What would be a good fit for me?

College Search & Selection
1

I am a grade 12 student studying in India

Academics:
I am doing the IB, with 4 HLs and 2 SLs, Business Management HL (7), Economics HL (6), English HL (6), Mathematics HL (4), Physics SL (4), French B SL (5).
SAT 2 attempts: 1290 and 1350, doing it again
Will do the ACT
Will do TOEFL

Extra Curriculars:
Won best delegate at Model UN at my school
Won best position paper at interschool Model UN
Secretary General of my school’s MUN
2nd place in school General Knowledge quiz
3rd place in adidas football(soccer) tournament
Performed in the school play for 3 years
Did the trinity college drama exam and passed with 85%
Interned at 3 different companies- Radio Indigo, Accenture and Gravitas Investment

I am looking to study finance and was wondering which colleges would be a good fit for me.
This is my shortlist as of now:
Dream

  1. UPenn
  2. MIT
  3. Columbia
  4. NYU

High target

  1. UT- Austin
  2. U Indiana - Bloomington
  3. Northeastern U

Target

  1. Drexel U
  2. UC davis

Thank you for your help.

2

What is your financial situation?

3

I think you would fit great at Indiana and the Business school is great from what I hear. Your scores for Ivy League like Upenn etc are too low but you can try…

4

In the worst case, I can afford to pay the entire tuition

5

Thank you so much, I appreciate the responses

6

UC Davis does not have a finance or a true “business” major. Are you looking at Econ or Managerial Econ instead? I would look over the curriculum to make sure these majors will meet your career aspirations. Instead of UC Davis, I would consider applying to UC Irvine which has a Business Admin and Business Econ major.

7

The competitiveness of MIT for international students cannot be understated. It is ridiculously competitive even for US applicants - many students with perfect stats and impressive extracurriculars are denied. Because of the combination of reputation, and being one of a tiny handful of US schools that are need-blind and meet full need for internationals… and add to that the fact that they limit international enrollment to 10% of undergraduates… this is the longest of long shots.

Penn and Columbia are need-aware for non-US applicants, so your chances are better if you do not apply for financial aid than if you do. (If you do apply for aid and still get in, they will meet full documented need.) They admit more internationals than MIT does, but it’s still a very steep admission path. NYU is a little less steep because its budget depends on large numbers of full-pay international students. Even if you apply for aid, NYU won’t meet full need, not even for US students much less international ones. Northeastern is in the same category - they love their full-pay international students (although unlike NYU they do meet full need for their US students, made possible in part by international dollars). The question there is, do you even want to be one of the students who full-pays over $300K to pad the bottom line of one of these schools?

The public U’s you are looking at would be a better financial deal, and the UI and UT business schools are comparable in reputation to the private ones. It’s still going to be very tough to be admitted unless you can raise your test scores, and not a sure bet even with a near-perfect SAT. Davis and Drexel are realistic, I think, but Drexel will be $$$ and Davis, as Gumbymom says, doesn’t have an undergrad finance major - and your price for a UC would be as high as some private U’s - around $65K/year.

In terms of private U’s that could possibly be worth full price, you might want to consider Lehigh, which is especially known for finance - this is its most popular major. For a co-op program that’s comparable to Drexel’s and Northeastern’s at a public U price, look at U of Cincinnati http://catalog.sou.edu/content.php?catoid=2&navoid=131

Other public U’s to consider:
[Berkeley, UMichigan, UVA, UCLA, UW-Seattle, UNC, Georgia Tech - assume you may already have ruled these out based on competitiveness and cost?]
But Arizona State, UMinn-Twin Cities, Penn State, Ohio State, Michigan State, UGA, UW-Madison, UT-Dallas, Rutgers, UTenn-Knoxville, U of Utah, UIUC, UMD, Pitt, Purdue, William & Mary, and UMass Amherst… ALL of these have higher-ranked business programs than Northeastern. The Missouri, Alabama, Arkansas, Colorado, South Carolina, Arizona, Kansas, and Oklahoma flagship U’s, as well as SUNY’s Buffalo & Binghamton, Auburn, and Iowa State, all outrank Drexel. (Not to overemphasize rankings, and this is at the MBA level, but just to make the point that there are many excellent b-schools at relatively-affordable public universities all over the US.)

