<p>*Unsure of the meaning behind this comment. What’s the difference between a liberal arts major at an LAC and a liberal arts major in the College of Arts and Sciences at a research university? *</p>
<p>None. </p>
<p>I guess I wasn’t clear. What I meant was that maybe the D has no intention of being some kind of liberal arts major. Maybe she’ll want to be a business major or something that LACs aren’t really known for.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Definitely doing that! Great idea.</p>
<p>We would just hate to see your DD have a pile of rejections last year. While she sounds like a great kid, just know that great kids with similar EC with top test scores/top grades get rejected ALL the time. One kid we know only applied to reach schools with Carleton as a “safety” school. 2340 SAT, 35 ACT. 4.0, Full IB program, EC’s, etc. got into Carleton as a double legacy, rejected at the other 7 schools she applied to…</p>
<p>I think that Bowdoin is perfectly fine for her, and I bet she would LOVE the school. Lots of high-powered kids there, Brunswick is a charming town, and of course it is coed.</p>
<p>I think that Smith would be a good choice for her. Again, lots of high-powered kids, great college town, and it is in the 5 college exchange with coed schools including Amherst, U Mass, and Hampshire.</p>
<p>To some degree it depends on your kid, but in most cases I would recommend against visiting so many reaches. We hear on CC all the time that you should build your college list from the bottom up. It is easy to find reaches that everyone likes. It is more important to find safeties you can love. </p>
<p>Most LACs have more women than men students, and in some cases the acceptance rates for men are much higher than for women, as they attempt to avoid having the male/female ratio too far unbalanced. At NCES college navigator you can find the male and female acceptance rates. At many of the schools you list, I think that your D’s odds are lower than you think because she is female. </p>
<p>I have a similar situation in that I have an older S at a more selective college than D will be competitive to get into. I avoided taking her to visit super-reach schools, and limited the number of reach schools we visited, trying to emphasize matches and safeties in our visits. </p>
<p>Another piece of advice I have is to look into schools which offer EA or rolling admissions. There is no safety as good as an early admission.</p>
<p>Carleton as the safety. Ha. Love that. </p>
<p>Thanks for the thoughts. I’m doing my best to help her build a diamond shaped list - a few high (but not impossible) reaches, one or true true safeties where she would be happy, a rolling admit so she can have something confirmed early, and several matches that she likes a lot in between. </p>
<p>Her hs counselor has literally not even heard of a single school on her list other than Trinity (relatively local) and Wellesley. Can you believe that? Those poor counselors have so much on their plates.</p>
<p>I still welcome help to identify in-between LACs with strong math and econ departments and a good cohort of ‘it-getters’ D should consider. </p>
<p>As more test scores come in we’ll have to draw a line between the impossibles and the high reaches and also clarify which are the appropriate safeties. </p>
<p>For now, the four schools we’re planning to visit in Feb. probably stand in the impossible category. But, we’re hoping somehow the visits will magically make her determined to get higher scores. That has apparently happened to some of your Ss & Ds which is encouraging. More realistically, perhaps her scores will rise somewhat over time and/or she’ll do better on the ACT. </p>
<p>And that, my friends brings us back to my original post. I acknowledge it’s a bit crazy to bother visiting these schools at this point. But, it looks like we are indeed going to go.</p>
<p>^ not at all crazy to me - if she falls in love and works her tail off to be the best candidate she can for those, side benefit is she is a much stronger candidate for everything else and may even get more merit at those.</p>
<p>Friends took their “B/B+ student” DS to a wide variety of LACs and universities, some schools as “matches” for his GPA/scores and some “very reach” (he’d be in 25th percentile). Their DS liked the “very reach” schools, but not enough to cram for SAT/ACT tests to raise his scores. He applied to a “reach” school (he fits 45th percentile) as ED and was accepted. (He has a minor hook that made him an interesting candidate too.) His parents were ok with his choice, don’t need financial aid, but recently expressed some reservations to us concerning his future academic challenges, indicating that a better fit (75th percentile) would probably be a less stressful fit for him.</p>
<p>I’ve also repeatedly read and heard (even from admissions officers) that it’s more difficult for a white girl to be accepted into many prestigious LACs than a minority girl or a boy. Kenyon’s admission director even wrote an essay that’s on the web concerning this issue. I’ve heard that there’s a 2 to 4 point spread between male and female ACT scores at many Tier 1 and Tier 2 LACs for accepted applicants. Be sure to check this as you review your daughter’s short-list of LAC candidate schools.</p>
<p>Seems many LACs are fairly narrowly slotted regarding their incoming students’ prior GPAs and scores, and it seems prudent not to encourage schools where if by chance your child is accepted, then your child still faces prospect of likely inhabiting the lower-end of the bell curve in their classes. This situation happens for some URM students, where they’re enrolled at an academic disadvantage but accepted for diversity reasons, can’t catch-up to the academic preparation of their fellow classmates, and get discouraged and drop out.</p>
<p>You don’t have to be “Intel level” to impress schools when there’s someting amiss with one of the scores. You have to match the personality/drive/engagement profile they like. That’s more than working through the freshman stats.</p>
<p>You noted a job (always good,) two community leadership boards, president of an active teen 501c3 board. Can we assume that, in addn to these roles, she’s also actually rolling up her sleeves and doing direct comm service work? Something with impact?</p>
<p>My D1 had the same goal of a peer “bar” slightly ahead of her, btw. She knew it would motivate her- and it has (now a college senior.) Her SAT M was ridiculous, despite the prep classes and even a tutor. But, she was able to match herself to what the colleges saw as “fit and thrive.”</p>
