I’m currently a junior Pacific Islander/Asian, I’m moving from Florida to Bellevue, Washington (a rich city) in my senior year. The current school I attend is a hard choice public school that’s ranked around #50. However, the school I’m moving to is a regular public school.
Will moving affect my admissions because I’m moving to a rich city and therefore I appear rich?
Will colleges see my old school and realize my GPA suffered because I went to a hard school?
I’m applying to Vanderbilt, WashU, Rice
Colleges will view your app in the context of your high school and your circumstances. They aren’t going to judge you differently because you have moved to a wealthy city. They will probably look at each high school you attend. They will look at your recs, your grades, your EC’s. They will consider it all, not just where you live at the time you apply.
Many students move in the course of their high school career. It’s the rare student indeed who made the move by him or herself. It’s a circumstance beyond your control. There’s nothing you can do about it, so stop fretting. You do the best you can with the opportunities available to you.
Colleges will see that your records come from both schools.
Potential disadvantages:
Recommenders at the new school may not know you well, and getting recommendations from the old school may be more difficult.
Discontinuity of extracurricular activities if they are school or region based.
If the new school has graduation requirements that the old school did not, you may have to “catch up” on them, potentially displacing other desired courses.
Moving during the school year can be more academically disruptive than moving in the summer.
Moving to a different state after fall of 12th grade could result in loss of state residency in the old state but not gaining state residency in the new state for state universities immediately after high school graduation.
Hi. I moved across states before my sophomore year of HS. I can say that you are probably going to experience academic disruption no matter what due simply to your new environment, teachers, peers, etc. Make the most of the move. Get involved right away. Colleges will be impressed by your adaptability.
You may want to consider the following mitigations:
Arrange for recommendations from your teachers and counselor at the current school before the end of this year.
Find out what graduation requirements and courses exist at the new school and contact it early to arrange your 12th grade schedule before everything desirable gets filled up. If you wait until next fall, you may be stuck with the undesired leftover courses.
Good summary by @ucbalumnus. I will say as a general statement that for selective/highly-selective colleges having a holistic admissions process (i.e. they consider everything, and no particular thing is a disqualifier), you needn’t be concerned about how the normal twists and turns of life might “look” to an admissions officer. They do this as a career, they tend to be good at it, and you will get fair consideration.
The main thing to focus on is that given the selective institutions you listed, you want to have a good plan as to the number and types of colleges applied to – both in terms of admissions likelihood to at least one of them, and just as importantly, affordability. Get that all planned out, throw yourself into your HS senior year as if it will never come again, and make it a point to have some fun along the way.
Change “disqualifier” to “assurance of admission” to make it more accurate. For the most selective colleges, it is easy for things to be disqualifiers (e.g. low HS GPA), but nothing by itself assures admission (e.g. high HS GPA is necessary, but not sufficient).
“no particular thing is an assurance of admission” is certainly a true statement, as is “nothing by itself assures admission”. But for my college at least, forty years of working with their AO leads me to believe that what I wrote is also true. The less desirable a GPA (or whatever metric), the lower one’s already-low chances are. But there is no defined cutoff point, unlike for some state colleges, and so to my way of thinking “no particular thing is a disqualifier”.
I’ve dealt with recruited athletes whose academics were so subpar (the exception BTW – most are very good) that the coach and Admissions were slugging it out as to whether he/she would be admitted. That sort of thing only happens because there is no definitive line. Likewise, if Amanda Gorman had applied RD to Brown this year, I’m confident she would be admitted no matter what her stats. Holistic.
College admissions folks do not look at your neighborhoods or the wealth of your community when reviewing your admissions application. You can put that idea aside.
Before you move, ask junior year teachers about letters of reference. You won’t be at your new school long enough to establish those relationships before applications are sent. You also need to find out how LOR are sent when they are not from the school you attend. Just make sure that gets done.