GPA 4.75(W) 4.26(UW) ACT 36- All 3 years all As and A+ except 1 A-, APs 5 got 5 2 got 4 - research in Yale, published with Orthopedic doctors group, worked with T1 international and wrote Op-ed, fencer, Primciple saxo player with EWS, acadamic award winner 3 year in science and math, MUN president, Human club president , Team lead in Wakesman, Gov school nominated(not a scholar)- National honor society member - what are her chances to get into good college?got international award in mUN and USABO merit certificate 2 times
People have different definitions of ‘good’.
Is your D a senior? What is her current college list? What is the budget and do you qualify for need based aid?
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ANy top public health school - not going for aid
Has she applied anywhere yet?
Assume she does not want a public health major, because that will be limiting.
Here are some recs with varying levels of selectivity, because I can’t tell how competitive your D is based on the limited info shared so far.
BU, Lehigh, Tulane, JHU, UNC Chapel Hill, George Washington, Michigan, Brown, U Florida, Harvard, Ohio State, Rutgers, Iowa, Arizona, IU. I would say UMaryland too, but she missed EA if she hasn’t already applied, so that’s out. There are many more. Public health typically requires post-grad study, so any related undergrad degree should be adequate.
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Other things that may matter for “top” (highly selective colleges) admissions beyond her top grades and scores (yay!) will be essays, reccomendations, and course selections over the years and how the latter relate to her school context. Has she taken the highest level of rigor in all subjects available to her (or close to it), etc. etc. If there is class rank published, what is it, etc.
She sounds amazing though! She will get in many schools, I am sure. “top” (meaning Ivy, JHU, Stanford or what have you) are VERY VERY hard for anyone.
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I’m sure you can get into some highly selective schools (you are qualified, but so are most of the applicants), but for schools that fall outside of that range for general admissions, but are still tops for public health, look at UMN and Pitt. Both have great access to internships and are smack in the middle of major healthcare centers.
At UMN Public Health is an advanced standing admission major that you can not apply to until junior year, however, the Biology, Science and the Environment major is perfect for those going into public health. Apply as BSE and you can either move into Public Health, stay with BSE, or double major. BSE covers all the courses you will need to be admitted to the Public Health major, but is also very flexible with a number of concentrations so it is a good program for both students who know that they want to specialize in something very specific while still looking at issues through a multidisciplinary lens or those that really want to explore many areas before honing in one one.
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What does good mean?
Are you an international or domestic student?
So no budget, so $100,000 a US is not a problem - for each year? So $400K + grad school. Would you rather spend less if you could or it’s not a concern? I mean, lots of schools have great / fine public health programs. Sure a magazine or website will rank them over one another but does that truly mean they are better or have better outcomes (which for many is grad school), I’m not sure.
Define health - does she want to be in public health - like community health/hospital admin/policy, etc. or biology/genetics or research or something else?
Have they looked or applied anywhere?
Do they have desires for size, geography (in a city, in a town, rural), weather, airport access, religion, etc?
It would help if you could fill out the chance / match me template - with all the classes taken, etc. and I still don’t know if you are a domestic or international student.
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In terms of schools:
UW-Seattle has top-top global public health programs and research/evaluation stuff (and domestic too but global is fantastic)…
Truly top overall leaders at grad /research level are really JHU, BU, Columbia, UNC Chapel Hill, Harvard – across topics they shine. I am less familiar what they do with undergrad majors. GWU has a very large public health grad school, as well. Tulane too.
MPH draw from tons of majors… if your kid more into data side, policy side, program design/admin side? some MPH focuses are practically MBAs, some nearly Data Science degrees - there is a HUGE range that falls under “Public Health.”
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Really just reinforcing others.
What you described sounds competitive anywhere to me. What we don’t really know is how she will look to the most selective holistic review colleges when they are doing their non-academic evaluations.
So this is why the “standard” recommendation for such applicants starts by suggesting they apply to at least a couple carefully-chosen Likelies and maybe 3-5 carefully-chosen Targets. If she both makes sure she is well qualified by all their observable standards, and also makes sure she is a good fit for what they are looking for and they are a good fit for what she is looking for, then it becomes extremely likely she will end up with multiple good offers to consider. Basically, she just needs generally positive non-academic evaluations for that to work, and very few kids like the one you are describing are at risk of actual negative non-academic evaluations.
