Identifying Safety Schools - Average GPAs

Look for the Common Data Set to find those GPA stats. It’s often buried, but they are required to publish it. Put it in the schools search engine and it should pop right up.

What’s harder is finding out what your child’s college within a larger university might set as a standard. Some schools don’t admit by college, and some do.

For example, my son wants to go into aerospace, and the ACT scores run as much as 3 - 4 points higher in the engineering colleges at most big universities, a fact that was lost on his college counselor who told him a 30 in math was just A-ok because that was above the 75th percentile at the university overall. We had to dig to find out what the scores were for engineering. Needless to say he did some studying and bumped it up to a 33, thank goodness.

Conversely, a student might be surprised at what is required in other colleges- it might not be as bad as you think!