I very much agree. Also Wesleyan maybe.
Less selective, maybe Oberlin, Bard, Muhlenberg, St Olaf, Elon, and Loyala Marymount.
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My Rice son was off campus his sophomore year, but back on for jr and senior year. And some Rice students are not (this is their term) âjacked off campusâ at all.
Why Sophomores rather than Seniors?
Your sonâs experience sounds like the usual pattern. D22 was one of the lucky ones - as a sophomore, she had a senior friend with medical accommodations allowing said friend to choose a suitemate so as to ensure proper medical training in case of emergency, and D22 was the chosen one. So sheâs been on campus every year.
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IIRC, there was a sort of lottery, and thatâs what happened. More seemed to go off campus junior year and then came back. It all worked out b/c he also stayed in the house they rented over the summer for his internship and got additional roommates that were also there for internships. Then moved back on campus junior year. But this was a while ago and now they have more residential colleges (well, and more students too).
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First of all, welcome to college confidential. You are a very accomplished student. Please donât let responses on here discourage you.The most important message posters here are trying to give you is that you need to build a balanced list of schools that you would be happy to attend. Any college with an admit rate below 20 percent should be considered a reach for everyone no matter how accomplished they are. This doesnât mean you shouldnât apply or that you wonât get in - only that a reach is a reach.
Second,you attend a private school. Go talk to your college counselor. They will know how applicants from your high school have historically fared with admissions at colleges that interest you and how you stack up against prior successful applicants from your school. If your school uses Naviance or scoir that may also give you some useful information. People on here can only make guesses based on very limited information. The high school you attend does matter - some private high schools send a large percentage of students to top schools and some might send only a couple. Have you taken the most rigorous schedule offered? Your counselor will be asked about this on your application. So, aside from GPA the most selective colleges want to see the highest level of rigor. Do you have that? I see a lot of honors classes but only a few AP/DEs. That may be max rigor at your school or it may not be.
Finally, I just want to emphasize the need to visit any school that might be an early decision contender. I would suggest if you make a trip out to Wake, see if you can swing up to Virginia and see Richmond and William and Mary. Richmond is more similar to Wake - wealthier and preppier. William and Mary is much more artsy and quirky. Itâs not in a city which may be deal breaker for you,but there are a lot of restaurants and shops walkable from campus. ⊠And as the second oldest university in the nation, it has a lot of cool traditions that might appeal to you.
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Your question wasnât directed at me, but my two cents: At Rice, senior year is the most important year to be on campus, for several reasons. Seniors get housing and parking priority, so for many itâs the first and last time that you have the chance to be in a single room or park in the lot right behind your building. Seniors also typically fill most or all of the leadership roles within a residential college, which range from housing/dining liaison to managing the collegeâs property to planning the collegeâs annual public party (âpubâ) to allocating the collegeâs student life budget to (most important) leading the effort to get ready for BeerBike, and you need to be there to really participate. Even if you are not directly involved, the senior year is the culmination of your residential college experience, and no one wants to miss it. Most sophomores donât really want to leave either due to FOMO, but at least you know that you still have two more pubs and two more BeerBikes etc. to be actively involved in.
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We visited several of the schools on your list. Wake was my first thought. Maybe University of Miami.
Visiting schools is really important if you intend to go ED, especially if you are full pay and will find yourself locked in to a $$$$ commitment. I think your profile is a strong match for the typical Wake profile (AS LONG AS IT IS A FIT FOR YOU) - full pay, private school, good GPA (assuming scaling is accurately captured), academic achievements (language/lit), athletics (lot of ex-varsity athletes/captains with strong GPAs at Wake - itâs kind of old school like that), volunteering (pro-humanitate). Plus with your language skills, I would imagine you would want to spend a term on study abroad. I donât agree about a 1400-ish score knocking you out-- Wake has been TO forever so you might be fine if your GPA and rigor are solid â check with your counselor. At my kidsâ high rigor school, the 3 ED admits all had similar scores (if you have access to Scoir or Naviance scattergrams, youâll learn a lot). But you have to be sure that you want to be there if you ED! Donât dismiss the Greek thing â itâs not the same as a school where everyone lives in frat/sorority houses on campus etc. â they run it differently, but it is a major part of the social environment, so talk to people about it. Iâve heard Wake described as kind of âcountry clubâ and thatâs probably accurate on the whole; of course there are nerds and artists etc there as well, but thatâs not the dominant group. If you want a bigger percentage of nerdy/artsy folks, then I might steer you toward rounding out WashU and Emory with Rice, W&M, Vassar, Wesleyan and Macalester (and of course safer names too) over Richmond or Wake. But nowâs the time to explore so you can figure that out and build your list! There are a ton of great schools out there, and this is an exciting time of possibilities for you! Donât be discouraged, we all are just trying to help you build a list of fantastic options where you can maximize your chances of admission and be happy once you get there.
