One of the mistakes I made during this process was hounding my son about this same thing. Years later he told me it was more stressful then it needed to be. Mostly due to the parents. So, walk away and revisit it. Stop talking about college and anything associated with it. Then suggest a pro /con sheet. This can actually be really helpful.
Our kids are not us. I know, they should be right? Lol… He knows the decision date. A few days prior if he didn’t bring it up then slowly bring it up. We also told all of our friends etc do not talk to him about college. Because the very first thing out of their mouths is “So, where are you going to college”.
This was my nephew a few years ago! My BIL was hounding him (and he is a hounder). My nephew would not make a commitment. Then an hour before the deadline, he just walked downstairs and into the kitchen and calmly announced his decision. And that was that!
Oh, I very much feel you on this! You are not alone. We haven’t moved, but my son still sometimes brings up feeling of frustration/anger/grief of feeling cheated, having plans go awry, etc., mostly due to Covid and all the changes it brought to our district. (And also still unhappy about some of his college rejections.) It would feel so much easier, lighter, to have that “super excited” and swag-repping kind of experience.
My son is also torn between some very different, good choices, and any one of them will be the right choice. He’s being pretty tight-lipped, and offering few if any clues to which way he’s leaning. I’m trying not to bug him this week. Like Tom Petty said…“the waiting is the hardest part!”
Yup, my daughter is in the same boat…torn between three schools. We attended each school’s admitted student day over the weekend, and now she only loves them each one more. It’s definitely a situation where she is afraid of picking the “wrong” one.
Interestingly, all three are schools that are on the more “safety” end of her list. She visited them first and was accepted EA months before she received acceptances to some more “reachy” schools. My guess is she assumed from the beginning she’d be going to one of those three and thus didn’t spend a whole lot of time envisioning herself at the more selective schools.
We’re going to try to be quiet about it for the next week or so and see what happens.
Happens all the time. Back off for a week. Reassure him there’s no bad choice. The only thing I told my kids was to not wait until the last minute. There are stories of deposits that went wrong. You might need a few days to straighten out. Good luck.
We went through this with my now senior daughter. She had narrowed it down to 2 and then got stuck. We did a lot of what is being recommend here: Backed off, reminded her there was no bad choice, suggested she choose a school and see how it felt to live with that decison for a couple of days and then switch etc. She told us later that just because she wasn’t talking about it didn’t mean she wasn’t thinking about it. In her case the 2 schools were both great choices but were very different from one another. There were pros and cons to both. she finally decided a couple of days before the deadline and she has thrived where she’s at.
Funny enough she just went through the exact same thing with grad school decisions. It was just as difficult and stressful.
Sometimes it helps to to a little legwork for them. Just as the application process can be overwhelming it’s easy to focus on the things that might be a little superficial. The one thing that might help is to lay out the requirements for their intended major at each school. Look at what the core requirements, language requirements, major requirements…
Factoring in all the requirements in in my S23’s two final choices. One ends up with about 18 credits for free electives and the other has 36 available to explore other areas or gain a second major or minor
This was our oldest’s story. A bunch of good choices, and absolute indecision on picking on. Went to several accepted student events and for the most part each one only had the effect of making him eliminate them because he usually found something not to like. Finally asked for a last minute re-visit of one a couple days before the deadline, committed the last day he could, and immediately second guessed it. A few days later he got off a waitlist, took another emergency revisit and changed to the new school… All very stressful for all involved.
The good news is it all was great after that. So just part of the journey on the way to loving his college, which I think a strong majority of kids do once they are there.
This is exactly why our kids never discussed their college application choices with others.
So politely say “I’m looking forward to sharing my college choice after May 1”. Repeat as often as necessary…and then excuse yourself to do something else!
Ironically, the only time mine will talk about college choices is when a well-intentioned extended family member asks about it. We know more about how he is leaning from eavesdropping on those conversations than anything he says to us directly!!