William and Mary might be a particularly good one to look at, as it has a “public ivy” reputation and it’s making a specific effort to recruit international students right now. (It’s more expensive than many publics, but still under $60K/year.)

Given that you don’t sound as if full-paying for a private U would be easy for your family, and that your qualifications fall more into what people on CC call the “average excellent” range rather than the super-high-stats + national/international-level awards & distinctions range that it takes to get into the super-elites… I would really encourage you to give public U’s a closer look and re-balance your list to emphasize schools that you can both get into and realistically afford. The schools you are targeting would be tough admits for a US student with your credentials, and for the most part being an international student makes it that much tougher. You sound like an excellent student, and many excellent schools will be happy to accept you, but you need more true matches and safeties to avoid being disappointed and/or having to over-pay for a private U that isn’t measurably better than the more affordable public alternatives.

8

aquapt, thank you for the effort and thought you’ve put into this, it is truly helpful

9

Update:
After taking into consideration opinions and research off the internet , this is a list I have I have to come up with. Please feel free to give me your thoughts on the same.

Reach
Univesity of Texas - Austin
NYU - Stern
Emory
Wake Forest University
University of Wisconsin at Madison
UC berkeley
William and Mary (

Match
Lehigh
Ohio State
Indiana - Bloomington- Kelley
Northeastern
UNC - Chapel Hill
Miami University
Babson
UIUC
u of maryland

Safety
Penn State
Virginia Tech
Drexel
Rutgers
Purdue

thank you for your help @sunnyflagirl @Gumbymom @aquapt

10

Take UNC-CH off your list; you are not competitive for admission. Probably not for UIUC or Northeastern, either.

Also, Virginia Tech should not be considered a “safety” school: a friend who runs a college admissions counseling service spoke this past Spring with an admissions officer from Virginia Tech, who said that their office had gotten a directive from their provost to lower the admissions rate. So they did and put all the students whom they would normally have accepted (beyond an elite group of applicants) onto the waiting list — apparently, it was a huge list. In the end, Virginia Tech took a good number of students off the wait list; but if you’re on that list, you just never know.

With your stats, Purdue is not a “safety” school, either.

I was going to mention Miami University in Oxford, Ohio: http://miamioh.edu/fsb/academics/index.html

11

Also, do you plan to actually visit any of the schools you are putting on your list? I ask because many of them are very different in size, location, and overall character; and I have a hard time imagining that you would be happy at all of them, given those differences.

12

^^ Hard to say about Northeastern. They have, at times, been noted to be more forgiving stat-wise with full-pay international applicants than with domestic applicants for whom they’re obliged to meet full documented need. I think OP has a chance there. But I am unconvinced that full-pay at NU would be a good value compared to the many public university business programs that are at least as well-regarded. There are benefits - the location, of course, and the fact that the co-op program allows international students to gain work experience in the US with relative ease. So the cost-benefit analysis would be an individual thing.

For many of these schools, it is tricky but necessary to drill down on the competitiveness of the business programs specifically; you can’t really tell from a school’s overall admissions stats, as the differential in competitiveness between the business majors and the school-as-a-whole varies from zero to very significant, depending on the program and whether the school admits by major.

13

@aquapt: Prior to this past year, I would have agreed with you about Northeastern; but this past year we had 7 or 8 students from our high school apply to NEU and none of them were admitted, and in the past we have had an average 60% admit rate there (and the applicants this year were fairly high stat kids). So, it makes me think that the NEU Admissions Office may be doing something a little differently in its approach (but I also acknowledge that I just may be completely off base in my thinking).

14

I think without ACT and TOEFL scores, it is very hard to chance you and say what your match/safety schools would be. That said I would put Lehigh, UIUC, and MD in the low reach category and Purdue and VT are definitely not safeties.

