College list recommendations

prezbucky
Mon, 02 Jan 2017 07:08:18 +0000

You will have good breadth requirements at most universities, which means you will have to take a variety of courses – some science, math, social science, and humanities courses – regardless of your major. That breadth of knowledge is part of the liberal arts approach to learning, and you don’t have to attend a LAC to encounter it.

So you want a school of 2k-10k students on the East Coast? Do you mean undergrad pop or total student pop? Because most of the Ivies have more than 10,000 total. I’ll use total population.

Let’s see – here are a bunch of schools, that are not STEM-focused (you want breadth…), with 2000-10000 students on or near the East Coast – and Yale, since you seem to like it and it’s pretty close pop-wise, with ~11,000 students:

Princeton
Yale
Williams
Dartmouth
Brown
Middlebury
Wellesley
Smith
Wesleyan U
Vassar
Tufts
Colgate
Barnard
Brandeis
U of Richmond
Wake Forest
William & Mary
Lafayette
Lehigh
Bucknell
Holy Cross
Mount Holyoke
Trinity College (CT)
Skidmore
Union
Dickinson
Franklin & Marshall
Bard
Gettysburg
TCNJ
Furman
St. Lawrence
Providence
Seton Hall

Read about these (and others…) and see which of them fit you best in terms of academics (majors/classes, class sizes, calendar, curriculum style, etc.), setting (urban, suburban, rural), environment/weather, and cost (run the NPC to see if a school is likely affordable).

There are plenty of reaches and matches on this list, but i’m not sure about safeties – maybe Providence or Seton Hall. Typically a school is a safety for you if its admit rate is at least 40% and your stats are well above average (vs. students who were admitted), and if you like and can afford it. In-state public schools often make good safeties for top students.