College Search Process......Then and Now

Parents Forum
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<p>Coming from the mid-Atlantic region in the late '70s, I applied to 3 schools (2 Ivies and an LAC), admitted to one Ivy and the LAC. I took the SAT twice in order to try to get my Math score up (my poor kids are doomed genetically as no one related to me will do well in math standardized testing). There was a handwritten scholarship app because I remember doing it during the day at school (no one read my essays, that is for sure). A number of schools had just gone co-ed, and friends a few years ahead of me braved those campuses. </p>

<p>I visited several LACs in the NE summer before senior year with my family. As I think about it, that should have made me more tolerant when we toured with my rising senior. I was awful and a know-it-all. </p>

<p>Everything was so much smaller then – the President of the LAC I ultimately applied to had lunch with me to encourage me to apply. </p>

<p>When it came time to decide, I could not afford the Ivy so went to the LAC – had gone to an admitted students day and decided it wasn’t so bad, and that was that.</p>

<p>Once I started school, family never asked about my classes, my grades, my major, my plans.</p>

62

<p>The only participation or input my folks had with me about applying to college was my major. I wanted art, they wanted science. They had no idea what was the SAT/ACT. I applied to 3 schools got into 2 and wait listed at an ivy. I studied science for a year and then transferred to art school. My parents feared I’d become a starving artist so they never took interest in my grades from that point on. I’m happy to report I’m not starving but the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree because my HS Sr. is applying to some art schools and I hear my parents words coming out of my mouth.
I see the college application process much more stressful for our D than it was for me 30 yrs ago. It feels like the bar is raised so much higher and there seems to be too much emphasis on rankings.
BTW, I had a friend who applied to Harvard with red crayon. It must not have been his first choice school.</p>

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<p>I went to school in the late '70s and early 80s, and going through this with DS bears almost no resemblance to what I did. I took both the ACT and SAT and did great on them, but it never woudl have occured to me to take them again or do any prep. DS did do a couple of practice tests, and only did the ACT, but most of his freinds did prep courses and took both tests. I rteceived a ton of mail from colleges all over the country, but applied to 1 school, the local state U. I knoew it would be affordable with the Pell grant and the small scholarship the offered. After 2 years I transferred to the flagship campus, since my brother, who is much older, volunteered to help with the room and board. It never occured to me that a private school could offer enough in aid for it to be affordable to my family. I am not sure about comparing apples to apples, but my parents, who never made more then $25K a year sent my to college and I had no debt. They had nothing saved, it was simply that grants paid almost the whole cost. I make much more than that, in a “better” job and my DS cost of attendance, at the same state flagship is about 35-40% of my gross income.I wish the grants had kept up with the increasing COA and them we might be in a better place!</p>

64

<p>Went to see the Allman Brothers night before the ACT. Home late, slept in my clothes. Did really well on the test. I applied to 3 state schools and admitted to all with some scholarship money. My friend was going to one of them and asked if I wanted to room with her. She and I drove up and saw the school. It looked cool. So that’s where I went. My parents were not involved at all. A friend moved me in. All pretty normal for the mid 70s. Also my parents had 0 money for me but I could do it with a few loans, a job, and scholarship money.</p>

65

<p>I had to write to colleges to request an application. They were filled out by hand, maybe I even used pencil…I’m not sure. I only applied to matches and safeties, and was accepted to all…probably 3 or 4. My college tuition for a year was a little more than what we spend on a year’s worth of books today.</p>

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<p>Funny, everyone here says how “different” it was, but my experience was really not all that different from today. The main things different from my and my son’s experience are 1) how electronic everything is and 2) how there are so many more students applying, so harder to get in to some of the same schools. My parents did not participate much in my application process, but I think it is because they are immigrants and did not know about the concept of college visits or think they were worth the investment (my friends went on them, though.)</p>

<p>Anyone else out here who went to a private prep school in the 70s or 80s? What was your experience like? Radically different from today or similar?</p>

