By Anne McGrath, USNews.com
Dave Brown got a slow start at his high school in Emmaus, Pa., and the evidence was clear on his college applications: mostly C's for four years of German, junior-year grades in physics that faded from A to FF ("for under 55 percent"), and a spot at No. 160 in a class of 470. But admissions staffers at nearby Ursinus College detected intriguing possibilities in Brown's transformation from a 2.0 freshman focused on playing pool and customizing his car into a determined senior managing A's and B's in several honors courses. And they were right. Under the guidance of Ursinus's demanding but accessible professors, Brown wrapped up his undergraduate studies with a 3.56 average. In May, he graduated from the University of Miami law school, where he earned his J.D. degree on a full scholarship.
Today's teenagers with less-than-dazzling records might counter, "Sure, but that was then. What are my chances at a good school now ?" It's undeniable that the college quest has lately become much more competitive for many students; indeed, the country's best-known institutions are turning away ever larger hordes of qualified applicants. Straight-B kids who have watched A-plus schoolmates collect rejections often assume, not surprisingly, that their only choice will be open-door State U. But that's a perception that drives college counselors crazy. "America is loaded with wonderful colleges with wonderful professors," insists Joyce Slayton Mitchell, director of college advising at Nightingale-Bamford School in New York and author of Winning the Heart of the College Admissions Dean (Ten Speed Press, $14.95). "There's no reason for [these kids] to think they won't get into a good college.
They can and they will." (Assuming any slacker tendencies have been overcome.)
Admissions deans, too, want to get the message out: Determined B students who choose thoughtfully and apply with care can count on having plenty of fine choices, period. "There are vast numbers of students who fall a bit below our academic profile but are tenacious and persistent and well-prepared to succeed. We want to be sure they're at our table, too," says Karen Foust, vice president for enrollment at Hendrix College in Arkansas, which, like all of the college-counselor favorites mentioned in this piece, fares quite respectably in U.S. News 's rankings. Some 30 percent of last year's freshman class arrived with grade-point averages between 2.5 and 3.5. Adds Scott Friedhoff, vice president for enrollment at Allegheny College in Pennsylvania: "I can think of any number of us who would be glad to accept most of our strong B applicants with combined verbal and math SAT scores of
1150."
Why the mismatch between perception and reality? Much of the noise about how tough it is to get into college results from too much pounding on the same few doors. Princeton, whose applicant pool for this fall grew by 21 percent, was forced to deny the vast majority of the more than 5,000 kids with perfect 4.0 averages, for example; Duke turned away 59 percent of the high school valedictorians who applied. "We've just become so brand conscious--'If I haven't heard of it, it can't be any good,' " laments Terence Giffen, director of college counseling at Montgomery Bell Academy in Nashville, who stresses that all kids are far more likely to thrive in college if they ignore prestige and look for a good fit. "I can say 'Grinnell' over and over all day long, and here in Nashville eyes roll back in the
head."
Beyond the small roster of nationally renowned schools lie many colleges--like Iowa's Grinnell--that aren't necessarily household names but have first-rate programs (and strong reputations among those in the know). Marty Strelecky, a Seattle father whose first two children went off to college nearly a decade ago and whose youngest, Marianne, applied last year, found the whole process to be "so turbocharged" this time around that he unloaded some of the stress by hiring a counselor to come up with a realistic list of some of those schools. "You think everybody's kid's going to Harvard but your kid," he says. "I think people have gone nutso. There's a lot of us who are just happy our kids are going to school."
"Expand your horizons." Marianne, a solid B student with average SAT scores of around 1000, admits to being "a little upset at first" that she hadn't heard of most of the schools on the counselor's list. She applied to six, was accepted by four, and had a very happy freshman year at the University of Redlands in California, where her classes were small and professors regularly handed out their home telephone numbers. "Expand your horizons when you look," she advises applicants now. (Her father would add some counsel for their mothers and fathers: "Tune out all the comments from other parents.")
It's one thing, though, to figure out which great colleges you'd like to attend and quite another to determine which ones might accept you. The breakdown of how many kids arrived from the top of their high school class--along with test scores of the current freshmen, expressed as the "25th to 75th percentile" --can help you figure out if you are looking at a long shot, a good shot, or a place where you'll seem so accomplished you might land a merit scholarship. Fully 67 percent of last year's freshmen at Southern Methodist University in Texas were from the top quarter of their high school class, for example. The school's 1100-to-1300 SAT range means that half of the freshmen scored between those end points, one quarter scored lower, and one quarter scored higher. (The scores reported in these pages are for the last class to have taken the old SAT with its 1600 maximum score. You can use
your combined scores on the critical reading and math sections of the new 2400 test to gauge how well you fit a school's profile.)
Grade-point averages are a little harder to figure out. The mean GPA s that colleges publish for their current freshmen often reflect some sort of weighting system that, for example, turns a B in an honors or Advanced Placement class into an A. Some colleges calculate their own weighted GPA for each applicant, stripping out all nonacademic courses. Others take whatever GPA high schools offer and crunch all the numbers together when calculating their classwide average. "The 4.8, the 5.0--everything is thrown in," explains Barbara Gill, director of undergraduate admissions at the University of Maryland-College Park, which reported a mean GPA of 3.85 for last fall's entering class. Most admissions officers will be happy to explain to you how they run the numbers.
Even if your test scores and recalculated GPA don't fit the school's profile, you may still have a chance. Gill and her staff use a list of 25 factors to judge applicants, including community service, special talents, leadership ability, and socioeconomic background. About 20 percent of last year's freshmen arrived with GPA s between 2.5 and 3.5. "I'm hearing people say, 'I looked at the profile of the class, and I ruled it out,' " says Susan Klopman, dean of admissions and financial planning at Elon University in North Carolina, where the most recent freshman class averaged a weighted 3.6. "I might be very interested in a 3.2 student! I always tell parents, 'Let us make the admissions decisions.' " Of the 1,232 freshmen who arrived last fall, 482 had GPA s of 2.5 to 3.5.
The encouraging reality? The vast majority of colleges and universities accept more than half of the people who apply. And it's a big mistake to equate selectivity with quality, says Loren Pope, author of Colleges That Change Lives ($15, Penguin Books), who takes issue with the U.S. News rankings' use of acceptance rate and student qualifications as components of a school's educational caliber. With rare exceptions, the 40 colleges he features--for their faculty contact with students and commitment to teaching people of varied abilities, strong sense of community, and an intellectual climate that produces a disproportionate share of budding Ph.D.'s--accept most of their applicants. Among his picks: Hendrix and Allegheny; Beloit College and Lawrence University in Wisconsin; Kalamazoo in Michigan; McDaniel in Maryland; Whitman and Evergreen State in Washington; Austin College in Texas; the
College of Wooster in Ohio, and Ursinus--the school that sensed potential in Dave Brown.
Applications tend to pour in as reputations spread, of course. The University of Redlands has seen a 42 percent jump in the number of applicants over the past six years, to nearly 3,400 for a class of about 620 this fall; Lawrence's pool has grown by about 52 percent since 1999. So it's vital to tackle your college search thoughtfully. collegees and test scores aren't your strengths? You need to figure out where your talents do lie, find schools that will appreciate them, and showcase your special abilities in your application and in person. In the next few newsletters, we will tell you how...
