<p>My daughter applied to a lot of schools that required auditions…she got into one of her top 2 choices but ended up choosing her safety. It didn’t hurt that they gave her almost a full ride. </p>
<p>This was my second time through this time and I don’t think my son applied to enough schools. He applied to two reaches, a match, two safeties and the school he thought everybody expected him to go to but he wasn’t thrilled about. He was rejected from one reach, WL and eventually rejected from the other reach and his match school. Being WL at the match school was completely unexpected and so he was left with two safeties and a school he didn’t really want but thought people expected him to go. Yeah, he’s going where he didn’t really want to go. But he recognizes it is a great school and found a way to make it work for him. His other option would have cost twice as much. He wanted a smaller school and is going to one of the largest in the country. He’s making it smaller by being in a living and learning community. He will make it work and is warming up to it slowly, but “happy” was not a thing for him. He did end up realizing that although he knows he would be more comfortable at either safety (very small schools), he wouldn’t have to push himself to grow. </p>
<p>I do think we should have tried to find more “match” schools, but I don’t that they’d have been financially feasible anyway. He’s landing at the cheapest of his options too. </p>
<p>I see several recommendations of applying to 6+ schools. My S has only 4 he wants to apply to. Two are OOS that will offer OOS fee waivers for merit. One is our state flagship, which is difficult to get into if you live in the same county as the school. The other is a safety, that he is not that interested in but will get into and we can afford. There are only 3 schools in our state that is accredited for his major, 2 of those he is applying to. There are other schools he wouldn’t mind applying to but what’s the use if he can’t get scholarships to make it IS price?</p>
<p>Both my kids applied to 8 schools (3 of 8 were in state public and only required 1 common app).
I think it’s reasonable to apply to 3-4 high reaches, 3-4 low reaches, and 3 safeties.</p>
<p>Look at Naviance and the profiles of the previously admitted students in your school and neighboring schools to determine where and how many schools to apply to.</p>
<p>I you want merit aid then concentrate on schoos that give merit aid. If you want need based aid then concentrate on schools that give need based aid. Mismatching could give a lot headache later when the kid decides which school to enroll and you want free ride or not. As parents you should decide on the financial issue first before telling your kids where to apply.</p>
<p>In general, distance does not matter, as long as it does not take more than 2 flight legs and it’s relatively easy to get to the airport. But if financial aid is covered and the desire to attend a specific shool is justified then distance should not be a factor. </p>
<p>I think the key is to manage one’s expectation (both parents’ and kids’). My understanding is that acceptance to top schools (as defined in USN&W) is still very dicey for kids with good stat (GPA of 3.8-4; >2300 on SAT) since the whole admission process is rather holistic. If your kid gets into a top notch school, then that’s great. If he/she has to study at a “middle-tier” school, then that’s wonderful too.</p>
<br>
<br>
<p>Unfortunately, these people are falling into the “donut hole” of college funding. Daughter has a good friend who was accepted to an elite school locally. She has to pass because her parents (even though the dad makes good money as an engineer) just could not afford it without selling their home or take out a big home equity loan (they have substantial equity in their home). I recalled some parent on CC making a comment about this is akin to winning the lottery and not cashing it in - I guess different people have different sensibilities.</p>
<p>You’re right furrydog, this is a “donut hole”. Many people think we are making a lot of money. They fail to see the big picture. Many of the private colleges recognize this and grant financial aid accordingly. But the cost is still very high. </p>
<p>"My goddaughter goes to W & M and absolutely loves it! "</p>
<p>Because my previous post became a long rant, I left off the fact that my D and I were very impressed with W&M. It is truly a hidden gem!</p>
<p>VISIT
Go beyond the group tour: attend a class, eat in the cafeteria, meet with students, and with financial aid. Ask questions. </p>
<p>DO YOUR HOMEWORK
Use the net price calculators and common data sets. </p>
<p>Develop a spreadsheet or keep a notebook with info on each school. You won’t remember unless you write it down. Include qualitative AND quantitative factors. </p>
<p>The institutional endowment and endowment per student are interesting data points. </p>
<p>Document the campus vibe. Berry College was hands-down the friendliest, positive vibe college we visited. Rhodes’ library was packed and students were studying. Furman was the least friendly.</p>
<p>BE REAL
Discuss up front how much you can pay each year and still be able to sleep at night. Stick to that number. </p>
<p>Ask financial aid for the percent increase for COA over the last 5 years and then do the math for ALL 4 YEARS, increasing the COA by the average percent increase. </p>
<p>The good fairy is not coming to your house with a bucket of scholarships. </p>
