Let’s look at Yale as an example.
From 2008-2016, they enrolled on average 0.89 students from North Dakota each year. Wyoming was even worse, enrolling just just 3 students over 9 years at Yale for undergrad. So while moving to North Dakota might be the funny punch line to a joke, I would assume any geographic diversity bump to be almost nil. Over that same time period, a total of 34 students or roughly 4 per year from Mississippi enrolled at Yale. If you estimate yield at 70%,
http://yaledailynews.com/blog/2016/09/12/yield-rate-increases/, Yale admits about 6 students per year from the OP’s state.
There probably are more than 200 times as many total students with a 34+ ACT in California than there are in Mississippi. Scores like that are not at all unusual at rich prep schools, at some magnet schools and in certain wealthy suburbs (all of which California has in abundance), but for obvious reasons scores like that are almost never found in lower income rural area or urban ghettos. A Mississippi student with that kind of testing credential is extremely rare.
“I got a 1410 on the PSAT with a SI of 210 (perfect score on math, Writing and Reading counting twice as much as math killed me) so I most likely will not be NMF since I think they said commended score is 211 nationally, so I won’t even get that.”
Semi-finalists are actually given out at the state level and it looks like 211 may be just below the cutoff, but if things break your way, you could make it at 211. At this point though, assume you’ll get commended. Mississippi is not North Dakota but would give you some edge, write about all the stuff you’ve mentioned so far (middle and high school in same building etc.) and how it’s impacted you. Though for sure a single classroom for all grades would be a lot better! ;
OP’s SI is 210. Commended is 211.
Your 35 ACT score, in a state where the schools routinely rank at the bottom of national lists, is going to be a significant help. And any top school you get into will give you the financial aid you qualify for, regardless of where you live. If you can write some killer essays (maybe you could write one skewering stereotypes of your state?) and get good recs from your teachers, you will surely get in somewhere very good. Harvard and Vandy are no guarantees for anyone, but you should still give those schools (or others like them) a shot if they interest you.
But remember OP will compete with other MS kids who may be in prep schools, faculty kids, in magnets, have coll grad parents in MS for various reasons. Not the kids for whom even a state public is a leap. And then perhaps other Rural South applicants, with proven drives and a variety of experiences. It’s too simple to base projections on location, ACT, and some involvement with foster kids (we don’t know what, whether it’s stretchy or just fun.)
Sorry, but I’m being frank. There are no shoo-ins. OP needs a strategy beyond good LoRs, some catchy essay, and location. In a sense, he has to stand on his own (competitive) merits, including the level of thinking he shows. I think the fair thing is to point him to researching his targets much better. And upping what he brings to the table.
The 35 is nice. But he will still compete. The tippy tops will need to see the energy and more. And it all has to be wrapped into the right app and supps. No kids get in from ND or WY just because their parents live there and their stats are good. They still have to match, both in academics and in the attributes.
OP, I think many of us are sensing you’re bright. It comes through in how you write (despite the shoeless comments and some FA misunderstanding.) But you have to rise to this challenge, if you want to apply to the ridiculously competitive colleges. Think about it.
The North Dakota/Montana line was of course a joke. But if you really want to see if there are geographic bumps, looking simply at number of students admitted by state doesn’t tell you much. What you would need access to is the admission rate and more importantly the median critical metrics of admitted students (class rank, gpa and test scores and perhaps some color on the subjectives) and compare that against all admitted students. The bump may be small, but it is not nil and definitely not negative as was the OP’s original concern. Agree with @lookingforward in post #45, that the application will have to stand on its own, objectives and subjectives, and the standards are incredibly high for the tippy tops like Vandy and Harvard.
“The 35 is nice. But he will still compete. The tippy tops will need to see the energy and more. And it all has”
You’re giving way too much credit to adcoms, you almost think they’re flawless (which if they were, they’d be retired on a beach). The ten students that Harvard admitted who ended up posting racist and misogynist posts should be proof of that. I wonder what kind of leadership they showed in their apps.
