International Student Applying for Financial Aid

[collegemom3717]

One of my recommendations will be pretty good, the other one will be average

Ranking: Top 20%

Annual income is about 35000 dollars

Together, those three things pretty much wipe out your list.

I am hardly ever this absolute, but

1. you can only afford to attend a school that will ‘meet full need’, and all of those schools will take the amount of your need into consideration. Taking your family’s annual income at face value, that would mean a full ride- tuitions, room & board. For these schools that means ~ $280,000. So they will look very hard at your application. Are you the kind of star that makes using up that much of their finaid pot look like a good idea? What do you add to their community, now and/or in the future?

2. looking at stats, no: for most of those schools you look just like their average student (for the top handful, your class rank is well below their average).

3. ok, what about your LoRs- do they show why you stand out? except for your GC you get to pick who writes your LoRs. If the best you can find is somebody who will only write you an ‘average’ letter that is going to stand out- but not in a good way. The AO’s for the schools on your list are used to seeing really strong, specific recs (and the first half dozen or so are used to ‘this is the most amazing student I have seen in decades’ level of references).

4. ok, how about your ECs- something special there?

My extracurriculars are not extreme, they are not things I have been doing for a very long time or I am super good at but they are pretty unique. There is a lot of both depth and breadth

If you haven’t been doing them very long and aren’t particularly good at them I am hard pressed to see how you could have ‘depth and breadth’. You might get points for novelty, but does it say ‘wow, that’s an impressive achievement for a 17 year old’ ?

That leaves only your essay to make the case as to why they should finance your education. As @cptofthehouse pointed out, it’s not just you knowing what you want, but you knowing what they want.

Finally,

Instead of going further down in terms of educational quality (which I can only judge based on student comments)

As @blossom noted, student comments online are an exceptionally bad way to evaluate “educational quality”.

I have better alternatives elsewhere.

That is super! then set a $ amount that you are willing to lose (play the lottery, as @cptofthehouse put it), and spend that amount on applications to whichever of the colleges on your list you really like. If you win the lottery, yeah! if not you have your better alternatives.