Uhm, yeah, asking for a friend,
What are some prestigious schools that don’t only look at grades but look at essays to understand the true potential of a student. My friend isn’t talking about highly selective schools such as the ivies, Stanford, MIT but schools with around 20% acceptance such as Carnegie Mellon, Georgia Tech, University of Virginia. My friend has read multiple stories of people who have gotten accepted into these prestigious schools with low stats but jaw-dropping essay/story and I guess he feels that he can pull off the same.
asking for a friend
I asked my friend. My friend says none in the 20% range and probably not in the 30% or 40% range either.
My friend suggests that your friend take a gap year and figure out how to improve your friend’s GPA.
Or go look at schools using some other criteria than “top 20%”. Those number reflect all sorts of factors that your friend might not care about and ignore a lot of things that might make the next four years a lot more rewarding.
If the only criteria is not disappointing a judgmental aunt then you need to figure out how to get into a famous school (or tell her to buzz off.) But if you really examine what you want from the next stage of your education then you will almost certainly get a better result than slavishly chasing USNWR rankings. If you want chemical engineering or music or journalism or a host of other degrees you’ll make completely different lists for each. Celebrate the differences, pursue what you really want, and defend your choices. Don’t settle for name brands.
Tell “your friend” that the excellent essay is part of what distinguishes an admit with top-end grades from numerous other applicants with top-end grades.
“My friend” told me it is against the TOS to ask questions for “a friend.”
There are oodles of colleges who consider stats (grads and scores) in the context of everything else that a kid brings to campus.
What is “your friend” interested in? Hidden gems- i.e. considered prestigious by people who know the program even if the general population doesn’t know. Engineering? Look at Missouri M&T. Employers love that school. History? Earlham, Rhodes, Lawrence. Literature? Beloit. Anything environmental/sustainability? College of the Atlantic. Music? Southern Illinois at Carbondale. Then there are universities which don’t get enough love where they are, but outsiders consider them plenty prestigious and rigorous- Stonybrook for STEM; Rutgers for poli sci and applied math; Muhlenberg for the performing arts.
If you post a little more detail- general interests? geography? financial constraints? we can be more helpful. And are we talking about a kid with a 2.8 GPA and average scores who thinks he can get into CMU or U Michigan? No, that’s not happening. But we can help with suggestions.
I think that “Colleges That Change Lives” schools and normal state schools are the ones who are interested in nurturing the future potential of late-bloomers…but they don’t have admittance rates in the twenty percentiles. Prestigious schools are looking for demonstrated potential that the student has already been honing with disciplined effort for the last few years.
Asking for a friend is not allowed. Please have your friend get their own CC account to post.