If you decide to apply to U MN, check out the club tennis team. It’s a great way to continue playing tennis on a competitive but fun team, develop a close network of friends, and travel to a variety of other schools for the competitions.
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Lots of good advice so far. I strongly encourage you to get clarity on your budget from your parents, you say your parents would love if you receive merit, but are ‘willing to make things happen’ is too vague. If they can’t spend $300K+ on undergrad you need to know that. Will you qualify for need-based financial aid? Run the net price calculators at several schools to get cost estimates and see if they are affordable.
Regarding tennis, are you in contact with coaches? If not, you need to be reaching out to them ASAP. It is likely you will need two parallel lists of colleges…one with schools where you would play tennis, and a list of schools without tennis.
I also encourage you to consider whether you will be able to keep your grades up to the level needed for successful dental school admission while also playing tennis. It is unlikely you can play tennis if you attend a combo/accelerated BS/DDS program.
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Great information, thank you!
Re playing tennis, I have multiple family members who played college sports, and our experiences with how that fit in with a academics varied wildly, depending on the individual coach, and the support of the faculty and administration. One student’s school it was up to the profs whether to allow tests at different times in the event of a scheduling conflict (and many profs said no). Another student’s school taped all classes and the students were freely able to make things up. And one student switched her sport because the first coach had crazy time demands, but the other sport was reasonable. So if playing on a team (rather than a club) is important to you, best to ask a lot of questions about a particular school’s team.
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My 18 daughter has the same stats, got into lehigh, too expensive. She mostly applied to safeties and matches, because she needed merit.
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As others have said, students looking for professional school – law, medicine, vet, dental – which generally requires substantial borrowing to fund, are best served by taking merit awards in college and putting college savings towards professional school to minimize debt. You also want a school where you can be in the top percentage of the class gpa-wise. For someone who also wants to compete in their sport, that means target and safety schools with generous merit awards. It’s not about getting into the “best” school you can, but about finding the financial, academic and athletic fit.
Off the top of my head, D3 schools with good merit aid include: St. Lawrence, Dickinson, Hobart William Smith, Kenyon, Denison, Oberlin, Wooster, Rhodes, Centre College.
Schools that don’t give merit awards: NESCAC schools other than Trinity and Conn Coll, Franklin & Marshall, Haverford, Swarthmore, Vassar.
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In PA, consider Washington & Jefferson southwest of Pittsburgh. They do very well in the pre-health fields, can offer decent aid, will give you a little less winter, and have tennis (I just googled).
Juniata is another in PA that has been previously mentioned and is worth consideration. Dickinson is too.
I’ll also add my support to Eckerd in FL if you want to put nice winter weather up higher. They are very good in the sciences, but beware that the good weather can make it difficult to study for the grades! Being the parent of an Eckerd alum, I can say going there for Parents Weekend in Feb was fun.
Your accomplishments and grades could make you a nice candidate for aid at these places and I fully agree that you want to keep undergrad costs low if heading into dentistry.
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I suggest you look at the Colleges that Change Lives website for ideas on schools. Wooster is actually on there. I also like Clark.
Your parents have said they will pay. I differ from some other posters in that I would also emphasize the experience of the next 4 years, not just the outcome in terms of dental school admissions (and cost).
I tend to question early career directions, but am often wrong on this 
Still, how did you become interested in the dental profession? Are you absolutely certain of this career direction? College can be a time for exploration and discovering new interests and career paths.
I would apply to colleges where you can be happy for those 4 precious years. Avoid pressure cookers, according to your own preference. Think about cost, yes, but your parents seem willing to pay. Think about size, location, academics, and especially “vibe.”
Tennis is another factor that I know little about.
Also look into ways that larger universities, like your state U., manage to create smaller communities within the larger one. You sound like a good LAC candidate but don’t write off larger schools until you have looked into how student life is arranged to create community.
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I think this approach is confusing for the OP. If someone said they wanted a Ferrari, and you said you could make the math work so they could have a Ferrari, but they’d have to live on the street for a year panhandling for food, you probably wouldn’t give that advice.
This example is not that out of line. Private UG, Dent School, and Residency will start the OP in a hole over $1M deep. That has HUGE implications. They will underfund their retirement and be unable to open their own practice.
Maybe if we take that approach, we should do it with a huge caveat, something like “sure you could get into school X, but here’s why you don’t even want to apply.”
I think the OP can have all 3. That’s the holy grail. Truman is a perfect example. A few posters have missed a salient point, that she doesn’t want a big school, but I don’t see anyone overtly saying fit is unimportant.
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Union in NY is another that offers merit and is strong in pre health fields.
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Have you looked into any of the BS/DMD programs. Usually you can shave off a year and get both done in 7. Take a look at Rutgers and SUNY, as two that come to mind that would be economical and in your stats range.
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This makes it sound as if you are likely to be taking a number of classes that overlap with premed classes, even though you are not premed. The same thing was true for both of my daughters. They both have multiple friends who are premed who they met specifically in the classes that they took that did overlap with premed classes.