<p>Don’t mortgage your and your kid’s future for prestige. Just because your kid got in doesn’t mean you can afford it. </p>
<p>Your best bet for scholarships are from the institutions themselves. </p>
<p>Guidance counselors are great but their plates are full. Don’t rely on them to help with the decision making process.</p>
<p>Follow up with your high school to ensure transcripts, letters of rec, etc., were sent. </p>
<p>Follow up with the colleges to ensure these docs were received.</p>
<p>Spend time on the essays. Your kid should start writing drafts the summer before senior year. Like now. </p>
<p>Have a friend who’s a writer (aka: lawyer, PR person, English teacher, clergy) review the essay. This is not a last-minute off-the-cuff assignment. It’s your kid on paper. I have yet to read my D’s essays but I have heard from the reviewers that they were genuinely her. </p>
<p>WINGS AND ROOTS
It’s a weird time for teens. They don’t know where they’ll be living in a year, who they’ll be sharing living space with, what they’ll be studying, and yet we parents have the audacity to keep asking them if they like a particular school, as if we want them to leave home and everything they know and love. </p>
<p>Don’t be surprised if your hear: ‘stopalwaysaskingmeaboutcollegeallthetime’ as your kid stomps off. Set up a couple days a week when it’s legal to talk college.</p>
<p>You can do research, set up college visits, and provide data but you’re missing a growth opportunity if you take over the decision-making process. You’re in a facilitative, supportive role, not a lead role. Help your kid put the pieces together to make a good decision. </p>
<p>Scout59: so did my D2. She’s going to one of her safeties this fall and is genuinely excited. A safety is a college you want to go to and is a sure thing for admission. It’s not an if all else fails I’ll pout my way through the next four years there.</p>
<p>@Razzyreb, my thoughts exactly. I work for an European company and my co-workers think it is ridiculous how much time and money we spend on sending our kids to college.</p>
<p>Good advice I got from a friend years ago was to make sure you focus on the needs of the kid you are sending to college now. What worked for your other children might not work the same way for the current one. The distance factor depends on your kid. D1 applied to schools from here to Europe. D2 is keeping a smaller radius. D1 went to a school 10 hours away or a plane ride. One day she got really sick over a holiday weekend, I could not get there so she had to rely on friends to help her. She was fine. I was a wreck but we all came out ok at the end.</p>
<p>I found from D1 to D2 lots has changed. First off the tuition alone at some schools are now much more than the total cost of attendance for D1 in 2010. Some schools have gotten more competitive. Northeastern comes to mind.
She turned it down with scholarship back then and when we visited, she was impressed.</p>
<p>Don’t focus on “top” but find the “best” school for the student. </p>
<p>To be brutally honest, I am more than tired of hearing how the student needs a “top” school in order to succeed in college. Do people really feel that your life is doomed to mediocrity if they don"t graduate from the “top” school and have internships with “top” companies?</p>
<p>Just realize that there are many, many schools that can meet your needs and help you succeed in life. </p>
<p>I agree completely with lia_b. I have found that the number one question to ask is “Where is the environment that will allow this child to thrive?” which turns out to be a very different question from “what school will impress my neighbors, colleagues, etc.” or which school worked for a sibling. It sure is complicated, though . . . </p>
<p>Best advice I ever got: When anybody asks you or your kid “What’s your first choice” refuse to answer. Say you are applying to many great schools. Because chances are, if your kid <em>does</em> have a first choice, it is a reach, and he/she may well not get in. Then when April rolls around, it’s “too bad, John didn’t get into his first choice.” We were adamant about not even asking our kid what his first choice was. Only when the process was all done did he tell us that he got into “one of his top two” (Yeah!). </p>
<p>I am a bit surprised by folks asking me “where do you want your child to go?”. I want my child to go where he wants to go and what suits him. I am not the one going. Aside from financial considerations, it is his decision.</p>
<p>I agree that the kid needs to be the one who decides. My D narrowed it down to three and chose the least prestigious of the three because it was the best fit. And I agreed with her. As much as I would have loved for her to go to my alma mater, her ultimate choice offered her a nice scholarship and she felt that it was where she most fit in. Summer orientation only further confirmed this fact–it was her true match! </p>
<p>Agree with previous poster that the “match” category often gets short changed. I would limit applications to 10 schools and apply to 3 reaches, 5 matches and 1-2 safeties that are good fits and likely affordable. </p>
<p>We see many posts about schools crossed off of a child’s list because of a tour guide. That’s why it’s so important to engage in additional activities while visiting such as lunch with a student and attending a class. My D found it very helpful to ditch me for an hour or so and go talk to students on her own. She felt they were easier to approach and more candid sans parent. </p>