But here’s an excerpt from Bruni’s “Where you go” book:
"I was a student at a large inner-city public school in Minneapolis. My hs was under-resourced, with high percentages of poor, minority and immigrant students. It had a robust program for Native American students and a program to support teenage mothers. But I am none of those things. I’m white and grew up middle class…Both my parents graduated from Princeton…And yet, there in my files, I found a note from an admissions officer: “She’d be a good admit for us from the Minneapolis Public Schools”. The other officer said “I’m in her corner” and would like to take one from the Minneapolis Public School.
Yale apparently wanted, even needed, a student to represent not just my hs but my entire 35,000 district, which is 33% white, 65% fall under federal poverty measures, a third are English language learners. The admissions officers knew, I think, that it would look unfortunate to overlook a public school system as large as Minneapolis. So they picked me, the white daughter of two Ivy League graduates."
Adcoms are making mistakes, have made mistakes and will make many more mistakes, because well, they’re human. If some adcom in a tippy tops says, we need some one from rural Missisippi, he has a really good shot with the 35, a really good shot. I’m not saying that you don’t have to work on the app, of course.
TM, it seems you tend to respond to bits of what I say and miss the…well, holistic. I’m not sure how your perspective developed.
And, of course, an isolated comment about Minn public schools tells zip about what made her app compelling, besides that. I wonder if the person quoted has some larger perspective.
We cannot tell OP he has “a really good shot.” He’s still learning, sorting through misperceptions, a few days ago had no idea, misread FA, how the ACT is accepted, and more. Let’s encourage him to dig in, not set him up.
Adcoms are not perfect. But some on CC think that means, indisputably, that it’s anarchy. Umm, not. If you have experience with this, beyond your own college time, you know that.
@lookingforward I don’t think anyone is saying the OP is guaranteed to get into a tippy top just because of his location and ACT score. I think OP does have, in some ways, a better shot than some kids from a yet another competitive suburban high school in Westchester County, NY. And that comes with a caveat: OP needs to have done more than just get good grades and high test scores. I understand holistic admissions rule at the top schools. I think some of us are encouraging the OP becasue we think he perhaps isn’t aware of what his options may be. He may not fully understand that he could be a very competitive candidate.
Better than yet-another-Westchester, yes. But not necessarily a better shot than other top performers in his extended area. Or other premed wannabes there. Getting someone from MS is a nice goal (and of course I know the desire for geo diversity,) but my best is he will be far from the only applicant from MS. And to be honest, they can satisfy the need for some amount of rural kids in many other places.
I think many of us are seeing this OP is bright. I understand some want to encourage him to look far and wide. Clearly he did something right. we’d like to see him pick up the ball and run with it. But he’s behind in understanding, very much so- and, @Lindagaf, imo, the beneficial thing is to help him get “from here to there.”
I brought up expanding his health related activities. He’s already aware he needs to be 18 for many opps. But he needs to refine what he offers. Just explaining geo diversity doesn’t advance him, his chances.
“Adcoms are not perfect. But some on CC think that means, indisputably, that it’s anarchy. Umm, not. If you have experience with this, beyond your own college time, you know that.”
It’s not anarchy but admissions are random, I don’t think there’s too much predictability in it, if it were, this site would probably not exist. 
The admission rate may not be that useful, as it varies with how many unqualified students apply in each state. Do you have links to any of the other data you say is needed? Can you demonstrate the median ACT/SAT of admitted students at Yale from North Dakota or MS is any lower than those from New York or California?
@theloniusmonk , that is possibly the biggest misconception on CC. Admissions to highly selelctive colleges are NOT random, though it may seem that way. It’s been said ad nauseum, but the colleges do not randomly choose applicants. Thousands of highly qualified students will get to the gate. The kids that get through the gate are chosen for reasons known to the college. The applicant offered something the college wanted. The college is filling seats and they know who they want in those seats. Every year, they look at many and choose a few deliberately. Look up “institutional needs” and you will understand that it is not random. https://survivingthecollegeapplicationprocess.com/institutional-priorities/
i think the OP’s original intent was to ask if being from rural Mississippi would ADVERSELY affect his college applications. i don’t think it will (although it’s possible there may be an adcom who might view it negatively) but it certainly won’t give it some magical boost if other parts of the application (essay, ECs, interview, a couple misspellings on Common App) aren’t up to snuff compared to other applicants.
all we can say is, he’s at least got the stats to be a contender. perhaps there are some EC activities he can do to strengthen his chances, but he can’t do a thing about being from rural MS (unless he handles the situation well in an essay). so OP, apply and take your chances like everyone else and good luck.