15

Consider USC. Los Angeles is an amazing place and Marshal is a great business school. They don’t have a finance major but the Business Administration major can be tailored to focus in finance. The school has tons of connections for job and internship prospects as well.

16

You may have a decent shot at Rutgers University in New Brunswick. It is the flagship state university for New Jersey.They have a well respected business program. It is more selective than the overall university. A higher SAT or ACT would be helpful . With your current scores, it’s not a safety.

17

Hi all, I have branched these colleges into the following categories using my scores and a website called niche which helped me compare my scores with people who have been accepted over the last few years and therefore I categorised them in the following ways. however, I shall take into account all of your opinions and try to re-think some of the colleges and try to re-categorise some of the colleges.

Thank you for all your help

18

If I remember correctly, Niche just looks at students who have voluntarily submitted their stats and outcomes to Niche, so it’s not a complete sample. Try looking at the odds-calculators that Prepscholar provides for each school and see if it matches what Niche says.

But also… even the most accurate calculator cannot account for factors that cause significant variability from the aggregate numbers.

At some schools, business majors are a lot harder to get into than other programs. At other schools there isn’t a big difference.

At some schools, international applicants face much longer odds of admission than domestic applicants. At other schools there isn’t a big difference. At a few schools, full-pay international applicants actually have better odds than US applicants.

At some schools, the aggregate numbers are a fiction, because no individual applicant really faces those odds. Either they apply Early Decision and have a reasonable chance, or they apply Regular Decision and have an even lower chance than the aggregate. It’s not unusual for some schools to admit a majority of their class ED, leaving just a small number of spots for a huge number of applicants in the RD round. (UPenn, on your list, is one of these.)

So there’s a lot of context to consider in evaluating the strength of your application to any given school. Since it’s harder for colleges to compare “apples to apples” as far as transcripts, for international applicants, my sense is that standardized test scores become a more important factor, and a 1350 SAT, while it’s very good especially if English isn’t your first language, is below median for a lot of the programs you’re targeting. So, if you can bring that up or get a strong ACT score, that will help you a lot.

Ultimately it doesn’t really matter what reach/match/safety label you put on a given school, as long as you have a well-crafted list with some good back-up choices. My personal opinion is that if you don’t have a 1400+ SAT by the time you apply, you would be wise to add a “super-safety” category to this list and apply to a few sure bets. Your safeties are likely but not slam-dunks.

19

@kgunited123, Is it correct that you are not a US citizen or green card holder and will be applying as an international? If yes, then you need to clarify your strategy regarding financial aid.

As mentioned, most schools are need-aware for internationals, meaning that your application for financial aid will be a factor in admissions. Statistics on international admissions are not widely available. Generally we know how many resident aliens are enrolled and we know how many enrolled students receive financial aid, but in most cases we don’t know how many internationals applied and what percentage were offered places.

It’s a reasonable assumption that an international’s application for financial aid could be a negative in admissions and that a full-pay application could be a positive. Therefore, don’t apply for financial aid unless you really need it.

Conversely, if you do need financial aid or think you might going forward, apply for it at the start. Most colleges will not offer aid in later years if it wasn’t requested in year one.

I’m not familiar with Niche, but unless the site specifically provides international student stats I would be wary of the outcome. Again, it’s very difficult for international students to gauge accurately their chances of admissions, but it’s a fair assumption that overall international admission rates are lower than US rates, maybe even half. MIT says “Every year more than 4,000 international students apply to MIT, and we can admit fewer than 150.” That equals a 3.75% admit rate.

@aquapt, You write:

I don’t mean to challenge you because I agree that that seems like a logical possibility, but wonder if you could provide more color on which schools you are referring to?

20

@kgunited To add to aquapt comments, sites like niche don’t break down the sat scores by different colleges or majors within a university.
Search for admissions profile of entering freshmen from the university website.

For the business school at Rutgers New Brunswick, the mid 50% for SAT is 1330 to 1460, higher than overall scores for Rutgers NB. I am a NJ resident and I do know that Rutgers is trying to attract more international full pay students, so that may be favorable. The key here is “full pay”.