And then she can also add 3-5 carefully chosen Reaches. Same deal, really, it helps to go beyond just generic things like selectivity or US News rankings and really study what they say they are looking for in a student, and why. And then focus on the ones where you really feel like there is a strong two-way fit. And if you do that when picking your Reaches, things like supplementals tend to be relatively easy. And all that maximizes your chances that one or more of them will see you as a great non-academic choice, understanding you can’t guarantee that will work.
OK, so people around here are pretty great at helping individual kids develop lists like that, including listening to what they are looking for, asking relevant questions, and generating possible colleges to consider at various levels of selectivity. To do that, it helps to start with the standard Chance Me/Match Me template (and then be open to questions).
But what I can say right now is IF she develops such an individualized list of carefully-chosen Likelies, Targets, and Reaches, she is very likely to have multiple great offers, whether not that includes any Reach offers. And in fact, in my circles it has quite often happened that even when kids got some Reach offers, they ended up picking a Likely or Target instead, for various reasons–scholarships, honors programs, special academic programs, or even just loving a college in general and really seeing themselves thriving there.
And that to me basically defines a very good result to this process–the kid has multiple offers they find appealing, and then they can pick the one that appeals to them the most.
Based on your daughter’s interest in public health, plus her published research, I am guessing that some form of graduate school is likely, and that something biomedical related (such as an MD or a biomedical PhD) might possibly be of interest to her.
One daughter attended a university that is typically ranked in the mid 120’s. It was a very good university, but was not one of the highly selective famous schools (it would be a safety for your daughter even being out of state). She had two friends who were premed students at the same school who had high school stats which were not all that far off from your daughter’s stats (one of them I think probably had one single B in high school, the other had never had a B in his life). Why did they attend a school ranked in the 120’s? It was a good fit for them, was near home for them, and they were offered very good merit based financial aid. Both of these friends are MD’s today. Both have less total debt because the parents put what was saved on the cost of undergrad towards the cost of medical school. Students in very good MD programs come from a huge range of undergraduate schools.
My other daughter is currently studying for a PhD in a biomedical field at a very good university. The other students in her program similarly come from a huge range of undergraduate colleges and universities. There is someone in the program who got their bachelor’s at Harvard, and another student from a highly ranked northeast LAC (something like Amherst, Bowdoin, Colby, Wellesley, Williams). There is someone else from U.Mass Lowell, and several from lower ranked schools that I had never heard of, in addition to some students who came from universities outside the US. Again, the students in very good biomedical PhD programs come from “all over the place”.
By “good college”, I personally would think that anything ranked in the top 150 universities or top 50 LACs would be considered a good college (and this might be too restrictive). With your daughter’s excellent stats and ECs, there are going to be a lot of safeties among the top 150 universities in the US. It is possible to go on to very good graduate programs from any of them.
It occurs to me that you might instead be thinking of somewhere along the lines of Harvard, Yale, Johns Hopkins, Stanford, WUSTL, and so on. For these schools, you are looking at acceptance rates in the low single digits. You might expect that something like 80% of applicants have stats that make them fully qualified for admissions. How admissions gets from “80% qualified” to “4% accepted” is a bit of a mystery for most of us, and is difficult to accurately predict. Clearly your daughter is competitive for any of these schools, but so are most of the other applicants.
Mostly I think that there are four things to keep in mind: Make sure your daughter applies to safeties. Budget for a full 8 years of university in case an MD becomes the goal. Look for a good fit, because a school where the student is comfortable and happy is going to matter a lot more than any rankings. Understand that students in top graduate programs, including but not limited to biomedical-related graduate programs, come from a huge range of undergraduate schools.
One last thing that might be worth doing is to look at actual numbers for the total cost of university. Right now there are some universities that cost very close to $100,000 per year. Costs have been rising consistently for decades, and typically go up slightly faster than inflation. MD programs can in some cases cost a bit more than undergraduate programs. Thus for 8 years of university, if you ignore cost and go to the most expensive schools, you are likely to exceed $800,000 for 8 years and might very well get to $900,000. If you have any other children, what you spend for your first child sets a precedent. If you are fine spending $900,000 per child for university then you do not need to think about costs. Otherwise, the time to think about costs is before your first child first applies to undergraduate schools. It really is possible to get a very good education for a lot less than this, but you need to pick the universities appropriately, particularly for undergrad (because there are typically more choices and it is easier to save money for a very good undergraduate education).
