Neither of my kids had any interest in joining this or any other college admissions discussion board.
That didn’t prevent me from being involved here. But virtually nothing from this discussion board affected the advice I gave to them about admissions. They were both special cases. #1 had very strong numbers, and significant EC’s, and was likely to be competitive for most of the “hard to get into” colleges. #2’s “numbers” were very good but the main evidence she would need for admissions was a top-notch portfolio, since she only applied to art schools and programs.
LOL. Happykid considers this a fairly safe and occasionally useful hobby for me to have. She has never had any interest whatsoever in visiting on her own. She knows my username, and where I keep all my passwords. The only time she is likely to visit is when she finds it her duty to let you all know I have shuffled off this mortal coil.
I have recommended this site to parent friends and students who I thought might find it helpful. As none of them have ever reported back about it, I truly don’t know of any of them ever did visit.
No. There really was nothing here that would help him. He would get frustrated with everyone having a 36 ACT and being the top .01% of their class and roll his eyes at me! He would also say that people don’t like the college he is going to and the degree he is in!
I actually have the urge to tell super-stressed kids on CC to get off it as a first step of “recovery”. Lol. It has lots of useful info and I also go to the parents forum a lot for things that have nothing to do with college, since I don’t do social media of any kind, I come here.
When I read some good threads, I do share it with my DS, he would read them, but is not interested in joining at all. Thank goodness.
My kids are not the uber-academics who tend to populate this site.
The “take your 3.0 and go to Community College, you’ll never amount to anything” mindset that’s so prevalent is unhealthy and untrue, and I wouldn’t want my kids dealing with it.
Nope. Don’t recommend it to friends, either. I describe it alternately as college issues related (and work for one, so at times I have some input,) or a chat forum. But more and more of my friends are dropping social media and texting for real life communicating. It’s a pleasant surprise.
It’s nice to help people and I’ve made some nice friendships, but you have to resist letting it be time consuming.
I don’t want my teen overly obsessing over college yet. As a parent I plan on distilling the wisdom from the site and providing a tip or two when needed.
I won’t be introducing DD to CC. It is my guilty pleasure. Also, she is only a HS freshman, so there is no reason she needs to freak out about college yet. When her time does come, I’m hoping she will be too busy with schoolwork, applications, and extracurriculars to linger here. Having said that, I really do enjoy this site and have learned a lot. It saved me money I would otherwise have spent on a private college counselor. DD will certainly benefit from this, even if she never reads these posts.
I’m not a social media guy much other than on a couple of college sports related forums. My kid actually found this first. He was pretty traumatized by the answers he got when he did a chance me. In fact he never told me about this site until I was pestering him about how his friends’ applications were going and he told me about CC.
I’m 99.9% sure he doesn’t get on this site and I probably wouldnt want him on this site as it can be very time consuming.
I think CC is terrific for parents to get the education that they need to help their kids handle the college application process especially when the guidance counselors don’t have enough time to help their kids. I will say that it has been very useful for me. There is a tremendous wealth of knowledge here, and for people who need to go the merit aid approach, there is no substitute.
I think CC is terrific for kids whose parents are not sufficiently involved to help them handle the college application process, or refuse to contribute to their college education.
I think CC is good for kids who want to understand different paths through life and what it takes to get there (engineering, medicine, law, business, musical theater, etc).
I think CC is ok for kids to help navigate a difficult situation like getting busted for cheating, or having difficult or dysfunctional parents, or other common scenarios
I think CC is terrible for kids whose whole existence revolves around getting into an ivy league or equivalent school, for whom life seems just one big grind. These are the most depressing kids of all.
I despise the chance me threads. They have zero value.
Nope. I have shown a few threads on specific topics to some students and parents, but my two high school graduates never went on CC, and my third son most certainly won’t go on. It’s a helpful website in many respects when used sparingly.
I showed mine some threads to read (less than a dozen total since 2010 or so when I joined) and I let my two younger lads (both now college grads) answer some questions about their specific colleges using my user name (and identifying themselves as Creekland’s son) once in a while, but none of my three have ever been interested in hanging out here. It’s way too different from their real life experiences in our section of the world - or theirs at colleges.
They know I glean info from it, esp about those different sections of the world/US, and they appreciated the college info I was able to glean for them from it though.
Mainly I needed/need to learn about different colleges and “getting there, etc.” They only had to figure out where they wanted to go. The Cliff Note version was far better for them than wading through all the “stuff” on here.
College Confidential is a vast ecosystem with multiple distinct neighborhoods, each populated by a variety of “neighbors”. As in any large community, you’ll find items of dubious value as well as gems. I have found tremendous value in multiple threads that focused on specific programs and schools. In fact, I started a few which generated heated discussions (e.g. impact of fraternities on Dartmouth) and useful tidbits which I followed up. By sticking to facts (following up leads with research) as opposed to opinion, I discovered information that was highly relevant to my needs and that was difficult to discover through a general Google search.
Another value to CC is to provide a reality check for students who may have unrealistic expectations. I have encountered way too many teens who believe that because they were the best at something at their local high school, then they must be competitive at the national and international level. There seems to be an unhealthy convergence among narcissism, provincialism and entitlement-ism in my local suburb.
My D used CC to great advantage. She heard about a game-changing summer program here on CC, she learned about a variety merit aid and scholarship opportunities, and she got a number of useful suggestions regarding schools that had programs that interested her.
The chance me threads are often counter productive, which is why I don’t recommend it. Every week there is some kid who comes onto the site with a lowish GPA and a high test score arguing about how he or she can get into a school. People take the bait and then you have a 10 page thread of circles. Then you have the 1600/4.0 kid who’s obviously doing a chance me just to show off. Some of the requests, especially in HS Life are pretty genuine and I like to help them, but many are not.
One of our kids attended CC–Community College and after 1 semester applied to transfer to her dream, competitive private U. She was accepted and started after completing 3 semesters of CC.
Our other kid was not interested and went straight to his competitive private U instead.
To the extent you mean College Confidential, both my kids are long done with college. Whenever there is something that may be relevant to them in Parent Café, I will copy and paste things that I believe are of interest to them and they may read it. Mostly my nuclear family is amused I am still participating in Parent Café.
