I second GWU and Tulane as a matches/low matches. Emory would be a reach, but your stats are good so you do have a decent chance.
The average SAT for enrolled students at Cal-Berkeley is about 2060, so I see less of an admissions barrier there for you than others. (I understand that you are out-of-state.)
Your list includes large schools only. Is this a preference you are already sure of? I tend to agree with @MYOS1634 that your list appears somewhat heavy on “random, famous” schools. Smaller, exclusively undergraduate-focused colleges are also worth considering. They match particularly well with your interests.
(Source for SAT scores: USNWR Best Colleges, 2015 Edition)
Your interests sound like they will lead you to graduate school. Save your “name” school for grad school. Keep your costs down now. I’d suggest a LAC where you are on the high end of their stats where aid will be higher. These schools offer tremendous opportunities and support that is sometimes distracted at research universities. Check out the Colleges that Change Lives list.
Although some top state flagships have adopted a “holistic” admission process, they do still seem to be relatively numbers-driven. At selective private colleges that aren’t reviewing over 60,000 applications, the admission process may have a little more flexibility to consider your course rigor and HS competition. If you’ve taken many AP/IB courses at a competitive HS, a 3.8 ought to be considered an excellent GPA (especially with class rank in the top 10% and test scores over 2100).
If you’re counting on need-based financial aid, and can cover your Expected Family Contribution, you may want to focus (for your match and reach schools) on the ~60 colleges that claim to cover 100% of demonstrated financial need. http://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/paying-for-college/articles/2014/09/15/colleges-and-universities-that-claim-to-meet-full-financial-need
All 8 Ivies are on this list. So are many small liberal arts colleges that are less selective but still excellent (and in fact may offer more personal attention than you’re likely to get at any research university.) Examples:
Bates, Colby, Colgate, F&M, Grinnell, Holy Cross, Macalester, Oberlin, URichmond.
Larger schools on the list include Boston College, Johns Hopkins, Tufts, and USC.
Your stats should give you a shot at these schools.
Tulane, Rochester, and Emory
^^ I interpreted the OP to mean that s/he is in the ordinal top 10, or top 2%.
To clarify, the fact the schools on your list have strong name recognition is not a problem at all. The problem may be that because this is the primary feature the colleges have in common, they are, overall, more different than similar. I’m hesitant to concur with CTCL. Reading through, the schools included seem arbitrary. One of the main criteria for selection seems to be relative ease of admission.
To clarify, I am ranked in the top ten students of my class of over 500, so top 2%.
@tk21769, @minorpoliticker, we started with that same list of full-need schools, but you should also consider filtering out the need-aware (not need blind) schools. For example, Tufts is on this list, but as I mentioned above, my kid didn’t get in, and I believe it was financial-need-related (we considered it a high match school at the time). Second kid may not even apply there as a result. Bates, Colby, Trinity and I believe Occidental are all need-award. There are more … Wikipedia Need Blind …
What is the ACTUAL stats for the OP? The data in post #2 seems to be a project GPA, SAT, number of AP, etc. So everything seems to be predicated on what the OP feels his stats will be sometime in the future. Maybe s/he need to revisit this thread when actual earned scores are in hand. Otherwise, the discussion is purely academic and meaningless.
Some of the CTCL would be nice and are quite selective (Whitman, St Olaf, Rhodes, Reed, Denison) while offering merit aid, although those 4 might be closer to a high match than safeties - for safeties, Lawrence, Hendrix, Wooster, Ohio Wesleyan, Allegheny, New College Florida, Kalamazoo, Earlham, Centre, are all excellent academically even if they tend to serve a self-selected bunch.
^ I tend to like and respect the schools in CTCL. I’m just not sure what the true bases for inclusion are. For example, why is Denison a CTRL, while the similar in some ways, but more selective NESCACs, are not? Personally, I don’t weigh selectivity as a primary indicator of quality. However, I don’t think it should be used as a criterion for exclusion, either. Additionally confounding, at least to someone who doesn’t know much about it, is that CTRL appears to be a “member” organization.
Occidental is great for political science. They met our EFC, although my son chose to go to a school that offered more aid. They have some unique opportunities, such as the “Campaign Semester,” where students can spend most of the fall working on a campaign somewhere (only in even-year, congressional or presidential races, in competitive states or districts) and return to prepare a paper on the experience in November. They also offer a semester at the UN.
Because NESCAC is already a group - CTCL is an organization, like NESCAC, but less prestigious/less famous colleges; their focus is undergraduate-focused education (intentionally transformational undergraduate education, in a nutshell - that’s their brand, I’m not claiming they are all as they say they are, but this is something they decided they had in common) with varying degrees of selectivity.
@psata82 given I’m a junior, my “ACTUAL” stats are undetermined, however because I’ve already selected my schedule for senior year, and have taken the SAT twice, and given that my current class rank is actually #10, although I anticipate it will increase by the time of applications, I can fairly easily predict what my stats will be when I apply. The point of the post was not to gain insight on the philosophy behind me posting it in my junior year, it is to get an early start on the college selection process.
@MYOS1634: Thanks.
@minorpoliticker: I see that type of criticism all the time … A post to say why there shouldn’t be a post.
You mentioned Political Science as a potential major. Are you left or right leaning in politics? All those schools on your list are pretty liberal, especially Brown, reputedly the most liberal of all the (already very liberal) Ivies. Maybe you should pick some of your most admired politicians and see where they went to college. It could also be a good way to network as they might be active alumni. For example Marco Rubio went to UF, Jeb Bush went to UT Austin, Bill Clinton went to Georgetown, Obama went to Occidental which has a transfer program with Columbia, which is how he ended up at Columbia and later Harvard.
@JoanneB That’s an interesting tip, thanks! I’m definitely liberal, so I don’t think it will have as much of an effect on me deciding as it would if I were conservative, given most top LACs and other top universities are already quite liberal. However the politician thing is helpful, I’ll look into it.
So I’ve read all of your comments and appreciate them and have updated my list a bit:
Boston College
Emory
Georgetown
Johns Hopkins
Tufts
Cornell
U Penn
Brown.
In addition to my two safety schools, UF and FSU.
Looks great! This group seems to have more in common than the first group. At some point try to identify for yourself two or three you REALLY want to go to. This will force you into even more clarity.
Another way to put it is that Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush went to their state’s flagship, Bill Clinton was admitted by one of the top programs for poli sci in the country, and President Obama had a successful college strategy (looking at his policies, he’d have been a conservative at Oxy, middle of the road at Columbia and Harvard, probably.) Hillary Clinton went to Wellesley, Carly Fiorina Stanford, Elizabeth Warren GWU and UHouston…
This doesn’t mean anything about the universities’ politics. 