I’m an incoming hs senior in Midwest. I want a science degree with strong research, maybe phd? I want to keep open options and flexible, but I’m set on science. Probably not engineering or CS. I like the outdoors, strong academic focus, selective school, research, and I don’t want a huge college. Right now, I’m leaning toward schools like Pomona, Harvey mudd, washu, Carleton, grinnell, Williams, Stanford, and the ivies.
Academics: 34 act, 35 superscore, national merit expected, 4.284/4.0 gpa, maxed out APs with all 5s
I also swim, with 1:01 and 2:12 breaststroke times (mens). I’m talking to coaches at Wesleyan, grinnell, and Carleton.
Let me know what schools I should add to list and what my chances are. Also, I’d like to know about chances ED vs RD in general and for athletes. If anyone knows how I can lower cost at private schools, also tell me. Income around 140-160k. I want to use swim to maximize chances, and I don’t want to sacrifice academic prestige and ranking if I don’t need to. I also want to keep costs low, maybe $25k or lower. The grinnell calculator said $30-35k ish.
If this $25K budget is a hard stop, you will have to change your list. Do any NPCs come within your budget?
If a coach offers you a slot, and you commit, they will likely want you to apply ED. Assuming you passed an academic pre-read, you chances of admission at the schools above would be very high with full coach support. You can and should also ask for a financial aid pre-read. Be up front with the coaches about your budget. If one offers full coach support and you want to apply RD you have to ask the coach if their support would remain.
What is the timing of the coaches’ decisions at these three schools?
At this point I would say getting recruited is not a sure thing, so you need to add some schools with higher probability of admission that are affordable. Do you have any schools that meet those criteria?
My son has similar academic stats (maybe just a tad lower) and is doing another sport but is being heavily recruited as a D3 athlete. He is being pressed for ED at a number of the schools he is looking at but some schools have been willing to wait. I suspect that depends on where you are on their list of prospects. He’s had good merit aid award preread offers already from a number of places like the ones you are listing, particularly in the Midwest. Have you thought about Kenyon, Oberlin, Denison, or DePauw? I suspect Grinnell would have some academic merit aid on top of the financial aid as well. I would think with your stats you’d get good merit aid in addition to financial aid at all those places. Less so at the Wesleyan’s and Pomona’s of the world. You might also try posting on the Athletic Recruits board here–I’ve gotten lots of good advice, and there are definitely some people who know more about swimming recruiting times than me over there!
I added the athletic recruit subtag to OP’s post, hopefully more posters will weigh in.
I will say if OP wants to contact more schools, he has to start doing that this weekend. For time guidance, OP can use swimcloud, D3 conference championship results, as well as each school’s results on their team website.
Based on your interest in scientific research, perhaps consider schools with notably strong science facilities. These survey-based results from the Princeton Review are a bit eclectic, particularly with respect to selectivity, but may offer you one or two further ideas that align with your general criteria:
From your tentative list, Harvey Mudd and WashU appear.
Your preliminary list of colleges is a good one. I would narrow down the list of Ivys no more than four should you decide to apply. I believe that with most colleges, the recruited athlete admit rate mirrors the legacy admit rate (of the ones that practice legacy admissions), so this could serve as a rough estimate of your chances.
You state that your family income is around $150K. For most colleges, especially public w/o any merit or athletic scholarships, your family would likely need to pay x amount of tuition & fees out-of-pocket. With your current GPA, test scores, & varsity swimming - you have the potential of winning up to full ride scholarships at the right schools - make sure they are renewable for up to four years. $25K next year equals $100K for 4 years of college & really more since costs usually increase each subsequent year. Some private school options could end up being significantly lower in cost than public even some in-state schools, saving your family >$100K.
Is Dartmouth a consideration. Excellent outdoor recreation things and a great outing club. Worth a look see. I’m not sure what their swim team looks like now, but this is a conversation to have with your current swim coach.
With the D3s that OP has mentioned, as well as the Ivies, students who have passed an academic pre-read, have full coach support, and verbally commit to the recruiting process have nearly assured acceptance if they apply when the coach tells them to (generally ED or single choice EA.) The legacy admit rate for these schools is not nearly that high.
I don’t think a full ride athletic scholarship is possible for OP. But, if he wants to look at national merit schools that give full rides, he might consider those. Alabama is one example, there are more here: Big merit NMF/NMSF schools and their specialties
Right, especially at Ivy League schools which sciencemajor42 is looking to apply to. During the SFFA v. Harvard trial, court documents revealed that legacy applicants were admitted at roughly 33% compared to 6% for non-legacy applicants, and recruited athletes had an acceptance rate exceeding 86%.
