Chance me for Swarthmore College ED2 [PA resident, 3.85 GPA, 1530 SAT, economics and statistics]

DadTwoGirls
Mon, 15 Dec 2025 23:17:23 +0000

SaintRice:

but i want my ed to be the highest school so wouldnt it make sense to ed to a school where i probably wont get in?

You really do not need to apply ED anywhere at all. I would only recommend applying ED if two things are both true: (1) A particular school is clearly your top choice; (2) Either you are fine being full pay, or the NPC shows it as likely to be affordable.

We have not mentioned budget in this thread and I was sort of guessing or hoping that it might not be an issue for you. However, it appears that you do not have a clear top choice. You can apply RD to a number of LACs and just see where you get in. There really are a huge number of very good LACs, and you can do very well at any of a long list of them. If you ever get to the point of applying to graduate programs, then again you can do well and be a competitive applicant with a bachelor’s degree from any of a very wide range of schools. If you graduate with a bachelor’s and get a job almost anywhere, you will most likely find yourself working alongside coworkers who graduated from a wide range of schools.

I might add that between my wife, my two daughters, and I, and my siblings, none of us applied ED anywhere. We nonetheless went to very good universities and have done well. You do not need to apply ED at all and in your situation right now I do not think that I would.

Another important point: Rankings are mostly to sell magazines or to generate clicks on web pages. Rankings do not say anything about whether a school is a good fit for you or for me. Higher ranked schools are typically not necessarily “better”. In some cases they are just more academically challenging and/or more difficult to get admitted to. There is in some fields a shortage of jobs for recent PhD graduates, which means that very good PhD graduates will be taking jobs at a very wide range of schools, and will turn into very good professors. Also, some excellent and well known professors go to less well known schools for reasons such as liking the location and/or having a spouse that has a job in that area, or because housing is affordable there, or because there are interesting research opportunities there [One example is that there are some top experts in estuary biology at a small school in Nova Scotia, because that is where the most extreme estuaries are]. There are excellent professors and excellent classes and very good research and internship opportunities and very good students all over the place.

Unfortunately the LACs that I know best are either the really top ranked ones in New England (all of which would be a high reach for you), and the small primarily undergraduate universities in eastern Canada. With you coming from PA the schools that I know in Canada would be a long way to drive to get to a school that you have probably never heard of.

However, I agree with others that schools like Carleton and Haverford and Wesleyan are very good and very much worth considering. You might seriously consider applying to all of them. I do not think that you have missed the RD deadline for any of them yet. You might want to look at Dickinson, Franklin and Marshall, Gettysburg College, and so on. With a 3.85 GPA and a 1530 SAT you are a strong student and there are plenty of very good LACs that would be very happy to have you as a student.

You might want to make sure that you have applications in to at least two safeties before too much more time passes in this particular application season.

Regarding math, your best option at this point might be to get a tutor and see how much you can strengthen your abilities. I have a feeling that you just got on the wrong foot at some point and can bring this back together and do well. Putting in some extra effort to get back on track in math is going to be worth it over time, particularly for someone interested in economics and/or statistics.

I agree with other comments about economics using math. As one example, in graduate school I took one single non-math class, which was econometrics. Even as a math major, econometrics had me spending one or two Saturday afternoons taking a close look at the underlying math to make sure that I understood it sufficiently well. With math, having a good understanding of the concepts is important, and this can be important even when taking an economics class. I by the way liked econometrics quite a bit, although I didn’t do anything with it primarily just because I found a couple of other things that I also liked.

All of this takes me back to a question that might also have been glossed over on this thread: Do you already have applications in to at least two schools which are safeties for both admissions and affordability? If not, you need to get this done. If you do already have these two applications in, given your recent thoughts about preferring LACs, does this include two LACs that you would be happy attending (if not, there is still time to get applications in).