Premed classes will be full of very strong students who are very serious and who are very determined to get top grades. This is true at any of at least the top 200 or more universities in the US. You are going to find these classes very demanding. With this, you want to be able to get the grades that are needed to get into dental school. This might be marginally less demanding than the grades needed to get into medical school, but it will still be academically very tough. “Deans’s list in high school” and “top 10% of my high school” will be true for almost everyone you see in quite a few of your classes.
Also, you should try to save some $$$ for dental school or other graduate work. You definitely do not want to take on any debt at all for your bachelor’s degree.
You have really good in-state public options. I am not from your part of the country, but my understanding is that you might have some sort of tuition reciprocity with the University of Wisconsin. I would take Minnesota and Wisconsin public universities very seriously.
I am not a big fan of reach schools for premed, pre-dental, or pre-veterinary students (one daughter was pre-vet and will start a DVM program in September). You need to excel wherever you go. I do not think that you want to walk into your first biology class freshman year and have half the class be high school valedictorians.
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I totally agree with the posters such as @DadTwoGirls . Go cheap, go where you can get high grades and have fun. I have a son who just completed his first year in a DVM program with top grades. It didn’t matter what college he went to undergrad. He is happy he went to a big state U with high merit and BS/DVM program (7years) and to this point has no debt, has offers to do work for credit at several places in other states and had time to even be president of his large fraternity. He went into professional school without burn-out. Several of his classmates from “more prestigious schools” are already burning out from nothing but work undergrad.
Dental is the same boat. They don’t care about undergrad prestige. Try not to go into professional school already burnt out!
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@Smasha , one other consideration to throw in the mix is this: Are there schools that would give you enough credit for those AP exams that you could shorten college by a semester or year? That isn’t of interest to everyone but I have known students who found saving the time and money quite helpful given that there was a long expensive path in front of them.
You would have to do this thoughtfully so you had the right college classes on your transcript for dental school apps, but it’s yet another option.
I think at this point it may be most helpful for you to give a short list of some of the schools you are being told are matches, safeties or reaches. And also, which schools have reached out for athletics recruitment.
Also, as an aside, pre-dental and pre-med and etc. are rarely majors unto themselves. (Sometimes there is a general Health Sciences type major that’s geared toward pre-health students.) And while a lot of students assume they should be biology majors if they’re pre-health, there is no actual need to major in biology. Any major can be combined with the pre-health prereq courses, and some majors can really enhance your background more than a bio major would. (For example, quote from Eckerd College’s pre-health advising page: " Anthropology courses give you an edge: Unlike most other liberal arts colleges, our Anthropology faculty are experts in human health, both living and past. You can study medical anthropology, skeletal biology, forensic anthropology, dental anthropology, and paleopathology — subjects that have direct relevance to pre-health students. When applying to medical or dental schools, this valuable academic experience often sets our students apart from graduates from other colleges with a strict Biology major." Public Health majors, where available, can be great too, and you’ve already shown interest in this kind of focus, with your Rotary project.
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You have many great suggestions upthread. I also recommend Case Western (demonstrated interest is important there, FYI) and maybe Rochester or Brandeis if you are interested in midsized schools that offer some merit. I have heard good things about Creighton (NE). If you are gravitating towards LACs - @Midwestmomofboys gave you lots of great suggestions. I know that you are wanting to get out of Minnesota, but St Olaf is also great for pre-health majors and has merit up to half of total cost. Another LAC worth considering is Muhlenberg, which has some good merit awards. Finally Clark U (Worcester, MA) might be worth a look.
As for your college counselor, this past year was a very strange and unprecedented admissions cycle due to COVID and Test Optional. It is currently very hard to predict outcomes so maybe your counselor is being extra cautious because of this. I agree with others upthread that you should gently and politely insist that your counselor also work with you to come up with a couple of reach options that interest you.
Your stats and ECs related to your choice of major look very strong. With a balanced list, I am sure you won’t lack for options. Good luck!
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How are you determining this? Meeting a school’s GPA/testing metrics doesn’t mean you can get in, especially at competitive schools. You need to look at the acceptance rates.
Take MIT as an example. They report that the sum of the midpoints of their SAT scores as 1550. But they also report that the acceptance rates for students with 750-800 in each section as 10-11%. So getting a 1550 doesn’t mean you’ll get in.
Matching the published metrics will mean you are in the range where you will be seriously considered. But a school with a low admission rate still means admission is unlikely (as it is for all), though more likely than those with lower scores. It’s a “match” but still a reach.
I don’t know why you would be discouraged from applying to these schools, but I would certainly encourage you to find other better match/admission rate schools to go along with them.
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This is a great point that most miss. You have to put the two together. A school with a median SAT and 5% acceptance rate is a reach if you have a 1550 (really any score there or above). A school with a 1550 median SAT and 50% acceptance rate is a match with a 1550 SAT.
I’m not sure the counselor did, but I’ve tried to make it brutally apparent…price. The total nut the OP is looking at could be well over $1M.
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Many of the colleges mentioned are on our list to tour this summer. Everyone has been super helpful, I am loving all the constructive ideas.
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