<p>Franklin and Marshall, Beloit, Conn College. Not as tough in admissions as Wesleyan (at least from my neck of the woods) but attracts a pretty engaged, studious student.</p>
<p>It is not too late to encourage your D to become a better reader. You may find that an article from the New Yorker or Vanity Fair on a subject that interests her (even the movie reviews in the New Yorker tend to be very well written with a vocabulary more complex than your local newspaper) can get her exposed to good writing. It doesn’t take the same time commitment to read a piece of fiction or a good long form article in a magazine as it does to sit down with Pride and Prejudice on a weekend…although I’d never dissuade a kid from reading my beloved Jane Austen!!!</p>
<p>Seriously though- a 15 minute a day reading habit of something interesting and with hard words and sentence structure- that’s all it takes to flex her muscle. If she’s interested in math and econ- the Economist, Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, New Republic- their editorials and even the letters to the editor are usually well edited and written on a wide range of topics.</p>
<p>So, higgins, that builds on my original thought in a new way. Even if admitted at a reach, will she be well served to attend there.</p>
<p>Is a match school a better choice overall than a reach, especially when it was a reach because of test scores?</p>
<p>I have had thought that being a big fish in a “smaller” (less academically competitive) pond might serve our D well for the long run. Should I urge her in that direction?</p>
<p>I don’t believe education quality is necessarily better at schools with slightly higher admissions standards. The opportunity to earn a better GPA is probably better at schools with somewhat lower standards and that can be critical for grad schools and first jobs. But, at more selective schools daily life may be different because of the types of people who go there. There are, in my daughter’s lingo, more ‘it-getters’. And, that breeds a certain environment that contributes to a person’s overall experience.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>As others have pointed out, those are going to be pretty much all “hooked” students. Geographic diversity and being a “math/science girl” are probably not going to be enough to overcome that.</p>
<p>Some kids love college visits some hate them. When we went on our college visits the one that was most interested,asked the most questions and ranked the colleges in order best to worst… was my 11 year old.:)</p>
<p>My DS felt once you seem a couple well… they all start to look the same. So I guess it depends on your DD. Have you done other things that have helped motivate her in the past that would lead you to believe these visits will?</p>
<p>My SecondToGo visited about 20 LACs in the northeast/middle atlantic and to be honest I liked virtually all of them … having the impression that this would be a great place for the right kid. My guy was a 1900+ SAT, 3.4 GPA guy so we visited a range of schools and saw something in all of them … the LACs a step down from the big boys were also pretty darn impressive to me … your daughter should have lots of great choices. (PS - To me the smaller size of LACs is a big bennie but also makes fit more important … so, to me, visits are very important to LACs.)</p>
<p>Imo, the OP’s D’s grades and rigor of her high school classes would be more indicative as to whether or not she would be able to handle the work at these schools then her SAT scores. Given what else the OP has said about her D, I don’t think she would have any trouble succeeding at the schools she will be looking at. </p>
<p>Bates conducted studies between submitters and non submitters and found very little difference in GPA. </p>
<p>"[N]either SATs nor Achievements seem to predict GPA [grade-point average] with great strength. The verbal and math SAT together accounted for 9.6 percent of the variation in grades, while the Achievement tests accounted for 12.2 percent of the variation. When SATs and Achievements were combined in a multiple regression analysis, they together accounted for only 13.6 percent of variation in cumulative GPA. "11</p>
<p>In comparing five years of enrollees who submitted SAT scores with those who didn’t, Bates found that while “non-submitters” averaged 160 points lower on the SAT, their freshman grade point average - which is what SAT scores are supposed to predict - was only five one-hundredths of a point lower than that of "submitters."12</p>
<p>The academic survival rate of non-submitters was found to be nearly flawless and better than that of submitters: in five years only one of the 14 students dismissed from Bates for academic reasons was an SAT non-submitter: 93% of those dismissed were SAT submitters. Those who didn’t submit their SAT scores had an academic survival rate of 99.8%. Hiss states, "These results seem to us, to put it mildly, very good. "</p>
<p>"In retrospect, Bill Hiss explained, when people at Bates started to look at their testing policy, three things were all moving in the same direction: first, they weren’t convinced that tests were highly predictive - in particular tests were predicting failure for some minority and English-as-a-second language students who turned out to be really brilliant. Second was the ethical question of whether test requirements were scaring away the very applicants Bates said it wanted. And third was a marketing issue: you can’t convince a high school student to attend your school if he or she has been scared off by high average SAT scores and has decided not to apply.21</p>
<p>Bates’ experience demonstrates clearly that even very selective schools don’t need the SAT-or any test score-in order to choose their entering freshman classes. At Bates, many non-submitters who turned out to be fine students might never have been admitted - or would have been discouraged from applying - without the SAT optional policy. In a 1997 interview, Hiss told U.S. News & World Report that for about a quarter to a third of Bates students, the SAT is:</p>
<pre><code>“not predictive and, in some cases, is what a statistician would call a false negative. That is, in fact the test seems to suggest the student cannot do good work when in fact they can. They come to Bates, they make the dean’s list, they graduate Phi Beta Kappa, having come with modest SATs.”