In all of this I am assuming that your daughter is a US citizen or permanent resident. If not, then MD admissions in the US becomes horribly difficult and additional issues might come up.
I note my two cents is that while highly selective colleges do sometimes say a large majority of their applicants are qualified, I believe they are using a definition of qualified that is designed to include all their athletic recruits and other special case. So I think realistically, a lower percentage of their “unhooked” applicants are actually going to be academically competitive, as opposed to merely qualified in this more inclusive sense.
Then they also have other considerations which can potentially be disqualifying at this initial sort of stage. See, for example, Episode 26 of the Inside the Yale Admissions Office Podcast, Should I Even Apply?
So my guesstimate is by the time they have done all that, the acceptance rate among the actual competitive unhooked applicants is much higher than the published overall rate, like possibly 15-20ish even at highly selective colleges . . . with the exception of Internationals with need at need aware for Internationals colleges, and then all Internationals at meets need/need blind for Internationals colleges.
And I personally think some people applying should know they are not in that group (hence the podcast episode). Others, though, are plausible as far as they know, but won’t know for sure how their essays and recommendations and such will come across. But the latter can for sure apply and see what happens.
OK, and then within that group, you get into “institutional priorities” for the enrolled class, which lead to the insider term “filling buckets”. For unhooked applicants this gets extremely hard to analyze, like you don’t know for sure what buckets they might have, how big they are, which you might be considered for, what the competition will look like in those buckets in that year, and so on. So, again, apply and find out.
And I think the vast majority of unhooked admits at the most selective colleges go through that sort of uncertainty. Plausible they will be competitive based on what they know, but not quite sure, and then also unsure what will happen even if they make it to the buckets stage.
So what is different at Targets and Likelies? Well, first, often a lot less uncertainty about whether you make it to the bucket stage. And then for Likelies, they may basically see you as filling a bucket just with your academic qualifications. Targets are not necessarily THAT easy, but they could still see your academic qualifications as attractive enough to move you up higher in your other buckets. So, better chances at that stage than 15-20%, indeed hopefully getting very high at Likelies, and still around say 30-70% at Targets (a wide range leading to the harder and softer Targets concept).
And of course if some Likelies and Targets like you enough, usually primarily for academic reasons but possibly other factors will contribute as well, they may well offer you merit, honors, or so on.
That’s a lot of sketchy math, but my point is a little understanding of what the colleges are likely trying to accomplish behind the scenes when it comes to enrolling classes can help clarify what you know, what you don’t know, and what that implies for a sensible application strategy.
Since nobody answered your question 
I’ll answer it: 100%.
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Assuming the list has been appropriately built, yes.
May be my question is what she is missing to get into Ivys or JHU or Duke?
You haven’t provided nearly enough information for anyone to answer this. Please fill out the Chance Me template as has been requested.
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If money is not a barrier …
what are her chances?
Your daughter sounds like a very strong student, but so are the vast majority of students applying to elite colleges. She has an excellent chance, but I would not say 100%.
Could you please do a chance me/match me thread and answer all of the questions on the template? This will give folks here a better picture of your daughter’s total application picture.
Your daughter needs to present an authentic HER. Not something she thinks will gain her admission to any college. She has good things already. Colleges are building a class, not just looking at one individual student and their accomplishments. Adcoms will view your daughter’s application in context.
She has a good chance…but she also needs at least one sure thing for acceptance that she would be happy to attend. Does she have that?
Where is that template
The Yale Admissions Office has an extremely information podcast that I think can really help people understand highly selective holistic review admissions.
The whole series is interesting, but also a lot to listen to (or read, they have transcripts of most available). Recently, though, they did a two-part series that covered a lot of important concepts, the 9/1/26 and 10/13/26 episodes (10/13 doesn’t appear to have a transcript yet):
Your College-Bound Kid is another great podcast resource, and I would personally suggest checking out Episode 629 for an informative discussion of the buckets concept (if you like, you can stop after the first long segment, after about 25 minutes):
Hopefully all that helps answer your question, or perhaps more properly reframes it. When making final decisions, if your kid is not admitted one or any such college, they may not have been missing anything in terms of academic attributes, they just may not have been quite what these colleges were looking for in terms of personal attributes as indicated in things like recommendations, or they may simply not have gotten far enough up the list in any bucket for which they were considered.
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@Lindagaf is this the most recent info?