Anyone you know get into elite schools with about a 3.5 unweighted gpa?
Elite in this case acceptance rate under 30%
About 1.5% of enrolled students at Harvard have less then a 3.5 GPA. I know a student that could easily get into any school in the country with a 3.5 GPA. However, he is a single digit football recruit.
Be an athletic recruit, have a family member donate enough for a building, etc…
In all seriousness, it depends on the rest of the application and not just the GPA. Where does that UW GPA put you in terms of class rank? How’s the academic rigor? Standardized test scores? ECs? Awards?
Yes I do. Recruited athletes.
Very similar question to your other post. http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/what-my-chances/2145940-low-gpa-lots-of-aps.html#latest
If you attend a highly ranked university, very quickly you no longer think of yourself as being at an “elite” school, and you start finding yourself at an actual school, with tons of homework, tough classes, and with some very specific characteristics of the school (big city, rural, small town, large school, small school, some strong majors and some weak majors and some majors not offered, etc…).
You should try to understand what you actually want in a university.
With a 3.5 unweighted GPA you need to focus on safeties unless as others have pointed out you are one of the top athletes in the country in a sport that schools care about.
Yes, but it’s nothing to rely on. Need something special in the application (and you probably need a SAT/ACT score that is pretty high). Apply for a reach or two, but focus on matches and safeties.
There may also be some high schools where a 3.5 is a pretty good GPA. But really, unless you have some fabulous hook an acceptance is extremely unlikely.
Yes. There are students who have a 3.5 or less in even the most selective schools. They have other things that make them desirable to the colleges.
Most applicants to these schools are excellent students with great recommendations, accomplishments in extracurricular activities, writing good essays. So these schools have a difficult job having to reject the vast majority of these excellent applicants. They have to look for reasons to reject if the students are not stand outs in something they want.
So if there is no such attribute that has.a school, saying, “we want this”. And it’s something rare. Like very few applicants have this attribute. If that’s not the case, the AO has to start culling the many applications to get the best of the bunch. Even there, students with perfect SATs, perfect grades may find themselves cut because there are too many of them, though most school categorize test scores and class rank in a way so that “perfect” does not stand out from the line drawn for the top category.
Given that info, those with a 3.5 gpa, are often cut. Not all, but most,
recruited athlete OR
olympic medal winner OR
patent holder that generates significant revenue OR
company founder with capital >10 million dollars
URM with 97% tile+ test scores
lead a nationally recognized march or political event (google “David Hogg SAT Harvard”)
be the top global player of an instrument with international recognition.
etc…
If none of those conditions describe you, apply to your state public schools and do your best there!!
I do know someone who is accepted into a T25 university with single digit acceptance rate and lower than 3.5, but s/he was a top 10 athlete in the sport out of 10 million people in the state.
The original poster didn’t ask about Harvard, but about schools with a 30% acceptance rate or better. At Tulane, whose acceptance rate is slighltly below 30%, 38% of students have a GPA below 3.5. That is a lot more than recruited athletes. There is a lot more to the application. Does an unweighted 3.5 put you in the top 10% of your HS class? At some schools it may. What about top 25%? What are your test scores? What does the rest of the application look like?
A 3.5 GPA DOES NOT exclude getting an acceptance for a 30% acceptance rate school, and you don’t need to be an Olympic medalist.
@bp0001 “At Tulane, whose acceptance rate is slighltly below 30%,”
Actually Tulane’s acceptance rate is now 13% (Class of 2023).
I pulled the acceptance rate from Education Corner. This appears off. The GPA stats I grabbed from their 2018-2019 Common Data Set. The acceptance rate shown in the CDS is 17.3%. The point of my post still stands that a 3.5 GPA does not preclude an acceptance from this type of school.
^^^ I pulled the data directly from Tulane’s own website from May https://news.tulane.edu/news/tulane-prepares-welcome-class-2023. Just letting people know that the days when Tulane’s acceptance rates were in the 30’s is over.
Any way you slice it Tulane is not an easy match for the 3.5 GPA applicant anymore and it’s not even “elite” by most ranking standards (more like T50-75). With that said, if OP thought Tulane is “elite” enough for him/her than I would definitely apply ED in this case.
My advice would be to change your focus. Focus on schools you can be successful at not how “elite” they are. That doesn’t eliminate elite schools some of them just might be the type of school you could be successful at. However, getting accepted at those schools is a challenge and you are going to be at the bottom of the applicant pool. Your best chance is to understand the reason it might be the right school for you. If you can’t answer that for yourself then it will be difficult for the school to understand.
“olympic medal winner OR patent holder that generates significant revenue OR company founder with capital >10 million dollars”
NO tip. (Unless the Olympian is recruited.)
The problem is 3.5 means some grades lower than A. That implies lesser learning or skill. If these classes are cores or essential to the hoped-for major, big Oops.
You could become a world class artist and go to Julliard. A lot less emphasis on grades at a specialty school. Does that help?
@bp0001 , @socaldad2002 is correct, most schools are having their acceptances drop like a rock!
Schools that I never would have even thought about as “elite” are now in the low double digits acceptances. One kid at our school, straight As , 32 ACT got rejected ED to tulane, another kid with 1500+ SAT, >3.8 GPA UW got rejected from Northeastern. There’s a vicious cycle with common app, of kids not being able to accept just going to a solid state flagship and instead applying to 10-20 reach schools because common app makes it so easy, driving the numbers even worse.
so if the OP is going to use the most up to date acceptance rate numbers that are accurate, s/he may be fine at 30% plus acceptance rates, But these are not the high profile state flagships or liberal arts schools that people normally think of. Virginia Tech’s yield this year was massively higher than expected so even the “2nd tier” (don’t hate me) publics are probably going to drop under 30% acceptance next year.
The CDS has a section for % of class with GPA below 3.5. However, some colleges use weighted/recalculated GPA or do not fill out this section at all. The specific numbers for Tulane, as listed in their 2018-19 CDS are below. Admit rate is clearly below the OP’s 30% threshold, and a good portion of the class is below 3.5. Tulane is far from the only school that meets this description.
Admit Rate = 17%
Mean GPA = 3.56
65% Below 3.75
38% Below 3.5
19% Below 3.25
7% Below 3.0
1% Below 2.5
With the extreme variation between different sub 30% admit rate colleges, it’s difficult to give a generalized answer. At many low admit rate colleges, few students have less than a 3.5 UW. At colleges where few have a less than 3.5 UW, there is often a good reason that those few sub 3.5 UW applicants are admitted, some of which have been listed in this thread. With a more specific list of colleges and more specific detail about the rest of the application besides just UW GPA, I could give a more specific response.
Both are correct, but you are listing different years. The acceptance rate by year is summarized below. Admit rate dropped from >30% to 13% in just 4 years. If the decrease continues, Tulane may be a sub 10% admit rate school next year. This pattern partially relates to improving need based FA at the cost of reduced merit aid.
Class of 2019 – 30.5% admitted, 3.51 Mean GPA
Class of 2020 – 26% admitted, 3.52 Mean GPA
Class of 2021 – 21.5% admitted, 3.56 Mean GPA
Class of 2022 – 17% admitted, 3.56 Mean GPA
Class of 2023 – 13% admitted, ??? Mean GPA