.</p>
<p>Also, depending on how hard you want to try for merit scholarships, four safeties is either two or three too many or too few. If you have picked a safety well, you really don't need more than one to assure an acceptable admission. (And if you use EA/rolling admissions intelligently, you may not need a safety at all, other than for financial purposes.)</p>
<p>Just finished touring colleges with prospective engineer #2.
Trinity (Hartford, CT) - has a 3-2 program of some sort with RPI. We didn't look at it.
RPI - the oldest engineering college in the country, I believe. A wonderful engineering program - state-of-the-art, collaborative, team-oriented projects, co-ops, etc. Exactly the program that my son said he was looking for, but he refused to get out of the car. He hated Troy. Oh well. It is only 25% women, so a great place for a woman interested in engineering to apply (actually, that was another reason why he refused to get out of the car).
Dartmouth and Brown - both good places for people who don't know what they want to do but think that they might like to explore engineering because you don't apply into the School of Engineering.
Tufts - 2 years ago, when my daughter was putting together her list, her CC told her that Tufts was looking to increase its enrollment of women in its school of engineering, so definitely worth looking at. I got the impression at WPI that they would also like to increase the percentage of women enrolled there, but maybe that was wishful thinking on the students' parts.</p>
<p>A couple of weeks ago, I met a really cute young woman and her mother, from South Carolina, in a hotel in New York. The young woman was wearing a spanking-new Rose- Hulman hoodie; she had just sent in her deposit. I complimented her both on her achievement and her bravery -- venturing in among all those boys!</p>
<p>CMU and Rice aren't guaranteed admissions, but they have approximately twice the admissions rate of most of the Ivy's. That's why I put them as reachy/matches. When we looked it seemed like there weren't too many of them.</p>
<p>I agree, btw, Cornell is the best Ivy for engineering. I forget about it, because my son didn't apply there!</p>
<p>Tufts as a safety, Tufts as a match. I can't bear it.</p>
<p>Could about 29,845 of us tell this person that despite what their counselor says, the process is different. "My kid had stats high on the Tufts scale, astounding EC's and amazing essays, and Tufts waitlisted my son/daughter" ? Maybe there should be a song:</p>
<p>"Tufts is not a safety, Tufts is not a safety, Tufts is not a safety, la la la la la..."</p>
<p>(I am not good at lyrics)</p>
<p>What's interesting about Tufts in this context is that in the last year or two it has implemented a completely new admission system, described in November 2007 by Robert Sternberg at the National Association for Gifted Children conference. I have NO idea how to reverse engineer the process at Tufts, and thus no idea how to gauge someone's chances there. </p>
<p>Here's the link to Common Data Set information about Tufts for the most recent admitted class (fall of 2007 entrants, I'm quite sure). </p>
<p>Sorry for being late to the discussions had too much to do yesterday night.
My daughter and both of us were shocked by the list and so I posted it on the CC.
We never thought that all the colleges she was interested in will be put on the reach list.
We have never thought about the colleges on the safety list and so it was really bad.
First thing we are planning to do is to study colleges on the safety list and make sure there are at least two that our daughter would like to attend.</p>
<p>CC at her D school became very defensive this year after the senior class debacle. Lot of the students from her prep school left with their safeties as the only admitted school.</p>
<p>So it seems they have now lowered expectation for everyone, but in my view this will make things bad even more for everyone involved</p>
<p>There are colleges on the list that are not particularly strong in Engineering like (U of Chicago or Gerogetown ) as the list was generated from the list of colleges my daughter have been looking at. But it seems all the colleges she have been looking at and desired to go have been put into the reach list and CC provided more colleges on the matches and safeties that are strong in Engineering and have the additional criteria of Women Field Hockey and National Merit Scholarship.</p>
<p>So the following colleges were added by CC
Matches: Bucknell, Emory, Lafayette, Lehigh, NYU, Tufts, Wake Forest, Wash. Univ at St. L
Safeties: BU, CWRU, Drexel, Muhlenberg, Northeastern, Rensselaer PI, Stevens IT, Syracuse U, Penn State, Trinity College (CT), Union College(NY), U Maryland, U of Rochester, Worcester PI</p>
<p>I'll be really obliged if people give their feedback on the safeties and matches that can be high safeties.
My Daughter will be happy in an environment where their is liberal atmosphere, freedom to choose classes, and not rural i.e either urban or semi urban.</p>
<p>Free to add colleges that you think cut the following criteria
1. Private University if not a University of California campus
2. Liberal student body in a semi urban or urban environment
3. Choice of courses that is freedom to choose non engineering classes as she might want to get into medicine
4. Have strong Biomedical Computational Engineerin or Operational Research and Financial Engineering or Computer Engineering.
5. Provide oppertunity at club or divison level Women Field Hockey
6. National Merit Scholarship</p>
<p>I believe it was stated before - there are some top engineering schools that would be great matches for your D that are rolling admissions - if you get the app in early enough the chances move more to safetly/match. Have you considered U Michigan or U Wisconsin - Madison? If she gets acceptances to one or both of these in Nov or Dec it takes off a lot of pressure. </p>
<p>If you follow the Lehigh/Tufts/Wash U threads there are tons of kids that thought these were safe or matches that were either rejected or waitlisted. Many of these schools value demonstrated interest. Treating them as a "safety" and not visiting campus if you live close enough, etc, could move them to a "reach".</p>