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This is so true - so many go in with an idea of what they want and then they realize later, oh, that wasnât what I wanted.
In fact, this even happens to kids who ED. ED is binding - you have to be sure - and yet some change their minds after the fact and then arenât allowed.
At 17 years old, things changeâŠ
Visiting is a great idea, but plan to do it when classes resume. Going to a mostly empty campus with closed buildings wonât give you a good sense of life there.
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Iâm thinking that the Claremont colleges offer a good alternative to Emory. Collectively, theyâre a similar size and have small classes like Emory. Selectivity ranges from 7% at Pomona last year, to 25% at Pitzer, to 38% at Scripps. Your choice.
Something Iâm seeing overlooked in chancing this student is the shifting landscape. Not only will there be fewer Hugh school graduates - and therefore fewer college applicants - next year, but more importantly there will be many fewer international applicants due to the political climate. At the vast majority of colleges, these international students are full pay. Colleges will have to replace this lost revenue stream, so Iâm guessing that full pay applicants like the OP - especially one who is a straight A student with excellent course rigor - will be in great demand, increasing her chances at schools which were too great a reach before.
I realize that the only thing we can be certain of for next year is uncertainty, which makes chancing an applicant all the more difficult.
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Speaking just for myself, I definitely never intend to discourage kids, but I often find myself trying to encourage them to maybe rethink what excites them.
Like, you have really good grades and a high test score. You can try to use those credentials to get into, say, the college highest-ranked by the US News, most popular with your peers, or so on. But to me, those are not particularly worthy goals, and also are the least promising use of such credentials because so many other kids with really good credentials are doing the exact same thing.
So, alternatives can include using your good credentials to get multiple offers from colleges that are really a great fit for you in particular, and then you can pick your absolute favorite among those offers. Or you can use them to get competing merit offers. Or some of both. To me, those are inherently more worthy goals, and also donât necessarily run into that problem of all those similar kids trying to do the exact same thing as you.
I understand that can somewhat sound like I am saying you couldnât be successful in competing against those kids for the highly-ranked/very-popular colleges, and of course I donât know that to be true. But almost always, your qualifications will be good enough to apply to colleges that are still quite unlikely to admit you. Which sounds like a paradox but it is the nature of holistic review admissions.
And yes, maybe reported admissions rates will come back up a bit if International applications are seriously discouraged. But I think reported admissions rates were really overstating the competitiveness of admissions for qualified domestic students to begin with. Like, I still think the ârealâ admissions rate for qualified domestic students at even very selective colleges is more like 15-20%, once you take all the not-actually-qualified applicants out of the pool.
But 15-20% is not high anyway! And the probabilities are correlated, so applying to multiple only raises your total probability a bit and then it levels off.
So I still think a solid majority of even well-qualified domestic applicants will not get into any of their Reaches in upcoming cycles. And that is OK. Because again there are so many other ways to use your qualifications to benefit yourself, and I really do mean to be encouraging about that. To me it isnât some lessor substitute for getting into one of those colleges everyone else wants to get into, it can actually be better than that anyway.
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Absolutely agree with you. There are literally hundreds of wonderful colleges out there that in many cases may be a better fit for a student than whatever highly rejective school they have their heart set on. Yes,the reality is that most kids wonât get into their reach schools. I am not suggesting that we should be sugar coating things or giving false hope. My comments above were not meant as a critique of anyone posting on CC. To the contrary, you and most other regulars on here do a terrific job of highlighting some outstanding schools with higher acceptance rates.