<p>@Glennu “I am another strong proponent of applying to rolling admission or EA schools. Getting into one early takes the pressure off your child. With our second, he applied early to Illinois and Michigan along with ED to Penn. He planned on applying to about 10-15 other schools.”</p>
<p>EA Comment
Getting an EA acceptance in place is a very good thing to do. In addition to Illinios and Michigan, UVA and MIT are also good EA candidates for the right student. </p>
<p>Comment: The right number of applications discussion
Everyone has a different view of this. In the end, many students and situations are different. If you are a National Merit scholar who has found a school you love and are getting a scholarship, maybe one or two is enough.</p>
<p>If you thrive in the highly competitive environment of top 20 schools, then you need to apply to a lot more schools and not become to attached to just one. 15 applications could make</p>
<p>Comment:The math trap and highly competitive admissions
Example: If Penn (or other school) has a 10% admission rate, I have a 10% chance of being accepted. If I apply to 10 of these schools, I have a 100% chance of getting into one of them.</p>
<p>This is FALSE. </p>
<p>College admissions is not a random lottery. There are places reserved for athletes and other students with a talent. There are also legacy students, then there are various diversity buckets to fill. If you are not in any of those categories, then the overall acceptance rate is much lower. </p>
<p>For the remaining positions, these schools will assess a student’s academic ability (grades and test scores) as well as the students qualitative traits like passion, leadership, resilience, and demonstrated ability to achieve at a high level (ECs, awards, and essays). </p>
<p>Remember that few students without any special status will be accepted from the bottom quartile of grades and test scores. Also remember that even if you are in the top quartile for grades and test scores, a top 20 school will still reject you quickly if your EC’s are weak. </p>
<p>In reality, students with perfect grades and 2400 SAT scores are probably admitted to a school at this level about 50-60% of the time. If they have weak EC’s, they are likely to still be rejected. Top quartile students with solid ECs are also admitted frequently, as are middle 50% students with something about them that is amazing/impressive (this can be absolutely anything that grabs the attention of the Adcom). </p>
<p>If you are not at least in the middle 50% for grades and test scores, and do not have good EC’s, your chance is not 10%, it is close to 0%. </p>
<p>I suspect there can be a potential downside to applying to a lot of rolling admissions schools. If your child has a few acceptances under his/her belt early on, how hard is the college counselor going to push to maximize that child’s chances at other schools? I think this might be especially true in private schools where there might be relationships between the high school and college. I think some private schools that have a high number of applicants to a particular college are assigned specific “readers.” If that counselor has advisees that have no acceptances yet, those students will be the first concern. </p>
<p>yes, our child got into one early with rolling admissions which was clearly a safety and in his mind it was framed as “that’s the school I’m going to have to go to if the REAL schools don’t work out.” Instead of reassuring him it became a new source of dread.</p>
Great post. I agree with some of it, but not all of it. My situation may be a little different in that my D was a recruited athlete who had a good idea she liked the balance of competitive sports and time for doing well in school that NESCAC is known for. That was the target, and that’s where she ended up.
My few observations, for what they’re worth, having just finished this process for the second time:
- ENTIRELY disagree about number of apps. There are a lot of great schools out there, but which ones your kid gets into amongst the many they are qualified to attend is entirely, and I mean ENTIRELY, unpredictable. What one admissions officer considers compelling will make another roll their eyes. I know this from my days as a work study student at a competitive law school, where I was an assistant to the Dean of Admissions. I also know it from my own experience and that of now two of my children. I was admitted to law school at U Penn (my alma mater) and rejected at Georgetown, a clear back-up school to Penn (and a few others to which I was admitted). Admissions is a crap shoot, and while I agree that the smaller schools try and gauge your interest, I do not believe for a minute that they have time or interest in checking to see how many times you visited their website. Visiting campus is another matter. I say apply to as many schools as you can, but of course make sure you actually want to attend any school to which you apply.
- Distance. Very subjective thing. Lots and lots and lots of kiddos from the west manage to go to school back east and visa versa. Might have been a scary issue for you, but is not at all for tens of thousands of others. Too subjective a factor on which to base advice.
- Prestige. See comment to #2. You can't tell people to not care about it. They either do or they don't. If they do, there are lots of good reasons to support their position. It's quite justifiable for those who care about it.
