I wonder if anyone has a four year roadmap, or wants to share the steps their kid took in boarding school to find the right college. I know that the schools do most of the heavy lifting. Kids are busy and knowing what’s coming up can be helpful. For example, a friend told me to take the kids to colleges whenever we travelled. I have already noticed lots of things cropping up. I know parents here have a wealth of knowledge. Is anyone willing to share?
I have had a 12 year road map! Many golf parents do…But seriously, we are using some of the following guidelines and goal-mapping tools that have been influenced by lessons from other CC parents!
- Review kiddo’s core values - what do you stand for- what do you value?
- What is the vibe? Small vs Large, Diverse or Less Diverse, Traditions, Faith-based or non-faith based, spiritual vibe, gender dominance, big athletic school, Greek Life or not, party culture or not, a lot of activism on campus or not? Is social life important and what kind of social life?
- Large or Small school
- Region of the country college is located in?
- Location -Country, Suburb or City - and proximity to home (want or not want)
- Interest areas of study, research and/or work click with the college?
- Size of classes (some students want smaller class size)
- % of classes taught by PhDs v. assistants, TA’s, grad students
- Desire/No Desire to create your own major
- Exchange programs, Study Abroad, Partner Colleges?
- Determine if accommodations are/are not needed@ college
- Are internship, research and/or work-study important to you?
- Are (above) opportunities built into curriculum or can you get credit?
- Merit aid (if needed and/or desired)
- Athletic scholarships and/or D1-III? (If applicable)
- Supportive services (if needed, desired)
- What is the history of acceptance/matriculation from your high school?
- Percentage of students who graduate in 4 years?
- Percentage of students who leave after first year?
- Housing and Housing Costs? How many years housing guaranteed?! This really can fuel cost of college and cause stress.
Just a start. Also, you may want to look into college based summer programs at your target college for current high school students (most are for rising Juniors-Seniors)
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@Golfgr8 supplied a good list.
One step, I’d put ahead of all on the list: I’d start with narrowing down which country? Mine had interest or applied to universities in the U.S., England, Australia, Canada, Ireland, and Scotland. What courses taken freshman year in high school have a huge impact. While IB Diplomas are a huge help across borders, each country also has their own peculiar admissions aspects that one should consider several years out. While Oxford and Cambridge have very high acceptance rates (circa 20%) relative to their American brethren, they are very, very picky about American acceptances.
Window shopping colleges is really enjoyable, but building a resume to earn the most options in 12th grade may be more important. Early on, I’d use window shopping more as a tool to inspire my kid (if inspiration is necessary). Within the U.S. context, in order to provide the most options for your child the most important thing you can do is figure out how much (if any) input from you, older sibling, relative, successful friend, coach, GC, etc… will maximize your kids’ course selection rigor, GPA, test scores, ECs, etc… over the next 4 years. For some kids the worst thing to do is get involved/interfere, for others timely input can make all the difference, for others acting as a task master until they mature is the only way. The admissions ‘clock’ commences the first day of 9th grade.
As you project from 8th or 9th grade to October of 12th grade. All kids enter 9th grade with a clean slate resume. However, only a very small percentile of kids will produce an application they could realistically submit to a 5% admit rate university in 3 years’ time. It isn’t 5% of all 12th graders, it is 5% of a self-selected tiny segment of the population that even dared submit the application to a 5% admit rate uni. Only a slightly larger percentile will have a 10% admit rate application, and work your way down from there, etc… If your kids’ goal is an 80-90% acceptance rate college, then you don’t need to worry about building a resume to keep the option of a 5%, 10% or 20% admit rate open.
No roadmap here. Our son was hell-bent on film school when he entered Choate, then dropped the service academy bomb on us two days before he went back for his junior year and that was that. We had secretly hoped he’d go to Michigan, but our only rule was “anywhere but Ohio State.” We should have been a bit more specific. We really didn’t care where he went to college as we never once worried that he wouldn’t get an excellent education wherever he ended up. We also felt that his high school education was more important than college. Take care of high school and the rest takes care of itself.
ETA: Of course, outstanding college counseling and guidance are a big part of what you are paying for at the New England boarding schools, and they deliver. The process starts early, and the advisors and CCs know both their students and colleges intimately; they’ve been in this business a long time. We were able to be completely hands-off during our son’s admissions cycle, although his CC kept us in the loop. Unfortunately, the service academy path is a process almost entirely outside the normal HS CC scope as the military academies have their own sets of rules and counselors (Field Force Reps, Blue and Gold Officers, etc.) to shepherd candidates through the daunting almost year-long nomination/application/medical/physical gauntlet. Our son’s HS provided transcripts and his teachers submitted LORs, but that’s about it. He had to do the rest on his own. Eventually, we were able to joke that we only got “CC Lite” from his school for the service academies and thought we should have gotten a bit of a refund. For his civilian college apps, though, the CC was pure gold. Too bad he passed on those choices. They were spot on in our opinion.
What the school tells us is that the first step is taking advantage of all the opportunities in boarding school - try new things. Figure out what you like and who you are the first two years you are there. Work hard. Be all about making the most of high school for high school’s sake.
They pretty much take it from there.
I am all about keeping options open for as long as possible. So the long plan is learn gently and slowly about options (visit schools when it meshes with other plans). Educate yourself about yourself and areas of study and schools. Have fun with it, and don’t let it stress you out if you can help it.
