Out of state acceptances to UVA and UNC seem really hard to come by. My California daughter, who ended up at Princeton, applied to UVA and UNC EA and got deferred at UVA and admitted to UNC under some weird program where you have to spend the 1st semester of your freshmen year overseas (not something she had applied to). After getting into Princeton early she withdrew her application to UVA. I won’t detail her qualifications, but I will say she was a very, very, very strong student (top 1% percent, easily, in terms of standardized test scores and GPA at a very strong public high school) and she was a multi-sport athlete on teams in and out of school, star of the drama department graduating with distinction in the arts and won a regional theater competition, community service, phenomenal teacher recs (e.g., one said she she wrote a graduate-level analytical paper that was the best he had read in 18 years of teaching), etc. Practically perfect and UNC and UVA didn’t accept her EA, but Princeton did. The point is, with these schools that accept a painfully small number of applicants (I think UNC takes about 10% of their out of state applicants; Princeton admitted about 4% of all applicants), you can’t expect a good outcome no matter who you are. It really is a crap shoot. If you don’t have some kind of attribute they are looking for (athlete, minority, some specialized skill, etc.), the chances of getting into these places is almost nil. Certainly apply and cross your fingers, but get excited about some of the other great schools on your list too.
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