Extremely misleading, twoinanddone. The graduate students aren’t all in the Evansron campus, as the medical and law schools are downtown. The Evanston campus is clearly dominated by undergrads.
Is there a HS requirement that you follow the GC advice? I do not understand what is a problem. D. simply applied where she wanted to apply and GC was there to provide LOR (maybe, maybe not, do not remember). We met few time to say hi and by. He had all rights to push her as much as he wanted, she was his ticket as #1 in her class, but she did not have to listen. Is it different at your HS? You have to listen to GC to successfully graduate from HS or something of this nature? D’s list took me 2 years to develop. She did not have to listen to me either, but she decided that my list had everything that she was looking for.
I didn’t even know one can add individual schools for a specific student on Naviance. Certainly, our large public high school didn’t provide that service. I would look at that list in much the same light as CC. If you post for suggestions, you will get many names. Some are good and some are kind of out there.Your daughter can pick and choose among the suggestions, or just ignore them all.
You mention she is new. Maybe she is just figuring out the system. Your daughter may want to talk to the GC about the schools on Naviance if she (your daughter) wants a more targeted list.
Maryland is huge. Loss of students and a LOR of acreage. If your child wants a medium sized school by any definition, Maryland isn’t it. UMBC is the medium sized choice for many good in state students.
Emory, Tufts, Michigan(OOS), and NU are highly unlikely with top 15% / ACT 31 unless she has a major hook.
If she’s considering Lehigh, might want to look at Lafayette in the same trip.
Bucknell is in the middle of nowhere but more of a match and fits some of her other requirements.
Agree with not discounting Catholic/Jesuit schools - Villanova good match.
Also, if considering American, stop and see GW - they’ve had a lot of growth in the past 5 - 10 years.
Agree with the collective wisdom of CC - its best to spend more time on the matches and financial safeties your daughter would be happy to attend , then add in reaches later.
GW doesn’t have a real campus - it’s very much integrated into the anonymous office building look of Foggy Bottom. American has a nice big green lawn in the center of campus. But yes, consider GW too!
Nice list!
My suggestions for potential additions. I was going to suggest UChicago because of your D’s academic slant, but it doesn’t get more urban than that which I suspect is why she prefers Northwestern.
Brandeis is great but probably too small. It’s small for a research university. It’s smaller than Wesleyan and Oberlin if I recall. It’s also really really ugly. Wesleyan isn’t in the middle of nowhere. These schools are in the 800 student per class range.
University of Rochester definitely has a feel that isn’t too urban. I don’t think Rice is THAT urban either, though that might be a reach.
American University is another possibility. It’s in a suburban part of WashDC.
Boston College, while Jesuit, has a pretty good sized Jewish population, is in suburban Boston and isn’t as “in your face” religious as for example Villanova.
Not sure how urban Washington University St Louis is, I’ve never been there.
University of Washington honors program has a great books core which might interest her. University of Texas has a similar honors program.
University of Delaware and Vermont are both beautiful campuses with good honors programs in the 10-15K student range with predominantly out-of-state populations.
Clark should be a safety for her and gives good merit aid, IF she likes the vibe there could be a decent addition to her list. Even though you didn’t ask for advice, you may want to look at some safeties that could also offer merit aid to give her some options other than state flagship next year. Given your varying income, I would assume you may be looking for merit aid rather than full pay or need-based aid? From what I know, many of the schools on her list are not known for good (if any) merit money and she is probably not a candidate for the very limited and highly competitive merit awards at the top schools (since they would likely go to kid ranked in the top 5% of their high schools).
I remember when my oldest first met with the GC (back in the dark ages when things were done via paper not Naviance) and it seemed that the GC had way under-estimated my son’s target schools. IMO, that GC had a student the year before have a really surprisingly bad outcome and was being very cautious and had not really looked at the test scores, just the grades. As someone said, no harm in looking at the schools listed by the GC but no obligation to apply.
So ~12,000 grad students minus ~1500 law and medical students means there are only a few grad students on the Northwestern campus? Okay.
