Coming back since I was the one who started the BC housing discussion. My kid is a junior there right now living off campus.
Admitted students get their housing guarantee – 3 or 4 years – in their admission letter. If you only get three years, the year you are off campus is junior year. You can petition to stay on, but there are usually more applicants than spaces and the current junior class was over-enrolled by 100 or so students as freshman. Yes, going back senior year to stay in the mods is a huge tradition.
As for study abroad, often kids will split a room off campus in a house or apartment with one living there first semester and the other second. The kids do a good job figuring that out among their friend group.
Boston is $$$$$ off campus. Leases are 12 months, most are very strict about no subletting. My kid has an internship elsewhere for the summer so we’ll be paying rent on an empty apartment.
To answer your question…yes, housing in Boston is very expensive. And the rents around BC are particularly high for apartments that are pretty gross. There are often stories in the local paper about landlords around the colleges not having the places up to code and taking advantage of college students. I know two local kids last year who got housing for 4 years and they live within a commutable distance. Good students but I wouldn’t say top stat kids at BC so I’m thinking more kids must be offered it now than back in my day.
Not sure if it’s been mentioned but what about Georgetown? Lots of kids here that apply to Richmond, BC, Villanova, W & M etc, also apply to Georgetown. Holy Cross also has a lot of cross applicants around here with BC and Villanova but not sure if that is too much of a “safety” for your daughter. It’s a slightly bigger LAC with a ton of school spirit.
@MAmom111 Naviance here shows she would never get into Georgetown. We did visit with D and S19 when he was looking. Neither loved it anyway. Thought campus was too cramped although we all of course loved the town.
We aren’t church goers so I don’t think I could get her to look at Holy Cross. Boston College or Villanova may even be a stretch although we know non-Catholic kids at both. We joked with D that ND is closer than BC or Villanova if she’s not crossing off schools affiliated with the Catholic church and she said no way…so that’s where the line is drawn at least until we visit BC and/or Villanova and D can check them out in person.
For some reason, C of Charleston is popular with B/C students in my area. The rep is major partying and lax academics. I would not consider C of Charleston for my kids. I’m working with a kid right now who plans to transfer out.
@homerdog , yes she did interview. It was an odd one though and she came away from it uneasy. Not really the sort she’d experienced elsewhere. The interviewer seemed to challenge her intellect and probe her politics (she’s not very political) and not really allow for a true conversation about her passions. The questions seemed to mirror the prompts on the application so it would be good to review those before. I’ve read reports of more typical interview experiences so maybe it was just a quirk of the interviewer.
@Temperantia Interesting. A friend of S19’s who was accepted to Wake last year (but chose BC) must have had the same interviewer! She told D that she had questions about politics too and it was more like an interview that the “conversation” she expected.
@Lindagaf : College of Charleston has recently been putting a lot of resources into the honors college. Is the student in the honors college ?
Great school for those into sailing & for those who want to take advantage of the cultural offerings in a gorgeous historical setting on the coast.
Offers business, visual & performing arts, biology, social sciences, & communications. While the academic opportunities are there for those who want to take advantage of them, best to be part of the honors college as both C of C and the city of Charleston tend to be very outgoing & social. Moderate (11%) fraternity participation; healthy number of students (25%) in sororities.
Similiar to most large Southern universities, the academic value is found in the honors colleges in environments which tend to be very outgoing & social.
P.S. To state the obvious, a large part of the attraction to the college of Charleston is the city of Charleston & the coast.
P.S. to my above post. The College of Charleston has an imbalance of males & females. C of C is about 64% female / 36% male and that could account for some of the dissatisfaction of the female student noted above by another poster.
@homerdog my DD19 did an on-campus interview at Wake the summer prior to senior year. It’s was not with her area representative. It was not at all like described above. It was a nice conversation mostly about her EC’s (activities and service). She brought her resume with her to help facilitate the conversation as she was nervous going in (was her first college interview). She mailed a hand written thank you note the next day. (Get the interviewer’s business card at the end of the interview)
@homerdog I am enjoying reading about your D’s journey, my two, DD18 and DD20, had/have some similar overlap to schools they looked at, applied to, etc.
Naviance was accurate for S19 and his decisions for the schools that had enough info. We were confident for acceptances to Grinnell, W&M, Carleton, and Kenyon and he got in. Vanderbilt was also accurate with almost all RD candidates above 1520 getting waitlisted and he was indeed waitlisted (and kids who took that waitlist spot all got in - something like six of them - it’s the way it works with Vandy and RD at our school). All of the other schools had very limited info since kids at our school are not very interested in east coast LACs unless they are being recruited and there are very few of those.
So, overall, yes. Naviance was accurate where there was enough data.
My best guess is that Vanderbilt University was engaging in yield protection when it waitlisted, then admitted all six of the high stats students who accepted a place on the Vanderbilt waitlist from your school.
@RockySoil 85% have hooks??? Maybe that means your kids do too?
Naviance isn’t always helpful at face value. I ask our GC a lot of questions about which dots are hooked or ED or I might even know without asking since we can sometimes figure out who the athlete dots are. Kids tend to share a lot of their info with each other. One place I’m thinking it’s not as helpful is for the big schools with a lot of apps since the dots only show highest composite and not superscore.
I finally got access to our Naviance this week. I used it for my oldest and I’m now just getting back into it. I find very useful at my kid’s school, even though classes are 500-550 kids. I believe hooked kids represent a very small population of each class and, in some cases, the hooked kids are just blatantly obvious.
@homerdog Yes the school is 83% URM, plus a few legacies and athletes. I think something like 30% are first Gen! We are not URM so Naviance is hard to use. For DS19 (3rd of 5) though, he is a recruited runner so probably will have the most powerful hook and won’t need Naviance.
Enjoying your thread - Wake and W&M are on DS19’s spring break visit list as well.