I think WashU would be a good one to consider.
It’s medium sized (many grad students, but many of them are on the medical school campus, so the main campus feels smaller than the stats suggest).
It’s in a great suburb with good restaurants, concert venue, and shops in walking distance. Should she change her mind about being in the city, she would have free metrolink light rail access to the city.
It’s pretty flexible so it’s good for undecided students. There is a size-able Jewish population and many Jewish student groups.
I would recommend retaking the ACT since WashU super-scores.
Just a vote for Clark although its location is not its strong suit (it’s in Worcester, NOT Boston). Clark has a great feel to it and we found it to be very generous with aid. With your daughter’s stats, I’d guess she’d be in line for some of their bigger merit awards. My younger son I think would be at Clark had he not been accepted by his first choice school.
The other thing I’d say is my older son decided early on that he wanted a medium to large sized school in a city. We toured UMass/Amherst and on a whim, drove down the road to Hampshire College. We parked next to a sizeable corn field. The admissions office is in a barn and I’m thinking “Way to go - he’ll hate it here”. You guessed it - he graduates next week and couldn’t imagine himself anywhere else. We tried to keep an open mind because you never know.
Good luck to you guys!
Thank you for all the great input! I realize that some of the schools on our current list don’t fit with her “parameters” - but that’s because she was having a hard time finding matches and safeties that do. Thanks to CC, we have a few more to consider.
Re: Wash U - Wouldn’t that be another reach?
She has seen a couple of LACs and does feel that they are too small, unfortunately. Middlebury would have been a nice one given its focus on languages.
@SlackerMomMD Oh, right. I found Naviance useless for searching. I thought @kibbles meant to just never use it. I liked the College Board site better.
I am actually surprised public counselors have such a bad rep. My school has one counselor and each grade has roughly 100 students. She scheduled one on one meetings for EVERY student in private and a meeting with the student an parent. She reccomended schools, helped with essays, in addition to the regular counselor stuff. She only had a grad school student teacher for this year, but has been just as helpful without that aid. Her door is always open and you can go to her after school and just talk.
ReadytoRoll, my D also wanted a medium sized school. She was going into engineering so there was that also. We could find plenty of reaches or reachy matches but safeties… That was really hard.
It sounds like you are on the east coast? I would not say Lehigh or Bucknell are matches but more reachy matches. Her grades and scores are right at the 50% and I would never say that a school that accepts less than 40% to ever be a match. D was accepted but others from her school with better stats did not.
For safeties, we were stumped but found a few. We had to compromise on size or male/female ratio or selectivity. We also needed financial aid so we needed schools that she wanted to go to that we could afford.
My niece last year did not do a good job finding a school that she liked that they could afford. She did not want to go to her instate school and was accepted to schools they could not afford. It was not a fun April. Fortunately, she had an option she could afford and disappointment last year became happiness this year :).
@ClassicRockerDad Brandeis has 3600 undergrads and about 2200 grad students. Wesleyan has 2800 undergrads and a handful of grad students. Oberlin has 2900 undergrads, no grad students. I’d call it a nice medium size. And campus beauty is in the eye of the beholder - I think Brandeis has a nice collection of modern buildings, I think the new Student Center is gorgeous, but it was founded in 1949 - so except for the Castle it does not have any charming old buildings. I consider it right at the sweet spot for size.
I also agree that many universities don’t feel has big as their numbers - I never saw any students from the Law School, Med School or Business school while I was at Harvard except for the one or two that lived in the House as resident tutors. (Our RAs were actually older and wiser than the rest of us.) I did know a bunch of students from the architecture school because I took classes with them and knew a few grad students either as house tutors, TAs or because I took grad level seminars. (Which I consider a plus not a minus.)
American is in a residential part of DC, but is only a ten minute walk to the subway.
Well, people already said what I was going to say: That HS students change their minds all the time, that most of the GC’s suggestions aren’t that far off the mark considering that your own list has some schools that don’t fit the criteria. Another point is that having more than one safety is a good idea - in case the first safety doesn’t work out for some reason.
For matches, I second the suggestion of American and Ithaca. I also offer suggestions of Arcadia, Case Western, Syracuse, Marquette, Villanova, Mercer University, and Southern Methodist. If OOS public universities are on the table, then the suggestions of SUNY New Paltz and Geneseo are ones I would echo; there’s also UPitt (which is in a city, but a smaller one). Two reaches she might be interested in are Duke and Vanderbilt.
If she’d be willing to go west and willing to consider women’s colleges and willing to consider a 5000 student consortium, Scripps is a possibility (maybe high match).
You have a GC that suggests colleges? Think of them like a real estate agent…they take your requests and give you some ideas that may not match…but you can use the Supermatch tool and find your own ideas too.
Wondering why some have said Naviance was useless in searching for schools. In our case, Naviance was useful for determining how students in our HS did in admissions. Did not use it as a starting point for searching, but did when trying to figure out if a school was a safety, low match or high match. Pretty much knew what the reaches would be. It was fairly accurate, although some of the results were surprising (waitlisted but then admitted to a school where his stats were at the high end).
Out school just started using Naviance for everything, so it was a bit confusing as some schools allowed all parts of the application that way, but others did not.
Here are some schools to consider: Boston College, William & Mary, George Washington (smack in middle of DC but that’s not a bad place to be), Grinnell, Bucknell, Kenyon, Smith. D was admitted to GW, Smith, U.Maryland, Kenyon and William & Mary this year. You should probably calculate her unweighted GPA, most schools don’t provide an unweighted GPA but you need to know where it puts her in terms of competitiveness.31 is a good ACT score but a 32 or 33 would make her application stronger. D applied to 21 total colleges, 9 of them were reaches. She was admitted to 13 colleges all of her safetys and targets none of her reaches. My recommendation is to limit the number of reaches and spend a lot of time on each application. Unless your daughter is attending a magnet high school or a private high school, guidance counselors generally don’t have a broad enough understanding of college options to make appropriate college recommendations. As noted, it’s positive that her GC is taking an interest and making recommendations
My kids guidance counselors have seemed completely oblivious to colleges. They sign off on transcripts and write what I can only assume to be the most generic of recommendations. They will tell you their job is making sure as many kids as possible graduate from high school. You may not agree with the gc’s advice but it’s harmless and easy to ignore.
I was thinking of Univ of Richmond. It is on the small side of medium. It has a beautiful campus that is just outside of Richmond proper. I also thought of William and Mary as many others have suggested but keep in mind that it will be a reach if your are out of state. It is a state school and 2/3 of the accepted students must reside in VA. That doesn’t leave a lot of spaces for OOS applicants.