I think oftentimes there can be a disconnect between what we are saying and what an anxious seventeen year old is hearing. In that regard, I think we need to be cognizant of how the message is delivered. Iâve seen a few responses (not from you) that come across as overly harsh. Things like âI donât see that happeningâ or âitâs highly unlikelyâ can be interpreted as âI shouldnât bother to applyâ and âIâm not good enoughâ - when what we really want to get across to a kid is that certain schools are a reach for everyone and they need to find some safeties and matches that they would be happy to attend if the reach school doesnât come through.
As an aside, I do feel a lot of kids assume that if a college is referred to as a âsafetyâ that must mean that it sucks. Itâs a little bit of that old Groucho Marx adage of âI would never join a club that would have me as a memberâ. Our colleges counselors used the terminology of âfoundationâ, âpossibleâ and âcompetitiveâ rather than âsafetyâ, âmatchâ,âreachâ I particularly like the notion of a foundation school which emphasizes the positive qualities of a college whereas deeming it a safety seems to convey that itâs subpar and a last resort.
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In reality, Iâm guessing more students of all academic qualification attend what up front most consider safeties - than any other type of school.
Kids choose schools for different reasons - with I imagine location and cost being #1 and #2.
And many kids, like both of mine, voluntarily attended safeties over higher ranked schools they got into - my daughter #16 or 17 ranked admittances - because they were right for them - they felt like home.
So yes, kids should absolutely consider the gauntlet of schools available to them and try to ignore the preconceptions. So many schools fit for various reasons - environment (my daughter found the small urban campus vs. the huge traditional and she loved that), sports, weather, architecture, specific majors, Honors and/or sub honors programs, and so much more.
Attending a specific school doesnât assure success in life. Nor does it assure a lack of success.
And law school or medical school - theyâre happening, even at the top levels, from hundreds and hundreds of colleges.
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I absolutely LOVE that term âfoundationâ. Our HS uses Likely instead of Safety, but I think I will switch to Foundation because it is so on point.
I know at our feederish HS, they emphasized most kids end up attending a Likely (Foundation!) or Target. And probably if you were looking at families that did not skew so high in terms of ability to pay, then it could have been most attending a Foundation, as those were at least pretty often generating the best financial offers.
So yeah, the non-Reach part of a college application list is absolutely critical. Because for one reason or another there is a very good chance you will be choosing one of their offers.
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Most high schools arenât feederish per se.
I live within the top district int he state, with a $945K median home price sold in the latest data, and while I canât find stats from the district, I have no doubt that the top four year college attended is Middle Tennessee State. Western Kentucky, UAH, Alabama and Tennesssee are likely the other top four schools - if I had to guess - all close to home, none would be considered a reach.
When I grew up in affluent Rancho Bernardo (part of San Diego), Iâm sure Palomar College was #1 (the community college) and SDSU #2.
The CC crowd and kids attending âfeederishâ high schools is not the norm in society - itâs just the CC bubble.
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Reminder that this is a Chance Me thread and that reply posts should be addressed to the OP. 
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Almost all seniors live on campus, and get the most desirable spots in the residential colleges. Most students spend one year off-campus, either sophomore or junior year (which year is the norm varies by assigned college), and then return. Off-campus apartments tend to get passed down within the colleges and thus arenât particularly hard to find - itâs just a matter of balancing cost vs. convenience, whether a car is needed, etc. My daughter ended up on campus all four years, and only lived off campus for a summer internship, but this was a sublet in one of the aforementioned off-campus apartments, with others from her college. It was close by and was fine. She actually ended up feeling a little burned out on residential college life by the end of senior year, and realizing that if she had it to do over again, she might have chosen the more typical off-campus year as a junior, for the change of scene.) She had one friend who moved off campus and didnât move back, for mental health reasons (mostly related to lack of emotional support animal accommodations on campus, I believe), but thatâs the exception; for the most part the seniors are there in the colleges and providing leadership and mentoring, which is one of the really nice things about Riceâs system. And even those who arenât on campus at any given time are fully included in the goings-on at the colleges.
In short, every school has its pros and cons, but I wouldnât put housing in the âconâ column for Rice - they have one of the best residential experiences out there, and the off-campus rotation is well-supported and not a big deal at all.
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not sure if i should make a separate thread for this (no idea what the protocol is lol) but just bc there is a lot of information within this discussion iâm trying to condense it so which schools should i look at besides wake? i have william & mary, vassar, rice and so far but i feel like iâm missing a ton from this thread and the other one and iâm just trying to get it in one place lol