@roethlisburger, agree that just looking at the admit rate is not determinative – that’s why the sentence didn’t end there. I don’t have access to the other data; to my knowledge no one does outside of the admissions offices, except perhaps the litigants in the reverse discrimination case against Harvard with respect to Harvard files. My point was that just citing the number of admits by state as you did doesn’t mean much. The bump may be small, but it is not nil as geographic diversity is listed as a non-academic consideration for HYPS in their Common Data set, same as race/ethnicity, legacy, first gen (although I am willing to bet the weighting is not equal). Further they almost always tout that the admitted class come from so many states along with stats and demographic makeup, gender/race/first gen. It must mean something. More relevantly to OP, being from rural MS is not going to hurt OP as was his original concern.
College admissions may not be random, but colleges do treat the details as a trade secret. Princeton said as much in a FOIA lawsuit. Nonetheless, some of the smaller or rural states do much better on standardized tests at the high end than some posters are assuming. MS has just under 1% of the HS age population in the country. For the last year, I could find data for, there were 2235 perfect ACCT scores. So if MS followed the national average, it might have 22 perfect ACT scores each year. Yet, one school in MS had 7 perfect scores this year: http://wjtv.com/2017/02/14/7-st-andrews-students-receive-perfect-score-on-act/. The corollary to that is the geographic diversity bump, if it exists at all, is likely to be cancelled out by the hit you take for not attending a competitive high school.
Just a comment. There are under-performing and under-resourced high schools. But these can still have some great and dedicated (and well educated) teachers. Some of these hs will have different tracks for college bound vs other paths. These schools are more than their average performance can tell. We see this in many magnets.
So just how OP’s hs stands is one more thing we don’t know.
“but the colleges do not randomly choose applicants.”
It’s not totally random, I agree, but it’s not totally predictable either, and I think it’s more random than predictable. But I think you’re missing the point - it’s more random than predictable to the observer, i.e. students and parents applying to top schools. It may be totally predictable inside (I don’t think it is) but since it’s perceived as random you have the schools getting more and more apps. There was someone a couple years ago who got into all the ivies and Stanford, MIT, Duke and she basically said college admissions is really unpredictable (i.e. random) so she applied everywhere.
Its one anecdote but it is imo representative of how students think these days.
If you wan a non-random admissions Asia and Europe have them. One test taken in tenth grade and based on that, you already know where you can get in.
@theloniusmonk no one said it’s predictable. If it was, CC wouldn’t exist. And I think you are missing the point. No one is suggesting the OP apply to European or Asian colleges. I don’t think most students are applying to more and more schools only because they think it’s random. They are applying to more and more schools because the Common App makes it easy to do so, because they and their parents think they are exceptional (most aren’t), because last year their friends applied to a bunch of colleges, so why shouldn’t they, and because they are under the mistaken belief that if they apply to more schools they might win the lottery.
I looked up the girl you mentioned. Yes, admissions are unpredictable, (not quite the same as random), but the most experienced CC poster around could have said with confidence that she would have certainly been accepted to at least one, and more likely several, tippy top colleges. Look at her resume, which included mulitple major national awards and the founding of several non-profits while still in high school. This girl is clearly exceptional. I dont want to digress too much from OPs topic, but admissions are not really going to be unpredictable for a girl like this. There are literally a handful of students like her, and almost every college will want them. http://www.poojachandrashekar.com/resume.html
OP, it’s worth you looking at this girl’s resume to give you an idea of what top colleges like to see. That doesn’t mean you should frantically start trying to do what she did, but it will give you something to compare yourself to. And don’t worry too much after reading it, because there are students who don’t do half of what she did but they still manage to get into Yale and the like. Just beware though that top colleges like to see real commitment and true interest in things apart from grades and scores.