Chance me - Stanford through Binghamton

The tricky thing is what do the colleges think you can swing? Many of the ‘meet full need’ schools give only FinAid, no merit. If you can swing that much, their algorithm may think that you can swing the whole amount- often in the $70K range these days. Be sure to run NPCs on anyplace you/she gets serious about.

UT-A OOS has a 10% acceptance rate and a $60K OOS COA, and unlikely to have any merit money. You need to consider whether UT-A is worth stretching your family resources that far, and have the money conversation with your student. It is entirely fair for you to say "our budget is X. For specific schools, that we agree to in advance, we would look seriously at stretching that budget to Y, but there would be trade-offs to make [in our family holidays / our retirement plans / replacing the car / etc] so it has to be considered carefully.

re: tours- as everybody who has navigated admissions cycles both before and during the pandemic will tell you, visits can make a huge difference*. Start with whatever colleges are within an easy drive for you (or are near places you are going to be anyway). It doesn’t matter if she has the slightest interest in going to that school- she is building a vocabulary. The first tours are full of new and wondrous things; by the time she’s done 2 or 3 the things that every college tour includes will be old hat and she will be better able to pick up on the differences of any given school. The schools run full-on marketing campaigns to get your kid to apply (even when there is zero hope of acceptance), and the good ones are really good at it. One of the Collegekids couldn’t wait to get to a particular college that she was sure was the perfect fit for her. We barely made it through the tour- she viscerally didn’t like the ‘feel’ of the place and couldn’t wait to get gone. There was nothing specifically wrong - it just didn’t fit her. A student who as UT-A and JHU and Vassar on her list really needs to go see some campuses!

Spring break Junior year is a traditional touring time, as are weekends. Some schools have fly-in programs- usually for low-income students, but sometimes for URMs. Your daughter may be eligible for some as an hispanic applicant- it’s worth checking.

re: using mid-point of middle 50%- the selectivity and other characteristics of the school can materially affect how helpful that is. It’s useless at Harvard, for example, because there are simply so many applicants with strong stats (middle 50 of ACT is 33-35), but also b/c there are so many categories who are not held to that standard (legacy, donor, recruited athletes, etc), who throw the curve.

*There is a whole thread on CC " Colleges your child crossed off the list after visiting, schools that moved up on the list. Why? " that has been going for 4 or 5 years now.

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