- Early. Yes, early. Do not put off until tomorrow that which you can take care of today. I'm doing several things now with sophomore (also a recruited athlete) that I did not do with her older sister just to avoid some of the hassle and expense we experienced.
- Application $$: this is really an extension of comment #1. yeah, it's not cheap, but this is a big investment, and in that respect, given the importance of the outcome, limiting applications because of the fee is penny wise and pound foolish from my perspective. If you can afford the school, then the appl. fee is a detail. If you need help paying, they'll help you pay. Either way, I think the app. fees are a poor reason to limit apps. I really do. See comment #1. This thing is a crap shoot unless your kiddo is a 2350+ and a very high GPA w/ rigor or is well outside of the admission zip code of the school. Anything in the middle, and it's impossible to predict. My D has a 3.9+ full IB Diploma candidate with all the goodies and a 2180 SAT. Even with the 3.9 IB transcript AND the hook of being a recruited athlete (including D 1 offers), there were some schools that didn't give us as strong a pre-read as many others did. If you have a qualified kid and limit yourself to 8 schools, then you might wind up with a very, very, very disappointed, abeit qualified, kid on your hands. I wouldn't do it. I'd apply to as many as you can handle.
- Details of visit. Eh, I'm luke warm on this advice too. That kind of thing may, but often does not, portend much about the four years they'll be there. Keep in mind that four years is a lot of life and experience, and good/bad/in between things will happen wherever they go, and I don't think they'll wind up looking back at the check-in process or on magic markers or banners with their names on them or whether they connected with Tommy or Jane during the walk-through or any of that. I mean, does any kid REALLY choose a school based on the random collection of human beings on their tour? Honestly? I would sternly tell my kid to use their brains if I thought they were using those people as a proxy for the entire experience. We had a couple on our tour of Bowdoin who were honestly two of the most obnoxious people I've met in a long time. Their kid wasn't even on the tour. As they interrupted time after time to remind us, he was being recruited and was with the tennis coach. These people were right out of central casting for preppy kid parents and dressed almost like caricatures of wealthy people in their Hamptons weekend attire. We're in coastal Maine for Pete's sake. And yet, I loved the school, and while my daughter didn't (partly I suspect because she wasn't being recruited there as they have no varsity crew), it wasn't because of those two instances of obnoxion on the tour. How stupid would it have been for either one of us to judge Bowdoin on those two clowns? My advice, which is what I told my daughter, is to try as hard as possible to take in the whole scene, try and get a high level sense of the place, couple that with the specifics about the school that one should already know before getting there, and take it all in and imagine where you'd best like to be for 4 years. In fact, I would actively, and did actively, discourage the kind of nit-picking you describe. Why? Because no matter how much you might love this or that detail, or hate this or that detail, as perceived on the first, second or third visit, there are going to be things you love and hate later on that you'd never have figured out on a visit. You can't get caught up on the little stuff. This is where they're going to school. Who cares about names on a banner or that their check-in process leaves something to be desired? Those are details and they don't mean anything, good or bad, about what the overall experience will be. I honestly do not advise people to worry about that kind of thing. No school is going to nail everything. Some of Wesleyan's dorms aren't super attractive. And? Should she have gone to Middlebury, where the dorms generally seemed nicer? Well, Middlebury has no varsity crew, and that matters to her. Though I would say dorms are a little more than a detail, I nonetheless encouraged my daughter to not dwell on that point because you get used to wherever you are eventually and 8 years from now is she really going to care about how pretty her dorm was? I sure as hell hope not.
Lots of good advice here.
I also vote for quality over quantity of applications, but enough schools to be able to choose offers. My older D applied to 8: 1 safety that she claimed she would be happy to attend and 7 matches/reaches. Her stats made it so she really didn’t have a match. She was admitted to her safety with a full tuition scholarship in October, so she could apply to her other schools, knowing she had somewhere to go. The other 7 she spent quality time on the essays, and she ended up getting accepted to all. It was great to have the 8, because half didn’t give her any $$, and the other half gave her lots of $$.
My younger D applied to 6 schools, and it was a totally different process, because she applied to art schools. She also got into all of them, and was able to compare offers and $$ in April.
Both are quite a long distance away, but they are able to get to the airport fairly quickly (both in big cities). And we are 5 minutes from our airport. It works for us, though I would love it if we could see them on a weekend drive.
Prestige was not so important as fit. Both kids turned down the more “prestigious” schools for schools that seemed to offer more of what they wanted in an education. And I know people say not to let Accepted Student Days sway your perception, but it’s hard not to. If your child is really excited about seeing the school, but the school doesn’t seem all that excited, it colors your perception.