What can I show the admissions office?Answered
I am an international student and my highschool doesn't provide honor classes, AP classes at all ,and the school doesnt allow the formation of clubs. There are no community colleges that provide courses in my area either. I am not a citizen from the country that I live in so I am not allowed to participate in national competitions , and I am not allowed to work . The only extracurriculars that I have are the massive amounts of online courses that I took , and some programs I was allowed to participate in and I do alot of community service. I am in 10th grade and my gpa last year was 4. I am at the top of my class I really work as hard as I can in my studies and I don't want things such as extracurriculars be the reason to being being rejected.
Everyone has high expectations of me , they are expecting me to aim for the ivy but I know that if things stay the same I wont qualify. I want things to change and I am willing to work extra hard for it. So considering my situation what can I do to improve my chances?
Note: I have 3 siblings ( I am the eldest) and I am from a middle income family so I also have to consider the finances
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Congratulations on being an excellent student. That is the most important thing any school wants to see. One of the main considerations for the admissions office of a top Ivy League school is "what has this student done with his circumstances and educational environment". If you go to an exclusive private high school for expatriates that has lots of resources and your family is high income, the Ivy schools will fully expect you to have all the requisite checkboxes checked off. 1.) Grades, 2.) Test Scores 3.) Course Rigor, 4.) Intellectual Vitality 5.) ECS 6.) Recommendations, 7) Interview 8.) and all the other detailed requirements like 100 TOEFL score or 7.5 IELTS, all 16 core High School requirements 9.) Essays. These are easy enough to verify on the college websites.
In your case, since your main areas are taking classes in school, online school, and community service, you will not be penalized for not having taking AP classes, dual enrollment at community college, school clubs, and work experience. Remember you still can write excellent essays, get excellent recommendations, get a great SAT/ACT test score, and perform well on the interview. Being super proficient at English also helps as well as continue to learn for the sake of learning.
If your goal is to get into an Ivy School, continue doing what you are doing and getting more information about how other International Students get into Ivys. You are not the first or the last person to have a successful college career so learn from past successes and if someone like yourself has tips, pay attention, and take notes.
Regarding Financial Aid, if you get accepted into an Ivy or Elite College like Duke, JHU, Rice, Notre Dame, Williams, Swarthmore, Amherst, Pomona, Stanford, Vanderbilt, Bowdoin or even slightly lesser schools like Colgate, Vassar, Claremont, Colorado College, Carleton, Univ. of Richmond, Washington & Lee, they will all work with you and your family to make sure you can attend with need-based scholarships. The hard part is getting in. It's much less of a problem to figure out the financial side once you have been accepted.
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Also depending on your income some of the fairly cheap public schools. Wyoming can have great academics and while not 100% need it is a very good school with fairly significant aid and cheap tuition. https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/09/these-colleges-have-the-cheapest-out-of-state-tuition.html is a great article to look at (Out of State applies to international but there may be a fee that is only for international students. Tyically that is around $100 (US Dollars) if I remember correctly.