I thought that might be the case with Scripps. Tufts is nearing the single digit mark in terms of rejectivity which is why I didn’t recommend it. But by all means visit, if you are in the Boston area. I second the choice of Wesleyan University. It gives off a bigger vibe than its size might indicate and while Middletown has its “sleepy” aspects, my vision of being stuck at home at Wesleyan would at the very least include cooking a good meal in one of the 150 or so university-owned “woodframe houses” that come complete with kitchens. Celebrity kids “disappear” into the background with no problem.
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Michigan?
Definitely not a target school!
Overall acceptance rate is in the mid teens, which means OOS acceptance rate is far lower.
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William & Mary, Rochester, and Wake are the three that came to my mind, but I wonder about Rochester and SAD. Also Wake has a good bit of Greek life, particularly for women. Still worth looking into but probably good to know right away. There is much less Greek like at W&M and Rochester.
I’m going to add to the suggestion to check out WUSTL, which has a lower acceptance rate than specified, but they have a reputation for being pretty numbers driven, and I think it might be in the softer reach category for this profile.
Similarly Emory is really strong in English, and good all around. Again this is outside the requested parameters, but I think can maybe fill the potential gap between the hardest reaches for high numbers kids and targets, what we sometimes call softer reaches in our feederish HS.
And I agree yet another like that to possibly consider would be Rice.
Another out of parameter suggestion I would second would be to check out SLACs in consortiums, including women’s colleges. Independently they would be too small, but the consortium relationships might make them feel bigger. Smith and Mt Holyoke are in Five Colleges, Scripps in Claremont [Edit: sorry, I see this is a no], and Bryn Mawr is in the BiCo with Haverford, TriCo adds Swarthmore, Quaker adds Penn.
The last thing I would agree with is that the Arts & Science subdivision of many larger public universities could be very suitable. That actually includes William & Mary, but they are a special case. However, I agree a number of bigger publics could be worth exploring.
In fact you mentioned you might specifically look at Barrett College, the honors college at Arizona State, with around 7200 students, 5900 in Tempe. Over 30% of their students are OOS, and I believe a lot of Californians specifically. It has a very good reputation, and it produces a lot of Fulbrights and such. I note it is test blind, but those grades/IB might be solid for them, and my understanding your test scores can impact merit scholarships (and indeed should be very good for merit scholarships).
Along those lines (sorta), Rutgers also has a very well-regarded Honors College. It is much smaller but I believe it does consider test scores, and Honors students automatically have a competitive merit scholarship too.
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Fair warning–while I think Pitt looks good on many dimensions, someone with SAD should be very cautious. The strip of territory just downwind of the Great Lakes and before the mountains gets a lot of cloudy days, rivaling the Pacific Northwest in fact (for similar reasons):
On the other side of the mountains, the actual East Coast, it is much better.
So it is up to you, but while normally I would be recommending Pitt, in this case I would more suggest checking out Rutgers, and maybe Delaware. Also perhaps Indiana, actually.
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Yes, the honors college is very good. I assume the “much smaller” refers to the HC and not the school overall?
Correct.
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Yes! Sorry. I believe the HC at Rutgers is only like 500 students, so way smaller than Barrett.
I note Schreyer at Penn State is another that people often recommend checking out, but I have a little bit more of a SAD concern with them. They have around 2000 students, but they are also test blind.
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Rice fits everything on your list perfectly except target school, lol – it’s another single-digit acceptance, but your DD is more than qualified with her stats.
My introverted sophomore is very happy there right now – no Greek system, but the residential colleges provide similar social structure without the competitive parts of Greek life.
Also, it’s a strong STEM school, but mine is a linguistics major and classics minor, and the intellectual curiosity thing is real and true. The core requirements for classes are very loose – my daughter met a good number of them with AP credits, and then she’s had flexibility to take all kinds of things. This semester she has something called Mapping the World - the history of maps from Ptolemy to Google. Also a Stage Combat class, lol. Her freshman year she took a Tolkien class on the history of middle earth. 
Big city, amazingly gorgeous campus, lots to do, very rigorous academics, good opportunities. (Mine is a TA this semester as a sophomore.) Large percentage of Asian students, if that is of interest. No real sports culture – no one shows up to the football games, really, although Rice went to a bowl game this year, and it was exciting. Crazy hot weather in the fall, plus frequent downpours – but when that settles down, the weather is lovely all winter with only an occasional cold spell. Houston (and Rice) is a liberal pocket in a conservative state.