Students considering Carleton might also consider St. Olaf and Gustavus. All 3 support a lot of research and have high rates of sending students on to PhDs. They also compete in the MIAC conference, which is a nice conference because all the schools are relatively close together so travel times are very reasonable and you won’t miss class. Your swim times would be a good fit for this conference, you would be neither too fast nor too slow.
I am a science grad of Carleton and also swam for them. My education was excellent and I was well prepared for grad school. Also my swim experience was terrific. I also know a parent whose National Merit child went to Gustavus, majored in a STEM field, and swam on their (very strong) swim team. This student got into a number of very selective East coast LACs, but chose Gustavus due to the full-tuition NMF scholarship. This student had a very good experience.
Like I said, legacy admit acceptance rate isn’t close to that of recruited athletes with full coach support (and it was never clear that’s what the 86% number represented). Obviously the Harvard data is dated now, the SFFA data was an aggregate of the Harvard classes of 2014-2019 (so 2010-2015 HS grads), I would expect the legacy admit rate to be lower now.
The important point is what I said in my first post…if OP passed an academic pre-read, has full coach support, verbally commits, and applies when the coach says to, their admission is virtually assured at the schools OP has mentioned.
The first thing that comes to mind is that there are a LOT of universities that are very good for science, and for many specific subsets of “science”. You definitely do not need to attend a famous or highly ranked school to get great opportunities to participate in scientific research. There is lots of research going on at a wide variety of schools. There might be a bit more research going on at the most famous schools, but there is also a lot of very strong competition for the research opportunities at these highly ranked schools.
I know someone very well who is currently studying for a PhD in a biomedical science field. The other students in their program come from a huge range of undergraduate schools, ranging from Ivy’s to in-state public schools (and not just the in-state flagship) to LACs to small unranked schools that you have probably never heard of. This is typical at a wide range of very good and highly ranked graduate programs, where students come from “all over the place”. You can definitely get into a strong graduate program with a bachelor’s degree from any one of a wide range of schools.
Admissions for PhD programs can be very competitive. Some students get a master’s degree first, some don’t (this seems to be not all that far off from 50-50 at the programs in the US that I am familiar with). Admissions to master’s degree programs tends to be very significantly less competitive. However, master’s degree programs are typically not funded. As such, sticking to your budget for your bachelor’s degree is very important if you want to go on to a graduate degree. You might end up needing to go for a master’s and you would be way better off if you can afford to do this when the time comes. Even if you go straight from a bachelor’s to a PhD, some limited parent funding can be helpful (PhD stipends are typically enough to live on, but are not all that generous).
I notice that you have quite a few LACs on your list. To me this seems like a good plan. In most cases LACs have relatively few graduate programs and relatively few graduate students. This suggests that undergraduate students are less likely to need to compete with graduate students for the research opportunities. There are a lot of very good LACs, and quite a few of them will be easier to for admissions compared to the ones that you have mentioned, and will still provide a very good education with very good research opportunities.
Academic prestige does not get you into very good graduate programs. Having some very good research experience and great grades and strong references and a good understanding of what you want to study and why might however improve your chances. Knowing how what you want to study fits with the research being done at any particular school can help you a lot when it comes to graduate admissions, but this is something that you do not need to think about for several years.
Also, what constitutes “prestige” can vary enormously depending upon what you are studying, or what you are doing research in when you get that far. As one example, two of the very best universities for desert biology are Arizona and Arizona State. However, if you would prefer to study estuary biology, you would need to go somewhere completely different (and there is a small school in Nova Scotia which would be very good, because that is where the estuaries are). If you would instead want to study veterinary oncology, Colorado State is one of the best schools, if not the best, in the world. My oncologist, in trying to explain why my cancer appears to have disappeared (yay), has mentioned some research that was done at Colorado State (the research was done on animals because it would not have been ethical to do it on people). And this is all in just a few subsets of biology. Branching out to different sciences you might find the best research is going on somewhere else. There is however some very good research going on all over the place.
You have named some very good colleges and universities in your original post. None of them are safeties. None of them are safeties for students with perfect grades and great test scores and great references. Some of them do not offer any merit aid. The eight Ivy League schools do not offer any merit aid and also do not offer any athletic scholarships. Many are likely to be over budget.
You definitely need to apply to safeties, and you need to think about what schools would be good safeties for you. In this, “safety” should imply both that admissions is very close to certain, and affordability is also very close to certain.
And among the famous and highly ranked schools, think about which ones would be the best fit for you. Then drop the rest of them from your list.
I would agree with this. Especially Columbia and Penn which tend to be a particularly poor fit for those attracted to SLACs. Cornell may have its own appeal due to location and very strong sciences.