</code></pre>
<p>[Bates</a> College profile taken from Test Scores Do Not Equal Merit: | FairTest](<a href=“http://www.fairtest.org/bates-college-profile-taken-test-scores-do-not-equ]Bates”>Bates College profile taken from Test Scores Do Not Equal Merit: - Fairtest)</p>
<p>Re: 51
There will be so much growing, between now and December 31. It’s too soon to predict whether she’ll want big fish or little fish. Or, what may spark her, interest her, between now and even September. Most of us saw our kids yo-yo. For some kids, the refining of their lists comes much later. Visit what you can, talk, but be cautious not to let her feel her possible matches and safeties are 2nd best or losses, compared to some of the beauts out here. One step at a time.</p>
<p>And, remember one other thing about the 4 you mentioned: all those kids applying to the most selective, have those on their radar, too.</p>
<p>Thanks lookingf, I appreciate the encouragement to let D explore the possibilities. emilybee, that Bates info is surprising and very helpful. </p>
<p>Please excuse me while I gush a bit about how this forum offers such an amazing wealth of resources. I have been posting for a few years now, but this is the first time I reached out for real info and advice. I am struck by how kind you are who take the time to provide input. Despite having gone through it before with our S, this time is quite different. I didn’t realize until starting this thread how alone I felt in this process trying to guide a kid who is considering schools that are off the map from everyone else in her school. This really helps.</p>
<p>What does she want to do with a math/econ degree?</p>
<p>niceday… I was where you were last year with my DS. He had the opposite problem though…very high test scores but lower GPA… which I think is more common for boys, and the reverse more common for girls… a generalization I know, but have seen it time and time again. Anyway, I was also under the naive impression that my DS’s amazing EC’s, high test scores and gender would be enough to overcome his low GPA, I was wrong…he ended up with a pile of rejections, and it was NOT fun. He was deferred then rejected from his ED school too. </p>
<p>The good thing is that I was at least smart enough to make sure he had a good list of reach, match and safety schools that were similar enough to the reach schools he liked so much. He was also similar to your DD in that he also wanted a classroom full of bright engaged kids. He loves learning for the sake of learning, but wanted more of a balance, so his grades suffered. </p>
<p>I only took him to visit his reaches… Bowdoin, Bates… after we visited some easier admit schools, UVM, L&C. The schools that did admit him…8 in all, were schools he had never visited at all…so an interesting April to say the least. </p>
<p>I do think that your DD will have any easier time getting admitted than my DS did with his low GPA, but I would try very hard to pinpoint some schools where she would be more likely to be admitted. It will make for a much easier time come March. Also, take a look at some EA schools… that will give you a good idea how here app is going to be read early, and you can make adjustments then. We added the school that my DS will matriculate to in August( he is on a gap year) at the very last minute after he was deferred from all of his EA schools. It was nice to have that wake up call.</p>
<p>5Boys, that’s my nightmare at this point – in an effort to jump start her thinking I’ll guide her too much toward schools that don’t want her. Painful, but I’m glad your S ended up with acceptances. I had forgotten how reassuring it was for our S to get a rolling admit letter in October from a school he liked (kinda). I’ll encourage D to apply rolling EA where she has a good chance of success for that reason, too. Good advice there. And, despite the upcoming reach trip, I agree that it is important in the process to de-emphasize reaches and focus on safeties and matches. </p>
<p>The section of D’s list between the safeties and the reaches is still skinny and I welcome suggestions. Folks today have mentioned F&M, Smith, Beloit, Conn College, Wake Forest and Kalamazoo, as well as Bard. I have some homework to do on those. </p>
<p>blossom’s advice about encouraging regular reading of a well-written periodical is good, too. </p>
<p>stevema, frankly I don’t think she has a clue, yet, what doors she will knock on after undergrad. I take from the tone of your question that you think we might oughta be re-thinking the whole LAC math/econ thing before she goes too far down that road? At one point I envisioned her applying to more schools that offer business degrees. But, once she decided against big schools and schools with big class sizes, that changed.</p>
<p>She might apply to U of Richmond and/or Babson. Those along with Trinity offer the possibility of a degree in business rather than a straight liberal arts curriculum, while still offering the things that attract her to LACs. None of her schools will require her to declare a major until she’s 20 years old. By then she’ll have clearer goals and possibly very different interests.</p>