If your DD really wants to disappear among a large number of students, I don’t know if that’s possible at Rice. Undergrad is about 4,500 – with 8,000+ including grad students. Most of my daughter’s classes have between 8 and 25 students (but many of those are linguistics and not general core). She is known by her professors, has been to a professor’s house for dinner, and studied abroad in Italy after her freshman year.
We couldn’t be more pleased with her experience – she is happy and thriving there. Of course, we pay through the nose for it, as there is very little merit, and we don’t qualify for aid.
Anyhow. If she’s attracted to Stanford, Princeton and Brown, give Rice a look.
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I note Rice is also super into people who are super into Rice. That doesn’t mean you have to ED there (although it certainly doesn’t hurt), but I think if you really have specific reasons for loving the idea of attending Rice that come through in your application, that can help you stand out versus the people more applying to Rice as a generic prestigious college on some shotgun list.
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This is so true. My daughter did not ED anywhere, but her final decision came down to Rice or Emory. But the only thing that Emory had going for it (to her) was that it was an hour’s drive from our house, as opposed to a two-hour flight. Rice still won out because she loved everything else about it, and that must have come through loud and clear on her application.
She’s a theatre kid, and she dug and found info about a particular show that is a long-standing tradition at Rice – then wrote an essay about how much she wanted to be in it, plus her background in that genre, etc. This semester she was cast in exactly the role she wanted in said show. Kid couldn’t be happier. Full circle!
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Interesting! One of my 2 applied to Emory but the thing that it had going AGAINST it was that it was too close to home! (That was the S who chose Tulane, not the S who chose Rice).
You might also play around on this website for more info https://www.collegedata.com/
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OP is early decision a possibility?
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Tagging @AustenNut to see if she can help OP find target schools (rather than schools with low to mid teen, or single digit acceptance rates).
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@BayAreaProud what criteria would your daughter be willing to compromise?
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I note part of the problem is schools like the OP’s ideal are expensive to create and operate. Really just a few get the funding to do it at the scale the OP wants, and as a result tend to be extremely selective. One solution is to do it at a smaller scale, hence all the SLACs. Another is to borrow economies of scale from a bigger public system, in the form of honors colleges and such. But all those can be quite selective too.
So in my circles, William & Mary, Rochester, Case, and Wake are a sort of known short list of exceptions. Unfortunately, two of those are in a bad zone for SAD, and a third has a lot of Greek life particularly for women.
So I think a list that goes beyond just William & Mary is going to involve compromises of some sort. Which is fine, but the OP is going to have to keep guiding us on which compromises are more acceptable, and which not so much.
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And not to complicate this—as I agree with your overall premise—but having spent a lot of time in Williamsburg in my grad student years, I can say that bustling/lively/interesting it is not. Beyond the confines of the colonial area, it’s just sprawl. I found it a real bummer.
I have also heard that undergraduates who want a lively social life often feel like they have to join the Greek system—which I’m sure is a different sort of Greek system than you’d find at a big party school, but if you’re not interested in Greek life, that’s worth knowing.
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I agree, it’s not easy to construct a target list these days for a high stats, unhooked kid (they mostly have safeties or reaches - true targets are rare).
But I feel like this thread has morphed into a “name your favorite school” thread.
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If you’re avoiding the Pacific Northwest because of SAD, you should probably also avoid the Northeast, and I bet the upper and central midwest, too. Honestly, her mental health is more important than anything else. Extreme south has more sun, and longer daylight in the winter. She needs to go to a large university with lots of majors, since she’s not sure what she wants to study.
So, CA schools, south, and southwest. Obviously, the CA publics are your best value, and they all meet the environmental requirement, especially UCLA and UCSD. Frankly, with her stats, and her in-state status, unless you guys are extremely wealthy, that would be all that’s on the table. Why spend an extra 200K for her college education when you have such great options available to her in CA?
Her stats could get her in anywhere, but you are right to look for target schools in the 20-30% range, too.
Tulane - they may offer her a lot of merit money, probably at least their half tuition scholarship.
Emory. U Florida. U Miami. U Alabama would probably offer her a huge amount of merit, maybe even their full ride, definitely if she’s National Merit, and because they’re offering full rides to top students, they’re developing a critical mass of really smart kids taking them up on it - she’d find her peers there.
Understand that for a kid from the Bay area, who’s got SAD, most of the country is worse than where you currently are, when looking for winter sun and daylight hours.
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Excellent point, so we are down to zero perfect matches.
Which is fine, but as is often the case in life, some amount of compromise is going to be necessary.
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Not to be picky, but I don’t think the NE is quite as cloudy as Seattle/Portland.
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