Agree with that, although some don’t agree with me and I don’t agree with some, it is very valuable to find other people’s points of view, even if you don’t follow their advice.
For example, we are still going to use our HELOC to some extent to pay for college, but we are probably going to be more conservative than we would have been. And others decreased the amount of angst we’ve had over it.
CC is for kids and parents, but honestly my parents were SOOOO not involved in my college aspirations, and it seems now that parents MUST be involved or the child will suffer.
i completely adore CC’s larger community…I come here from advice on teaching kids to drive to how to make a vegetarian meal for 50.
On the topic of college, CC saved me & D from a world of hurt…I thought I had raised a child who was going to be carried on a red carpet into any college she wanted…only to discover that she is a prince-among-princes…with plenty of kings above her…so we made a short list that made sense for her…
I do admit to enjoying threads like “I’m going to apply ED but back out if I get a better offer…there’s nothing wrong with that, right?” and then see everyone jump in…
I’m not sure if that’s meant to be ironic or what. Listservs and Usenet predate the Web by quite a few years, but none it was new when I got there. The Web is new. And I did admin a webserver back in 1994. But I wouldn’t call it pioneering.
College is simply too incredibly, ridiculously expensive to not have resources like College Confidential. I wish it was around when I was applying. Lots of relatively bare bones information online by today’s standards. But the cost factor just eliminates so much of the exploring / self-discovery aspect that college used to entail.
@Pizza, perhaps it serves a parallel function as having a separate Chances forum: it isolates the “prestige ho” threads from the threads where rational posters are looking for pragmatic information.
I was exchanging emails with a long time friend living in Maryland. His son is a junior going to a good private school. I was surprised when I found out he didn’t know what Naviance was. This is a highly educated person who probably thinks he knows as much as he needs to know about getting his kid into a college, but he hasn’t done enough research to know what Naviance was. I was also surprised the school has not introduced the tool to juniors yet.
CC has wealth of knowledge, but it takes time and patience to weed through a lot of non relevant posts.
A few of weeks ago my son (then the applicant) said, “you’re on CC?” and kind of laughed. Well, after an online Q&A chat with the College he came to me and said, “hey, that was pretty cool. I knew most of the stuff since you’d passed on so much info from CC, but there was some new stuff too”. So – CC is what you make it. If you use it like the great parents of the University of Alabama do, WOW! What a powerful tool. Of course, you must do your due diligence in ascertaining a poster’s credibility, but it’s not difficult. RTR!
Not sure about other “expensive private” schools, but at my kid’s they had Naviance but it only showed the total number who applied and were accepted, waitlisted or rejected to any given school. I suppose it would have been too easy to identify the individual students if they’d provided the more detailed stats larger public schools do. My kid got rejected from schools that gladly welcomed lower-stats students with legacy and/or athletic connections. Live and learn, but thank God I didn’t put all my trust in his counselor–or else my son would have been left with choices that ranged from very expensive to completely unaffordable! The CC community was invaluable to me, but I’m glad my kid never ventured on here!
I joined CC back when my middle child was in the application process. Now my youngest is in the process. I found out that middle’s first choice school ( that she attended ) posted their EA decisions before my daughter did
Different concerns this time around so I am hunting for threads about what happens when child gets accepted into first choice school without sufficient scholarships . This is a fear of my husband and I right now. We are pulling for another school since she probably has a better chance there and we can afford it
We had to tell our son that he couldn’t go to Wash U, his first choice. That was hard! He actually got a good scholarship offer, but it was still too expensive for us. I want to avoid that situation with my youngest, a HS junior. She’s not as strong a student.
