Another reason not to ED. Why my son chose his school over the early favorite which also housed kids away from campus. Kind of kills the college experience always needing to bus or bike in from far away. U just can’t run to a dining hall or club meeting etc or go back to the dorm on a split schedule.
I don’t think Tufts puts freshmen off campus. At least they didn’t when this happened before…
Was just responding to @TheBigChef which said they did. I have no knowledge either way. But they said so a few messages ago
If you want another affordable regional option, she could apply to UNM. New Mexico is different from TX politically/culturally and her stats would get her in-state rates (less than 20K per year). Rolling admissions so she’d know quickly and would probably be invited to Honors as well.
With that said, the Trinity deal looks pretty sweet to me and you’d be hard pressed to get a better education at such a great price.
Re SATs, I would not sweat about that. My kid applied last year with a high 1500s score and I didn’t see much if any difference between her results and those of classmates with 100 points lower (or the ACT equivalent). There are relatively few schools that are very fixated on top scores these days (Vandy is among them) but with the shift to test optional, I don’t think high standardized test scores matter as much as they might have done pre-COVID.
Good luck!
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When my son and us parents put together the list last year, we watched a lot of YouTube college tours and students days in the life. All the safety schools we picked were those we thought fit him well , and he would enjoy going to any of them. (He was also OK to go to a community college.) One of the safety schools was Colorado School of Mines. We really really liked this school. We liked the students, activities, dorms, town, programs. We were very disappointed when we received the financial aid package.
For us some safety schools were also near the top priorities.
I
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Mines was my S19’s top choice. They told us face-to-face that their cost would come out the same as WUE, which they didn’t participate in. S was admitted and was so excited! Then we received the Mines financial aid offer, and it wasn’t even close; it was not affordable for us. S was very,very disappointed when he had to decline their offer.
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I don’t know what Tufts has done in the past, but this year there are 100 members of the class of 2025 living at the Hyatt in Medford. The school runs a shuttle bus between the hotel and campus, although there have been complaints about the frequency. It’s a good half hour walk if you don’t want to wait for the bus.
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Thank you again everyone for all the help and advice! Without this community, I wouldn’t even know that we didn’t do her weighted GPA the way most people are used to seeing it (her school doesn’t do it that way). Now that I’ve googled it and re-calculated myself, her UW is still 4.0, but her Weighted GPA is 4.45 (if you give 1 point to each AP class and .5 to each pre-AP/Honors class). But on the common app, we put down 4.075, which is taking her score on the school’s 100-point average curve, divided by 4. Is it worth updating somehow, or do the schools run their own re-calculations anyway based on her transcript?
Schools run their own. There’s no universal methodology. It differs from school to school.
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Her Common App GPA should match her transcript. That way every applicant from the same school is compared using the same system and grades are easily checked against the official transcript.
Each college can take the raw grades and recalculate according to their own methodology, which is not uniform from school to school.
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No loans at all for full pay. We did receive surprisingly generous merit aid from schools, which was unexpected to me since we don’t need assistance (unlike when I went to college and was on my own and getting emergency loans between terms!).
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I think kids look at the Instagram’s of current UNCW students and assume it’s right on the beach but it’s about 7 miles to Wrightsville Beach (pre-Covid, UNCW hosted its new student welcome events on the beach, which also may give the impression that campus is beachside). My friend’s son is a junior there and tried (unsuccessfully) to talk them into letting him rent a beach house with his buddies as their off-campus dwelling for the year 
I think there are students who do that though.
Re track: one of my daughter’s classmates, who didn’t participate in any formal recruiting, was able to get a tryout (facilitated by her high school coach) for the track team at the D2 school that she had already chosen to attend. Not only did she get a spot, but they were able to give her a little bit of money as well. All of this happened in May of her senior year - so it may not be too late to be considered for track at the D2 or D3 division (not sure if any of the smaller schools on your current list fall into that category).
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@OK_tx - First both you and your daughter did a wonderful job getting to this point. It sounds like she’s put a lot of thought into her list and will have plenty of options. My only advise is to take your time on the decision and it’s good to approach it like any other big investment that you are making. For my D19 we had a big white board in the kitchen that listed all the acceptances and then Pros/Cons and costs. We quickly were able to narrow it down from 20 (why 20 is a topic for another thread :-)) to a top 5, then after another two weeks was able to get down to a top 2-3.
At that point, while the decision was still VERY stressful, it was much easier to quantify a reason for her decision. The other thing that happened in this process was that the focus turned to the those things that are really important, and some of the more superficial things like who had nicer dorms didn’t matter anymore.
I will tell you she agonized over her final 2 choices and didn’t make a decision until the last day, but she is now a Junior and loving life in college.
One last piece of advise for both of you is that once she makes the decision, she should own it! No regrets, dive in head first and don’t look back.
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Olga, your D sounds amazing.
Just a quick note to reassure you- your d can research and research until the end of time, but no college or group of colleges has a lock on what will prepare her for what she wants to do professionally. She could major in psych and take a few business classes. Grad school is where she’d develop a focus on early childhood. She could major in early ed and get a doctorate. She could major in public policy with several internships in early ed (what does Head Start do well? What don’t they do well? several prominent think tanks cover this area). She could major in cog sci.
Etc. it’s not as though the “curriculum/program development for children” field has a gatekeeper who says “You are qualified, you are not”. Yale has a world renowned center for early childhood studies and the practitioners and researchers who come out of there have a wide variety of undergrad, grad, and post-grad backgrounds. Ditto Bank Street, which has more of an education focus than Yale (which is both Ed and Psych).
I think as you come closer to decision time, the actual mechanics of living somewhere for four years should play a little more importance. She’s going to figure out the right academic path for herself, but she still needs a campus to call home. And don’t let the claims of “we have undergrads working as research assistants” fool you. There is not a psych professor on the planet who wouldn’t welcome an ambitious and hard-working volunteer (which is what it is) to add to their lab capacity!!! Using grad students gets costly- you need to account for them on the grant, you need to supervise their work closely, you need to collaborate with other faculty members to make sure they are progressing appropriately towards their dissertation.
Managing an undergrad? Free labor!
Good luck, your D sounds great and so do you!!!
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This is incredible advice- thank you so much for this and all your kind words! Will relay to my daughter for sure!
@OK_tx, please share any updates/news/decisions your daughter ends up making. I’m confident all will turn out well, but would love to hear the details of the story!
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Absolutely, will do! And thank you for the pep talk, I need it!
So far, no good news or I promise I would have updated. She was flat-out rejected from UVA (EA). So were pretty much all of the other kids from her HS, even with higher SATs (UVA took 5-6 from it ED, some with lower stats, so maybe that’s why?).
She sent LOCIs to both of her deferred schools (UMich and UChicago). I read them and thought they were great.
She also sent updates to Tufts and UMidd to clarify she’s not asking for aid/correcting that part of application. UMidd responded with a sweet personal email. Tufts didn’t respond.
And now we wait…
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Everyone from our private high school who applied EA to UVA was rejected - I think I saw 5 red triangles on scoir. We finally broke the Vandy curse this year and had a boy with a 36 ACT accepted. We are three hours away so lots of kids apply and very few in our large town get in.
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Don’t lose sight of the fact that she’s already sitting on good news. 
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UMidd? Is that a reference to Middlebury College?