Please Match Canadian Asian male to T20 [4.0 UW, 1580 SAT for Chemistry or Math]

With a 4.0 GPA I would expect the Canadian universities on your list to be safeties, and these are indeed all very good universities. I suppose that you could add Queen’s, but I don’t see why you would need to given the excellent quality, relatively reasonable cost, and very high probability of acceptance to the Canadian universities that you already have on this list.

By the way, we currently live in the US but both daughters and I have dual citizenship. All three of us applied to Canadian universities and considered them all to be safeties with grades and SAT scores that were slightly lower than your stats.

You should at a minimum budget for a full 4 years of university. A master’s is possible for either a chemistry or mathematics major, which suggests that you might want to budget for 6 years. In Canada my understanding is that a master’s degree is usually funded, but in the US it usually is not and can be somewhat expensive.

However, one reasonable option to consider would be to get a bachelor’s degree in Canada and then a master’s or other graduate degree in the US. I know multiple people who have done this, or are about to do this (one daughter starts her PhD in the US in a few months). This can cost less than just a bachelor’s in the US, since a master’s degree is generally somewhere between one and two years so you would be paying the big bucks for a much shorter period of time. Of the people I know who did this, one got his bachelor’s degree at Toronto and his master’s degree at Stanford. I also used to know someone who got her bachelor’s at Toronto, and then both a master’s and a PhD at Princeton. The others have also attended very good graduate programs in the US. Even the highest ranked and best known universities in the US know how strong the top universities in Canada are.

Many of the highest ranked universities in the US are need-blind for admissions (Harvard, MIT, Princeton, and Stanford come to mind – edit, oops, I forgot that Stanford is not need blind for international students). You might as well apply for financial aid. You can run their NPCs to get an estimate for what they might cost you assuming that you apply for financial aid and get accepted (if you Google “Net Price Calculator Harvard University” you will for example find the NPC for Harvard).

The Universities of California will almost certainly be full pay for an out of state student.

The full cost of attendance at a private university in the US can often be somewhere in the US$80,000/year to US$90,000/year range, although apparently there is at least one that is now up to $95,000/year. By the time that you get your bachelor’s degree, you could very likely be paying over US$100,000 per year at a private university in the US. The public universities might be slightly less, but only slightly. I do not understand the point of paying this much for a bachelor’s degree when the alternative for 1/4 the cost is on the level of Toronto, McMaster, Queen’s, McGill, and UBC. I would urge you not to start at any university in the US without knowing for sure how you are going to pay for four years without taking on any debt.

Do not plan on being allowed to stay in the US after getting your degree down here. International students who attend university in the US are expected and generally required to return to their home country after graduating. Also, at least in my experience (admittedly from many years ago) Canadian employers often seem to prefer to hire from one of the excellent Canadian universities rather than from top US universities (even at the “MIT, Stanford” level).

One small NIT is that I do not think that UC Irvine is a safety, but on the other hand I do not think that this matters because I think that Toronto and McMaster are safeties for you and are excellent universities.

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