Posts by Andrew Belasco:

College Admissions in Mesa, AZ: What Students and Families Need to Know

Posted on: 30 Jul 2025

Mesa is Arizona’s third-largest city. It borders Tempe and Phoenix to the west. To the east, it stretches into the fast-growing communities of Gilbert and Queen Creek. In fact, few suburban markets in the Southwest offer comparable academic variety: nationally ranked charter schools, a large public district, and a major research university sitting directly within […]

How to Get Into Rice University: Acceptance Rate and Strategies

Posted on: 28 Jul 2025

Houston, Texas, is home to one of the nation’s finest private research institutions—Rice University. No matter how you measure Rice’s performance, this school of roughly 4,500 undergraduates comes out shining bright. The university is consistently ranked in the top 20 among all universities and is known for its exceptional undergraduate engineering program. This well-resourced school […]

How to Get Into Davidson College: Acceptance Rate & Strategies

Posted on: 27 Jul 2025

Davidson College is a highly ranked, North Carolina-based liberal arts college. And, yes, NBA legend Steph Curry is an alum. It is one of the very best such institutions in the Southern United States; many comparable highly selective liberal arts schools are situated in the Northeast (Colby, Colgate, Wesleyan, etc.). Like many of its peer […]

Is Huntsville, AL a Good Place for College Admissions?

Posted on: 25 Jul 2025

Huntsville is not a typical Southern college town. Rockets built the city, and that engineering identity still shapes its schools. Is Huntsville a good place for college admissions? The honest answer depends heavily on which of its three school systems a family lands in. Some Huntsville-area students graduate with genuine research experience at a federal […]

How to Get Into Johns Hopkins: Acceptance Rate and Strategies

Posted on: 24 Jul 2025

Like many other elite private colleges, Johns Hopkins University has fared quite well in higher education’s selectivity arms race since the start of the present millennium. As the Baltimore Sun reported back in 1996, the school received an all-time record of 8,503 applicants for a spot in the Class of 2000. At the time, the […]

How to Get Into Notre Dame: Acceptance Rate and Strategies

Posted on: 23 Jul 2025

The University of Notre Dame has always been a university for high-achieving students. In 1986, the home of the Fighting Irish admitted 43% of applicants. This group, the Class of 1990, sported an average SAT score of 1200; 75% earned a place in the top 10% of their high school cohort. By the turn of […]

Top High Schools in the San Jose, CA Area: How They Compare for College Admissions

Posted on: 22 Jul 2025

If you are raising a college-bound student in San Jose, you are navigating a saturated academic market. San Jose sits at the center of Silicon Valley, and that proximity shapes the region’s school culture. Engineering and computer science are not niche interests here. They are the default. As a result, families face a genuinely difficult […]

Is Chandler, Arizona a Good Place for College Admissions?

Posted on: 21 Jul 2025

Chandler has spent the last decade building a reputation as the “Autonomous Vehicle Capital of the World.” That appetite for technology now shapes how its students approach college applications. Families weighing whether Chandler is a good place for college admissions will find a suburb with genuine academic strength. They will also find unusually direct access […]