Hello,
My son in the 9th grade at a very competitive public high school in Ohio. He is doing very well academically. When is a good time for him to start scouting potential colleges and universities? What should he be doing in the meantime, if he would like to attend a specific college or university? He is leaning to a career in Math and Science. Please advise. Thanks
It’s a good time when He is interested. My Ds weren’t into it until Junior year. In the mean time take demanding classes and do well. Find other things of interest to do (ECs). Have fun.
We did mostly vacations where we drove. Once our kids were in HS, we coild drive near or though colleges on our vacation trips. One kid was very interested in looking at specific colleges by 10th grade…so we did. The other wasn’t really interested IN 10th grade, but was interested the summer between 10th and 11th grade.
Kids are ready at different times.
What is your KID saying about college interest?
Our daughter’s interest in looking at colleges only manifested itself toward the end of her junior year. We made one giant 10-day tour of 11 colleges during June (we took a classmate of hers along on the tour). Not the best time of year, in terms of viewing the colleges in action. But it worked out pretty well.
Our son was never interested in making tours of colleges. He had seen a number of them with his high school debate team. He spent a couple of summers at a debate camp at a major university. He visited my alma mater after 10th grade when I went to a reunion. But he only “visited” colleges regarding possible admission after he was admitted to them!
I would not do any college touring in 9th grade. Give some time for things to evolve until you get a sense of his HS grades, standardized tests, interests etc. We started looking at colleges in earnest in the fall of our kid’s junior year of HS and felt that this gave us sufficient time.
At this stage, I would not even mention college.
But in the meantime…DO look at college admissions course requirements. Luckily we toured schools early enough to get info. We learned that some schools required three lab sciences…and had the time to make an adjustment so that that would be taken. If we had waited until fall of junior year…it would have been too late to make the course adjustments
Fortunately, you don’t have to visit campuses to get this information. It will be somewhere on the college’s Web site.
What looks like a good school for a talented 9th grader will not be the same school that looks good for that same student 3 years later, I guarantee it. Encourage your child to continue to take the most challenging courses available, but also to pursue extra curricular activities that seem interesting, not just useful for a college application. Build a child, not a resume.
At this point, I would look at what you need to do. Are you on track to pay for private colleges (if that’s important to you)?
I may take my child to colleges but not to do formal college tours with information sessions just yet. What I may do is maybe do something fun on college campuses. UMD-College Park has an event called Maryland Day where the students and faculty in the various departments show what they study and what they do in a very informal, fun manner geared to the general public and even young kids. I would take middle schoolers and 9th graders to something like that. It gets the child thinking beyond the subjects offered in their own high school. In other words, I would look for potential areas of interest but not a specific majors or colleges.
We live in a large city with a number of local college campuses. All of them have music concerts, plays and such that the community can attend. We have been to see all the animals at Pre-Vet Day and the kids have been in swim meets at the College Rec Center. If you can find family fun activities you can attend on college campuses, it might gently introduce your children to the idea of college.
Avoid building up an expectation or promise that you can fund a college that is more expensive than you can afford. This time of year, there are usually many threads of heartbreak because cost constraints were not discussed between parents and student before application time, or the parents led the student to believe that there would be more college money than there actually is, but the admissions in April end up being too expensive.
We did some school beak tours in 10th grade but it was requested by my son. He did end up applying to a number of these early choices and it was good motivation for him to see the “prize” for all the hard work he was doing. I agree with @ucbalumnus to figure out a comfortable financial range and don’t let them fall in love with a college way outside of that range. We have decent college savings but each of our kids had a school in their top 5 that was very expensive and offers almost no aid so we told them early and often that x school was not going to work but how about these similar schools that offer merit aid or were 100% need met with no loans.
Get a copy of the Fiske Guide to Colleges. Leave it laying around.
Maybe spring of sophomore year, take him to visit a large university, a LAC, and maybe a tech school to see what type of college he likes. You can’t do much more until after he gets PSAT scores around Christmas junior year.
I think it depends on your individual family circumstances. If you are going on some family trip to a place you don’t expect to be back anytime soon, and if there is a college you think will seriously interest your kid close by, it might make sense to take a quick look. They may not get another chance to see it.
We have always included visiting college campuses on family vacations, even before we had kids! So our poor kids grew up seeing lots of schools. We didn’t do formal tours or anything, we just wanted to see the schools/campus/iconic buildings. We also visit state capitol buildings and historic churches on vacations.
Younger S was in 8th grade when his older sister was touring. He really enjoyed the tours. He wanted to know if he could skip HS and go straight to college!
We opportunistically began looking at college campuses around the 9th grade. No tours, just checking them out if we happened to be in the area for a vacation. So for example, we visited Stanford because it’s my husband’s alma mater and it has a great art museum and both of my daughters like art. We visited Berkeley because we know somebody who works there and he gave us an “insider’s tour.”
We started formal tours when D1 was a rising junior, again focusing on where we happened to be vacationing or visiting family. Now that she is a rising senior, we are planning a trip that is based on her research of where she might want to go.
ETA: At this moment, encourage him to challenge himself and to pursue activities that he genuinely enjoys. He should not be thinking (now or ever) about how to mold himself to the (imagined) requirements of a particular college or university.