OP didn’t define what she meant by ‘medium’ school. I said to me it was about 4000-8000, but those are just rough numbers. To some, 8000 might be in the large category, and add that many again as grad students and it definitely is large. She didn’t want rural. Didn’t want Jesuit. The GC isn’t doing a great job of making recommendations, but look at the schools that have been suggested here, not that much closer to the perfect fit for OP’s child since we don’t really know any more than OP posted, a list of desires and a list of schools that don’t really match those bullet points.
Muhlenberg is on the Hillel list above.
You might as well look at her recommendations–even a blind pig finds an acorn once in a while.
More seriously, this is probably just a new and well-meaning GC dropping suggestions into multiple students accounts when information about a college comes across her desk.
How about adding Brandeis to your list?
Sounds like it hits all of her criteria and location preferences.
Maybe she is trying to open her up to more suggestions? In addition, your list is inconsistent with what you are saying your daughter wants, so I can understand the confusions. Based on your reccomendations, this was the list I created. I limited the schools to the Northeast, Mid- Atlantic, and Mid West and chose Spanish and French with a Study Abroad option:
Reach: Princeton, Tufts, WUSTL
Match: Rochester, Lehigh, Marist, New Paltz, Stony Brook, Ithaca
Safety: In state safety
We have Naviance at our school but we didn’t use it. Always an option not to use it…
@kibbles For some schools, that’s how you make letter of recommendation requests and that’s how your GC knows where to send your transcripts
@calicash, I think @kibbles meant for looking at colleges and universities. My daughter’s school has Naviance and yes, she used it to attach the LORs to her Common App but she didn’t really look at it for vetting colleges. It wasn’t useful for her that way.
Oh, I didn’t know that @CaliCash We didn’t even sign up for it; just had my son ask teachers at the end of the summer after his junior year for recommendations and sent each request for info (outside of the Common App) directly to his guidance counselor. I am guessing that at some high schools, they won’t allow you to do that? We picked colleges from the “Princeton Review 376 Colleges” and requested info from each (we started in the beginning of junior year) then took a summer trip and looked at as many schools as we could fit into an 8 day trip. LOL. I have three kids so I felt that having all of them along on the tour would be helpful.
It is great that the public GC took any interest in suggesting colleges at all, even if off the mark. If you research them and they are not for your D, just cross them off. I think it is hard to decide what is a “match” when you are in the 31 ACT range because many of the colleges where this score sits squarely in the ballpark are still selective if not the most highly selective, so hard to know what the match is. Also, knowing that some schools misreported data on prior CDS (eg. Emory, Bucknell) and represented data to have higher scores than were actually in the pool, the problem of transparency even in the CDS is highlighted. Our family went on what I would like to call the great LAC trip to many LAC in the Northeast. Other than size (smaller than you note), there are many schools that might interest your D. If she has already decide not to look at these, just fuggedaboudit, and good luck.
Like other posters, my kids went to a public school and the GC never spontaneously suggested any colleges so I’m impressed you’re getting that service! Maybe those colleges are going to be visiting the school so there’s a way to somehow highlight the kids who might be interested in that particular college for a visit reminder? Our GC mostly wrote recommendations for kids and made sure everyone was on track with apps, they really didn’t do anything like find the perfect college for the individual kid.
When my kid was looking at colleges, she also wanted “medium” – which we defined as roughly between 4-8000. We defined that as undergrad only – we totally discounted any grad students. To her, it was irrelevant how big the grad schools were.
It’s difficult finding those medium-size schools. So many schools seem to be either small LACs or large state universities.
American really seems to fit your needs – it’s in very residential part of the city. Fordham may be in NY - but it is in the Bronx, on an enclosed campus, and it doesn’t have that inner-city feel like NYU or BU. How about one of the Claremont colleges?
Another example of “No good deed goes unpunished.”
Someone in a position to offer suggestions, offers suggestions, and is criticized for offering suggestions that aren’t quite good enough.
She would also be criticized for not offering suggestions.