My daughter is graduating high school spring 2018 and applying to colleges. She has a 31 ACT and combined SAT 1350 (700-math, 650-english). She has been an IB student (5 year Latin honors) with an A average… but dropped out of IB and has been taking college courses instead, so has a college transcript from the local community college. She wants to major in Statistics/Math and go on to an excellent law school. She prefers to stay in the same school, but looking for one with fewer than 10,000 students and preferably Christian. Any recommendations? Absolutely ruled out all TX schools, even though we live here. She is considering Duke, Northwestern, Univ of Rochester, Tulane, Cornell, Notre Dame, Cal Tech, Purdue, Emory, MIT… but we don’t want her going to a “liberal” college, even though she thinks a “Harvard” would be best… Any suggestions?
First of all, your daughter is considering a lot of “reach” schools, especially for her SAT/ACT range. I’m not saying that her scores are bad, by all means a 1350/31 SAT/ACT is pretty good, but definitely low for a “Harvard” type Institution. Of course, if her transcript is strong (as it seems it is) that usually is a bit more important to admissions, and could balance out the application. Also, by no means trying to discourage your daughter from applying to these great schools, just trying to give my perspective.
Secondly, I have found that most of the top academic institutions in the United States tend to have a more “liberal” environment. It just seems to be the nature of the system. Now, if you don’t want to send your kid to some super liberal school that is okay, but I would argue that college is about allowing your kid to become an individual and meet people with different perspectives. Your daughter can choose to go to a homogeneous school where she is surrounded by people who have similar ideals as she does, but I think students grow more when they are pushed out of their comfort zone. Also, it seems that she is looking for a new experience given that she wants to leave Texas.
Anyways, here’s a few more schools that might fight your criteria:
Liberty University
Davidson College
Lafayette College
Tulsa
Pepperdine University
Villanova University
College of the Holy Cross
Boston College
Georgia Tech
Virginia Tech
Honestly, the best advice that I can offer you is that you should let your daughter find some schools that she might like and VISIT THEM. You may find that many of the colleges that you thought where too “liberal” have good conservative and religious programs that you didn’t know about. Take UC Berkeley for example, yes, the school where students protest seemingly daily actually has one of the strongest republican associations in the country because these republican students are in a minority. You probably still won’t apply to Berkeley, which is reasonable, but the point is that you might end up liking some schools that you never would have considered.
Just for transparency, I am a liberal and atheist person from Connecticut, but I live in a community that is pretty evenly split between conservatives and democrats and is also largely Catholic. I have both conservative and religious friends who have very similar concerns as you do. All that I am going to say is that your daughter should find the school that she wants to go to regardless of politics. And being a minority on campus is not necessarily a bad thing.
Best of luck as you go through the college application process.
My S was a part of an in-depth overnight program at Lafayette, and is currently a student at Tulsa. He loved Lafayette, but it definitely is not a Christian school. I think Lafayette would provide an awesome environment and strong education.
TU is no longer officially affiliated with any church. However, there is a strong Christian presence on campus with several strong solid Christian organizations from which to choose. As far as the strength of the academics, there is no doubt about that. The average ACT is 30 for incoming freshmen. TU is known to be very generous with scholarships. Being in TX, you probably know students at TU. PM me if you want to know more. I think it would be a great out-of-state option that meets your criteria. TU also has a law school.
Lafayette is not affiliated with any church or religion despite what college niche says. It’s got a great mix of kids and is a terrific school. But it doesn’t have a law school so wouldn’t check that box
agree that the list is very top-heavy with reach schools. To have a reasonable chance of admissions, you (the applicant) MUST be squarely in the top 50% of the applicants, preferably in the top 25%. Do not make the mistake of thinking that if you’re in (or close) tot eh mid-50% that you have shot. You simply don’t.
May want to add some more overtly Christian schools to the mix. Calvin college offers very solid merit aid, and we are a big fan of the school for multiple reasons. Do some searching here to get names of other schools to consider.
As a safety, you might want to look at Valparaiso. It’s smaller, but has an honors college within the school, has a law school which definitely looks at law as a calling for service & justice, and has a strong faith presence (Lutheran, although not directly tied to either ELCA or LCMS).