Good decision, I’ll bet that if she puts some effort into her essays she will be getting her acceptance in December.
Be careful with Naviance for schools that admit by major. For engineering or CS it isn’t always accurate. Look at the school’s overall acceptance rates for engineering if you can find them. Again, none of those schools should be considered a safety for a prospective engineering major, including OSU.
My D’s school’s val with perfect scores and GPA (and I mean perfect perfect) was wait listed at Michigan for engineering.
@Scubaski1. With all due respect your not getting good advice. Naviance doesn’t take into account engineering which is always higher. I live by Wrigley and my son went to the number one high school in the state 3 years ago. I am also a regular on Michigan boards helping people out and have seen who’s getting rejected yearly from all your schools. I also have friends whose kids are at just about all your schools including 2 at MIT. My sons at Michigan for engineering with great stats, GPA etc
Ohio State… Maybe safety. Purdue… Safety.
WashU… Flip of a coin, Illinois… Many getting rejected with your stats from Instate yearly. Look at last year’s thread.
Sorry not trying to be rude but just trying to be informative.
I only wish your daughter the best of luck.
@knowsstuff - I tend to agree with you on almost all things but I’ve been hearing some scary things out of Ohio this last cycle for engineering - in state kids with ACT of 33 and 4.0 GPAs not getting accepted to main campus. Purdue’s acceptance rate for engineering is also dropping year after year. Matches for this student for sure, but I’d still add at least one true safety.
Yep totally agree. Last year OSU was brutal. Purdue used to be a given for a lot of kids due to the amount of kids they take yearly. I have noticed that also that it’s getting tougher. Wisconsin has been tougher and Minnesota seems to be going in that trend the last few years. I know a college counselor at the Lab school and she is telling me some kids are only getting into their safeties. These kids would normally get into just about any college they applied to. Not anymore. Our high school was also sorta a feeder to NW and UChicago and UIUC general population was a given. We did well with engineering but not a guarantee.
The good news is that the number of high school graduates is stagnating over the next decade before going down so it shouldn’t get worse like it has over the last decade.
I’m not depending on Naviance for this info. We have visited all the engineering schools she is applying to, attended the engineering tours and info sessions at each school, and communicate specifically with the engineering admissions reps. UIUC, Minn, Wash are not reaches for her. I do know that Mich is more selective. I never said it was a safety.
Our top-tier public HS is 100% college bound with a large # of students going to UIUC, Minn, Mich, Ohio… The admission reps are constantly at our school. My own son and 8 of his HS friends are sitting in an OSU dorm now, so I’m pretty familiar with OSU as well.
Anyhow, we’re comfortable with her college list. If she can’t get into one of the 14 schools on her list (incl her own state’s flagship) as a female from a large high-weighted HS, with a 1580 SAT/800 Math II/790 Chem, 226 PSAT/prob National Merit, perfect 4.0 GPA with classes like Calc 3/Diff Equations/Linear Algebra, AP Physics C, AP Chem, AP Calc BC, ( 8+ other AP classes) with all 5 scores, and a boatload of high-level EC, etc…
Then I guess she can do community college and try to transfer into UIUC as a sophomore. So our safety is community college.
I’m sure your D will get into many, many wonderful schools and hopefully she’ll be accepted at her 1st choice, NU.
But I’d thought I’d chime in on UMich, since I tabulated many of the results from EA and the subsequent RD releases in February and March of this year. It’s a reach for everyone OOS, not a target.
We actually have a somewhat frequent poster here on CC who had a kid with 4.0 GPA/1,600 SAT that was deferred EA and rejected RD. That kid will be attending Cal Tech, so it worked out. There were high stat OOS UMich legacies deferred, then rejected. So, when applying make sure your D conveys a passion for attending UMich.
FYI, just throwing out a few stats. There are roughly 1,100-1,200 CoE seats available in a freshmen class of almost 7,000. For a comparison, LSA has about 4,100-4,200 seats in the freshman class. The OOS acceptance rate for the Class of 2022 was 19% and now a bit under that for the Class of 2023. Obviously CoE will be even less than that 19%, since there are fewer seats available.
At any rate, your D’s stats are stellar. Best of luck.
Oh, one more thing. Naviance won’t show results by school/major, tell you who’s 1st gen, Pell Grant, recruited athlete, etc. So, the scattergrams are useful, but limited.
Yes, please PM me if you or your D have questions.
I don’t think anyone was saying that WI, MN, UIUC were reaches for your D but there is a difference between a match and a true safety.
The reason I joined this board two years ago was one of my D’s closest friends got shut out of all his colleges and ended up at a safety that was only on the list because a GC made him add it. (My D also went to a college pre-HS where 99% went on to 4 year colleges). Other than his three reaches, the other schools should have been easy matches according to Naviance, and he had legacy status at one (although he didn’t apply their ED which seems to negate that hook.).
There are some WONDERFUL engineering safety schools, especially for a students with strong stats. My D had two true safeties on her list that she truly would have been happy to attend and be successful. Psychologically the benefit of an early acceptance (because hopefully the safety will have rolling admission), that usually comes with a ton of merit, honors college, etc… for strong students, can make the rest of the process much less stressful. When D’s deferral from Michigan came right before xmas, she said “oh well, at least I know for sure I can study chem e somewhere.”