Super helpful info to know we’re not in the same boat, thanks everyone. Luckily he realistically has 10 or so days to stew on all this. My wife is getting him a Harry Potter sorting hat as a joke
I like the coin flipping option. Another way to prompt a decision might be to have him build a matrix of variables like academic strength, campus, food, dorms, social life, location, graduate outcomes, etc. and score each school. The object is not necessarily to choose the school with the highest score (though that would be the rational decision), but to force him to think seriously about his choice.
I also agree with giving him some breathing room to decompress, but give him a deadline several days before schools need to be notified. You could say, “You have until xxx to make a decision. If it helps, you can do this matrix…”.
I second the recommendation of making a chart for them.
I gave my S23 a chart with his top three a few weeks ago. It had things that aren’t totally obvious or things he already knew. I included things specific to his criteria like days of sunshine, days of precipitation, humidity, campus ideology leaning (put your child’s desired one on there and then list low, med, high) some things about ease of getting to our faith’s religious services, dorms, food, flexibility of the major, ease of changing majors, etc. They were usually just low, medium or high. No one college had all the highest, but using the chart and his gut reaction from the tours, he did rule out one of the three getting us to a final two.
As I remarked earlier, he then seems to have had a mental health setback from that decision within a few days, and so I dropped the topic for the last week. We do have an enrollment deposit in now at the one he favors. Luckily, neither of these are the places where you have to choose housing and roommates before May 1, so he has some time to the deadline.
I plan to broach the subject again this coming Sunday. (We have a long drive to religious services here- about 45 minutes each way, so time to corner him in the car where he can’t escape!)
This is hard, and if you followed everyone’s advice to not have a dream school, it’s not unusual to be at this point without a frontrunner.
You say he’s visited so he already has a feeling for the environmental at each. I don’t think that it helps to feel that you’re yearning for the decision to be made.
My kid waited until the final weekend to decide. We’d offered to get him to any visits he fell he might need, to be a sounding board, and to help with any research he might need. Throughout most of it, we were not taken up on our offer. But ultimately, he made a choice.
There are a lot of pressures that parents aren’t fully dialled in to - what the school’s social reputation is, other kids who have attended, etc as well as the things parents talk about here (majors, costs, food, etc.)
Hang in there – he’ll get it done! And you’ll like his choice!
S2 didn’t decide til 8 pm on May 1st. What finally did it was that he looked up a major class in his intended field and read the course descriptions side-by-side. That made the differences in the two schools very clear, and led him to his decision.
S1, unsurprisingly, made a spreadsheet of the characteristics that were important to him (these were pretty granular and very specific to him – he didn’t care about the food, sports, Greek life, spacious dorms, etc.). Once he had the criteria, he ranked them in terms of how well each school filled that need, and also ranked them by how important that particular aspect was to him.
Neither of them picked the “obvious” choice, but each had rock-solid reasons for their decisions. They only applied to schools they really liked and could see themselves attending. As we told them repeatedly, there were no wrong decisions because they’d taken such care in building their lists.
Neither school was perfect – none of them are – but part of college is learning to adapt to the unexpected and living with one’s decisions. One of my sons found his balance by doing research for two summers at the school he turned down. Best of both worlds.
My DD is stuck deciding between two schools and we don’t know what to do to help her. One is her “dream school” that she didn’t expect to get into but did (UTAustin), but because she’s waited so late she thinks housing will be impossible. Also it’s in our city. The other one is in California (CSULB), where we used to live, but she doesn’t “feel right” about it even though it’s more affordable and has good programs. We even went to their admitted students day and she bought merch, which really surprised me! I felt sure she would sign that day, but she said she needed to sleep on it. When we got home she kept sleeping on it day after day and we kept bugging her to accept the offer but when it came time to, she couldn’t do it.
She didn’t really take care building her list and turned down schools that we recommended as being good for her major (film). Every time we mentioned college, starting in the 9th grade, she didn’t want to talk about it.
This is tearing our family up and we’re all extremely stressed about it. I have my preference but I’m trying really hard to be impartial for her and not sure I’m succeeding. What can we do to help her decide?