67

<p>

Vassar went co-ed in 1969 :slight_smile: I KNOW you didn’t go to college in 1969, mathmom!</p>

68

<p>That’s great, Amarantine! And Ucbalumnus, I didn’t doubt that there were nonscience majors available at MIT, but I do seriously wonder how many people matriculate there INTENDING to major in those fields and also not intending to study much math or science (although I now view that as a mistake). Also not too sure how I would have fared in my area of interest, which was a foreign language not offered at MIT, and an area studies major that, at least now, can only be done by special arrangement.</p>

69

<p>Here’s a scary thought. What do you think the college admission process will be like in 25-30 years when our grandchildren are applying?</p>

70

<p>IMHO the biggest difference is the leveling of information. </p>

<p>Back in the day the way to find out about colleges was to peruse the dated brochures and college catalogs in the counseling office (and they didn’t have that many), or listen to the half-baked rumors and “knowledge” passed around by kids you knew. Growing up in LA in a lower-middle-class area all our teachers had gone to the CSU system or occasionally UC, nobody had a sibling or relative who attended an elite college so we figured those were just for rich kids or children of doctors and the like. </p>

<p>These days a kid in the most remote school can read everything online and take part in forums like this where colleges are discussed ad nauseum.</p>

71

<p>LBowie: I’m in North Carolina, where few people even knew about the ACT until recently. The required ACT for juniors is new. The legislature mandated the ACT, as well as the ACT PLAN for sophomores, as ways to measure students’ academic progress against those of students nationally. I doubt College Board likes it, because some students are now opting not to take the SAT. I think reports to three colleges are included. Any extra reports must be paid for by the student/parents.</p>

72

<p>My senior year in HS was 1974 and since I was good in math and science all our friends and neighbors told me that I should major in Engineering and go to either UT Austin or Texas A&M. Since A&M was only recently coed and had only a relatively small percentage of girls, I quickly decided on UT. That was the entire decision process.</p>

<p>I filled out the SINGLE PAGE application in March and took the SAT in April (I had an automatic admit as a top 10% student but had to take the SAT to register a score - it didn’t matter what I scored, I was in). I remember it took me longer to find an envelope and a stamp than it did to fill out the application.</p>

<p>The first time I set foot on campus was the day I went to register. Tuition was something like $5 per hour, I remember my bill for classes and fees was around $250 and included football tickets, which we drew at random and sometimes I ended up on the 40 yard line.</p>

<p>My starting salary as an entry-level engineer was more than 2.5 times the entire cost of my degree, including room and board.</p>

<p>Times have changed, radically.</p>

73

<p>Here was my college search process: </p>

<p>I looked in some college guides. I thought UCSC sounded cool, and it was near a beach in California. I mentioned that to my parents. My mother then had my favorite cousin call me. He was a PhD student in English at Princeton at the time, and had graduated from Harvard a few years before. I worshiped him. He told me in no uncertain terms that there were only seven universities with the library resources to support serious scholarship of the type I should want to do: Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Chicago, Berkeley, and Stanford.</p>

<p>Then I told my parents I was really interested in Stanford. My father said, “That’s great,” and left the room. My mother said, “Your father thinks that there’s nothing you can get at Stanford that you can’t get at Harvard, Yale, or Princeton, that we’re willing to pay for.”</p>

<p>At the time, my school sent multiple kids to Harvard, Yale, Cornell, and Dartmouth every year, with occasional singletons to Princeton, MIT, Brown, Penn. Also many to Williams and Amherst. I was basically told I would probably get in wherever I applied, but just in case I ought to apply to more than one college. Harvard could be my safety; I had a lot of family connections there. I wanted to go to Yale, though, because Harold Bloom was there, and had written a bunch of books about the British Romantics, especially Blake, and also because Cleanth Brooks and William Penn Warren were there, and everyone said it had the best English Lit faculty and the best French Lit faculty. Also, my best friend wanted to go there, too; it would be fun to go to college together. My mother worried that it would not be rigorous enough for me (she was a Harvard fan, despite having turned down Radcliffe when she was a girl), but one of her friends who had a son at Yale assured her it was really quite stimulating intellectually.</p>