@sushiritto - Thanks for the info… I understand how competitive Mich is. UM is low on the list for her. I think she felt it was too big and spread out, with the Engr schools on a separate side of campus. The music program is very competitive, esp. for a double major. She’s on the fence if she’ll even apply there.
@momofsenior1 - I do appreciate the advice. We have a counselor meeting tonight and will review her safety schools and see if we should add some.
I just sometimes find the responses on CC somewhat alarmist (not yours)…I went through the same thing with my son last year - was told on CC that he wouldn’t get into any of his schools, so he took a lot of extra time applying to many safeties (like Montana, Iowa).
He got into every school but one, incl schools on my D list, and he is nowhere near my daughter’s stats. And he’s male.
I posted about how lucky an avg. student like himself got into these schools, and another poster pointed out that he wasn’t lucky, but he was well-qualified. I think we sometimes need to be more realistic on things.
So I am trying to be more prudent with my daughter’s time, as she has a very full course load now. I just don’t see how Minn, Wash, Ohio, UIUC are not match/safeties for her. She’s not applying to WI. We understand the competitiveness of Mich.
She understands she’ll get plenty of rejections and doesn’t need an ego boost of more acceptances. She doesn’t need financial aid. She doesn’t really want to be in the Honors College of a less competitive program - but if that’s her only available path if other doors get shut, she’d do it.
Anyhow, we are always open to suggestions. If there are other good engineering safety schools you can suggest, we will definitely look into them.
Everyone seems to think there school is a reach when the stats don’t really back it up. State flagships are an example of that. When a school rejects more then 50% of its perfect scores then it’s a reach for everyone. No state flagship does that. JMHO.
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I will just chime in that I believe OSU Engineering may actually be more of a safety for and OOS student, especially female, with your daughters stats. Its hard to parse the data, but anecdotally it seems like being instate (especially from certain suburban Ohio zip codes with a huge number of applicants) is not a positive when it comes to admissions. We live in a suburb of Columbus and there are MANY horror stories of very high stat kids not getting into main campus engineering. They send those students to Lima, Marion or Newark campus all the time, knowing they will transfer sophomore year. But I feel like those stories for out of state students are more uncommon. Good luck.
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If you are getting no aid and can benefit from some merit, try adding top 20 colleges with merit scholarships for RD. Rice, Duke, Vandy have some.
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In general, for engineering, older private colleges which started from a Liberal Arts tradition tend to be weaker than universities which were established in the 19th century and were generally established to train kids for the future, rather than to provide an education to the elite. So most of the Ivies, UChicago, etc, will be weaker then the top state schools, MIT, CMU, Cornell, Michigan, UCB, UIUC, GTech, Stanford (which was modeled after Cornell) etc. Exceptions are Dukem which has an excellent engineering program, and UChicago, which is weak in engineering.
While people who are not engineers, and are convinces that “Ivies are the best at EVERYTHING” will disagree with this generalization, I have spent many years among engineering faculty, and this is the general attitude.
So, @Scubaski1, I think that NU is an excellent choice for ED in engineering for your D, based on her interests and on her planned majors. The only other college on your list which for which I think she should consider ED would be Cornell. I think that she should definitely apply to UIUC EA, to Purdue, and UMichigan as well.
I tend to agree that UIUC is a more likely a high match or a match for her, rather than a reach, and I think that the same is true for Purdue and UMN. These engineering programs have acceptance rates in the 20%-30%, as far as I can figure, and your D’s stats are in the top 25% for engineering students for all of them.
Of course, the best place to check is in your high school’s Naviance, and with the GCs, since they can give a better idea of what percent students with your D’s stats were accepted to these programs.
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NU is 18th on latest ranking list for engineering colleges among the likes of 1. MIT, 2. Stanford, 3. CIT, 4. Rice, 5. Princeton, 6. Yale, 7. Harvard, 8. Vanderbilt, 9. Columbia, 10. Duke, 11. U Penn, 12. Cornell, 13. Johns Hopkins, 14. WUSL, 15. Olin, 16. USC, 17. Norte Dame, 18. Northwestern, 19. GIT, 19. UCLA.
You shouldn’t worry at all if she ends up at NU.
Which ranking are you quoting @riversider? USNWR has Northwestern tied for 14 for undergraduate engineering programs:
- MIT
- Standford
- Berkley
- Tie Cal Tech and GT
- 3 way tie CMU, Michigan, UIUC
- 3 way tie Cornell, Purdue, and UT Austin
- Princeton
- VT
- 4 way tie - Northwestern, JHU, TAMU, UW Madison
- multi way tie Columbia, Duke, Rice, UCLA, UC SD, U Washington
Regardless, NU is a top 20 for engineering. Great program!
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@Riversider no reasonable engineering ranking would put NU below WashU, Yale, Notre Dame or Vanderbilt. I don’t know which universe the ranking you posted came from. It’s also strange that there’s no public school.
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I think the “scary stories” may also suggest that these Big Ten flagships may be rejecting overqualified applicants. In that sense, it may not matter how great your credentials are; they are not safeties because of that.