<p>Your test scores are fine. I think my daughter had a 23 ACT in math. Colleges look at the scores in the context of the student – they don’t expect all students to be good at everything. You aren’t planning major in math or science – the math that you need for econ is more toward statistics, which isn’t tested on the ACT. </p>
<p>You have a great app – I just really worry about the financial end of things for you. Barnard is fairly generous with aid, but not so much that you can assume that they will give you more money than other schools. </p>
<p>I do think that you should have more safeties on your college list (posted at <a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/what-my-chances/1690073-give-it-the-panda-a-chance-get-a-panda-chance-back.html”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/what-my-chances/1690073-give-it-the-panda-a-chance-get-a-panda-chance-back.html</a> ). Drop Berkeley from your list – you aren’t going to get good financial aid as an out-of-state students, so you won’t be able to afford to attend. Also for the other public schools on your list, research their financial aid policies for out-of-state – generally attending an out-of-state public is not helpful for a person who is eligible for substantial financial aid. </p>
<p>Your list is reach-heavy – so keep the schools that have very strong need-based aid policies, and then add more safety/match schools that also offer merit aid to high-stat students. </p>
<p>Getting into college is not going to be your challenge— the big problem will be paying for college. So as a future econ major, this is lesson #1. </p>
<p>That’s why ED is a bad deal - in your export business you probably have figured out by now that you can get better prices on the stuff you sell if you are careful to comparison shop, and perhaps keep an eye on merchandise until it goes on sale. For colleges, ED is a marketing gimmick, meant to attract more customers willing and able to pay full cost. They create a lot of hype around ED (primarily around the idea of improved “chances”) – and they take away their customers’ ability and incentive to comparison shop – so I’m sure that if a study were done of the costs paid for colleges, it would turn out that students coming in on ED on average pay a lot more for college and receive significantly less financial aid than RD admits. I’m not talking about Barnard in particular – just the whole ED system. </p>
<p>(* That would be a good thesis topic for an econ student. I’m not sure where you could find the data, because colleges aren’t required to report those numbers separately – but I wouldn’t be surprised if there is a very clear, monetary cost tied to ED that could be quantified.)</p>