Hello Fellow Parents!
This is such an exciting time of year as the acceptances start rolling in. The long, tortuous wait is over and soon you and your child will be sitting down to decide which campus is best for them.
As my child is set to graduate in a couple months, I wanted to share with you the things I’ve learned -and wish I knew as we mulled over campuses 4 years ago.
I really went into the college application process fully armed with knowledge, or so I thought. I read the books on writing essays, the “how to get into a great college books”, I studied up on AP classes, and extracurricular activities. I ended up learning so much, I was coaching my friend’s children through their process, too. However, the things that I learned while my daughter was IN college, for my family at least, ended up being crucial things we really should have thought of well before she SIRed.
The first thing, that ended up causing a lot of grief, was that I did not familiarize myself with the campus disability offices of the schools where she had been accepted. Don’t believe for one second that just because they offer student disability services that they are equipped to offer the special attention, or will understand the needs of your child. I have discovered that while most campuses seem to be superb at offering assistance to people with physical disabilities, that they are woefully unprepared to offer assistance to students with mental, emotional, or learning disabilities. Have a broken leg? We’ll come pick you up! In a wheelchair? We’ll pick you up! Are you blind? Deaf? We have special assistance for you. But if you are manic-depressive, schizophrenic, suffer from crippling anxiety, are on the autism spectrum, or have ADHD, then they will make you fill out massive amounts of forms, provide ten thousand documents, come in for special meetings with their disability staff, and stand on your head and bark 3 times.
I spoke to someone who has been in the college level education system for over 30 years and he said the reason behind what I just said is two-fold: First of all, colleges receive all sorts of money for offering programs to the physically disabled. This allows them to pat themselves on the back for being moral heroes, while also avoiding ADA lawsuits. But as far as emotional, mental or learning disabilities, they don’t receive much funding for that, so the schools really want to be careful that they aren’t giving assistance to just anyone who says they are stressed out, etc.
If your child has been diagnosed with emotional or learning disabilities, get on the phone NOW to every college they have been accepted to and get to know the campus disability office. Find out now before you SIR how -and if- they can provide the needs your child requires. If they require a 9 mile paper trail to help your child, you’ll be glad you got the ball rolling on that now, and not 2 weeks before you drop Junior off.
My daughter received 6 acceptances; most to were schools in the UC system, and 2 other were private. She really wasn’t excited about the smaller schools and zeroed in on the UC campuses. She ultimately chose one that was 500 miles away from us, because she loved the campus. We told her to go for it if that’s where she wanted to be. What we didn’t factor in, and this is another thing you need to think about, is how much it would cost to cart her back and forth to this campus 500 miles away from us. Now, someone on this site once accused me of exaggerating, or being too frivolous with our expenses, but it literally cost us $900 to $1000 every time we picked her up or dropped her off. I’m not referring to her coming home for holidays, I mean the physical act of dropping her off for school and picking her up in June.
Why did it cost us so much money? Because we have an older car, without enough room, so we would have to rent a minivan. Someone suggested renting a smaller, cheaper car, but there is no way that would have worked. The minivan we rented was packed FULL with a fridge, microwave, bedding, clothes for an entire year, a printer, books, a TV, tons of paper towels (many UC campuses are “green” and don’t provide paper towels in their dorm bathrooms) and incidentals. There is no way we could have fit it all in a 4 door sedan. Then because we just spent 9 hours on the road, we would spend the night in town, and because it was near a beach, a total dump room still cost $200 on a Saturday night… Then you throw in $250 for gas, and meals along the way, and poof, you have just dropped a lot of money for doing nothing more than getting your kid to college. Just something to keep in mind.
Because my family was going through a horrendous time financially, we ended up having to have our daughter transfer from her school in Northern California, to something closer to home in Southern California. This is when I realized that just because all these schools are under the UC umbrella, does not mean they operate the same, and the school she transferred to became my worst nightmare when trying to deal with their disability office. The school up north was ah-mazing, kind, efficient, understanding. But the one she transferred to had the warmth of a labor camp. I was literally in the process of moving out of the house we lost, while trying to provide the necessary paperwork to the new campus, and working with those people was more of a nightmare then losing our house. It was that bad!
The final thing I would also recommend to you while perusing those acceptances, is to look at your child’s ultimate goal. If they have dreams of graduate school, then a big state school may not be the place for them. For instance, my daughter wants to go to law school, but as we review the application process for law schools, they all want letters of recommendation from college professors. It seems to be this way with many graduate schools. But when your kid is in a school where classes only last 10 weeks, and there are 200 kids in the class, how do you go about forming a strong enough relationship with a professor for them to recommend you for anything? It’s a joke, and in retrospect, my daughter does wish she would have gone to a smaller school.
If your goal is just to get Junior a piece of paper (and there is nothing wrong with that), then a large, state school is the perfect way to go, but if Junior already knows he wants to get his PhD, then a smaller school where the kids have a better chance of bonding with their professor may be a better fit for his future goals.
Sorry this is so long, but like I said, these are the things I wished I had known to look into or think about before we excitedly SIRed.
Good luck to you and your college student. And congrats on those acceptances!