College selection help for my daughter

minstrel01
Wed, 19 Sep 2018 15:15:32 +0000

Been perusing the forums for sometime. Decided to finally ask for some help with college selection for my daughter, graduating high school in 2019.

Let me start with her basic information:

GPA: 4.0 UW/5.2 weighted
Class Rank: 11 out of 700+
ACT: 36
AP classes: more than 10
ECs: Multiple science fairs up to state level, DECA president, DECA global finalist, Interact, Student Council, NASA high school scholar.
Ethnicity: Asian
Cost/Finance: Don’t expect any need based aid. Merit would be nice but not a deal breaker.
Intended Major: Bio/Pre-med/Business

We live in Texas (Houston area) and she mostly wants to stay close to home for undergrad though she has picked some schools out of state. And we would love to have her close as well.

So here’s the list:

Rice, Northwestern, Tulane, Vanderbilt, UT Austin, SMU, Trinity (San Antonio) and possibly TCU.

She is an auto admit to UT…very keen on the honors programs at UT. Pretty much not interested in other “public ivies” given her auto admit in UT. As for the privates, she is not too keen on Ivies, MIT, Stanford, Caltech, Chicago or WashU. Duke still might end on the list. As she sees it, admissions to most of the elite colleges are really a crapshoot and she does intend to do graduate school further down the line. Might as well save the money and stress for later.

So, does this list make sense? What are her chances at Rice/Northwestern/Vandy/Tulane? Any merit aid from any? Is she likely to get into the honors program at UT? We suspect she will get merit aid from SMU and Trinity. Any chance of a free ride?