<p>It was a far simpler time.</p>

<p>The COA, after my NMS, was less than 10% of my parents’ joint incomes. My father had me borrow as much as I could, because the subsidized loan terms were better than he could get from a bank, and he could earn more investing the money than I had to pay in interest. He then paid off the loans over time.</p>

<p>I did take the SATs more than once. In 10th grade, I was in a program in Spain with mostly 11th graders, and they all took the SAT, so I did too. I did fine, not supergreat. Then I took it again as a junior, and did really well. I took Achievement Tests in Spanish, English, and Math, and AP tests in Spanish Lit, French Lit, and Calculus. The Spanish Lit one was the only one I took before 12th grade; I took it in 10th grade, from Spain. It was completely unusual to take AP classes before 12th grade – I don’t think I knew anyone else who took an AP test before 12th grade. Armed with the AP test, I talked my way into a 400-level Spanish Renaissance poetry class at the local SUNY for 11th grade.</p>

74

<p>jym, when mathmom and I were high school seniors, there was a big article (in Esquire, I think), about the first co-ed class at Vassar. It focused on class president and flamboyant cross-dresser Jackie St. John. It sure looked like an all-female atmosphere to me!</p>

<p>I had a future sister-in-law and future best friend in that class, but of course I didn’t know it at the time.</p>

75

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<p>Unfortunately, it seems that half-baked rumors and “knowledge” are still being passed around, even on forums like these, despite the fact that the answers are more readily available now. Examples:</p>

<ul>
<li><p>Parents and students confusedly flailing around about college costs, or assuming that certain types of schools are expensive or cheap, when they could just go to the net price calculators and find out for themselves.</p></li>
<li><p>The common assumption that all STEM majors lead to good job prospects at graduation, when that is not true for biology majors.</p></li>
<li><p>The assumption that four and six year graduation rates say more about the school than the students at the school.</p></li>
</ul>

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<p>The apparent emphasis on visiting that people have here seems to be different from when I was in high school. Many students applied to and attended colleges where their first visit was when they had to go to orientation or registration.</p>

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<p>When I was in high school, most AP test takers were seniors, with a few juniors who were advanced in the subject (e.g. those who aced level 4 foreign language as juniors, or an exceptional-in-math student taking calculus as a junior).</p>

<p>There were a lot fewer AP courses and tests offered; the proliferation of “AP lite” courses like human geography that are considered suitable for use as normal high school freshman and sophomore level courses had not occurred. Students were not trying to run up a dozen AP courses and tests to impress college admissions people, but only taking a few in their best subjects for which they wanted to start in a more advanced course when they got to college.</p>

78

<p>jym, true, I’d forgotten it was co-ed by then, but still seemed overly female to me - sight unseen of course!</p>

<p>We definitely were suppose to have a reach, match and safety - I believe those were the very words.
Reach: Harvard
Match: Brown
Safety: U Penn</p>

<p>But for me the process was similar, just the quantities have changed. More tests, more prep, more colleges to apply to. We obsessed about where we would get in from Dec to April. I was lucky, but plenty of people didn’t get in everywhere they applied and there was often someone who misjudged and the GC would call around and find space somewhere for them.</p>

<p>There was a junior in my calc class who took the AP, and there was a girl in my year who was also one extra year advanced in math, but mostly it was very, very rare to be more advanced than calc senior year.</p>

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<p>Those two probably thought that the course was an easy A and the AP test was an easy 5, right?</p>

80

<p>I imagine so. I know the one in our class went on to Princeton and majored in statistics. If that’s a major - that was her interest anyway!</p>

<p>The other big difference is that there were only 5 of us in that calc class (girls school), now probably half the class takes it. A number of friends stopped with Algebra 2 and still got into Harvard.</p>