Just to add to the great advice above…Please look at schools beyond your region and your “mental” geographic comfort zone. You would not believe (or maybe you would) how many parents tell me that they don’t want their kids going to a college in the Midwest, South or “out West” - partly, because they don’t want the kids far from home. I have been surprised by the narrow views I have heard…please be open minded and consider the many wonderful colleges that exist somewhere south of New Jersey, west of Philadelphia, east of Stanford, north of CA, and in between. Having played a lot of collegiate golf, I was able to visit many campuses around the country. Some with their own golf courses! Feel free to DM me if you want info.
I think 4 year plan is all sorts of crazy and leads to completely stressed out kids. Unless you are an athlete in a sport that already recruits in 9th, it is also pretty pointless. Just get used to HS and try to do the best you can on your classes and explore your interests in ECs. When traveling, visit college campuses, we are sports fans so often got in a basketball or football game depending on the season. Just to start getting some sense of what sort of campus you like (for the student not parents). We did first official tours in the summer before junior year, mostly because we were near some schools she was interested in at the time. She started out liking SLACs in the NE, by the end of the process was sure she wanted mid-sized university, and applied all over the country. Kids change a ton in high school and keeping college talk and craziness to a minimum before junior year is wise if you can manage it.
Be very careful on the visits. I know too many people who happily visited Harvard, Stanford and Duke in 9th grade only to be told in 11th that those were not remotely realistic based on their scores. Disappointment followed. Manage expectations, you are very early in the process with no track record yet.
How do you get a sense of schools before having scores though? Seems to me that for athletes this is kind of the problem. We have already had open gyms with various coaches attending and I know we need to narrow the field to make it manageable but don’t know how because we don’t have scores.
The scores will be different for athletic recruits anyway, but the counseling office will know what is needed.
@one1ofeach I have a kid who is playing Div I basketball in a Power 5 conference, but we went through the whole D3 to D1 recruiting thing early on. I could write a book. You can DM me if you want to ask questions on the subtopics.
@Happytimes2001 With 3 kids, we had over 50 campus tours across the country over the past 7 years. More visits were to the elite. However, I have a kid in an 80% admit rate uni, who is just as intelligent as my other two kids in 8-9% admit rate uni, so I have some background narrowing down both ends of the spectrum and some in-between. I am not going to rewrite 50+ campus tours again, but feel free to DM me as well on specific questions.
Your BS will take care of the nuts and bolts (testing, applications), and otherwise I would say start looking around when convenient, just to get a feel for different geographic locations, types of campuses, settings, sizes, etc., but otherwise, start low-key. We started building the list one year ago (early sophomore year) due to sports recruiting, and I think DS will be ready to be done (as in, emotionally) around the time most of his classmates are gearing up. It’s another big project to layer on top of everything else they have going on.
I do think it’s good to casually visit campuses for your child to ask, “Can I see myself going/living here?” but at the same time, like others have said, it’s not a linear process and kids and their goals and desires evolve during HS and are swayed by many things. For a while DS said he wanted to go somewhere warm. Then he said there was no reason to look anywhere more than a few hours from home (NE), since there are so many good schools within a small radius. Then he threw himself into recruiting for his sport, so we started with a list of the DIII schools with his sport and have visited from OH to MId-Atlantic to New England. This weekend he threw CO into the mix. So start thinking about the broad criteria and be open-minded. Focus on the exciting aspects of the process.
@1ofeach , I think it’s typical to do some for of diagnostic SAT and ACT testing in 10th grade, so you’ll start getting some idea of where your child stands. But for sports, we had to be proactive and start the actual testing process quite a bit earlier than the school-driven process.
Thanks for all the good advice. Funny how different kids are. Mine likes doing things over the long term. Waiting until late Junior/Senior year would be completely stressful but taking baby steps now ( like exploration, PSAT, planning classwork) Would help immensely. This kid Is a planner and would like nothing more than a worksheet to check off what the major steps are. Just like my spouse.
I think it’s wise for kids to cast a broad net. That being said, kids definitely will know where they stand relatively speaking by end of Sophomore year. It’s not like they are going to change radically in their learning style. And the BS aren’t shy about telling them where they are academically And athletically. I agree 1000% that they can change impressions of what’s best for them both major and school type.
We just won’t have the time to traipse around to dozens of schools in search of a fit. We need some idea ( very vague but general idea of the school and its attributes).
Maybe a whirlwind tour is best? We know folks who did this in the Summer. It sounds exhausting!!! After the tour I’m not sure any knew more than before. Maybe they did. There are lots of good ideas to think about.
I would say that tours over the summer are far from ideal, we did some because we had to but not having students on campus changes the vibe, in fact the campuses we visited had a bunch of HS students there for summer programs which was a very different vibe from when students were there. It is fine for first pass when you are in the area for another reason but nothing like visiting during the school year.
My eldest was in a basketball tournament in SoCal her freshman year of high school, so during the downtime I took them to a group of schools and told them to get a general feel for the type of school:
UCLA - big state school in the city
USC - large private school in the city
Pepperdine - medium-sized private with religious affiliation
The 5 C’s of Pomona, Claremont McKenna, Harvey Mudd, Scripps, Pitzer for all girls LAC, STEM specialist, creative LAC, old blue blood LAC, and newer blue LAC on one cool campus.
UCSD - giant, more isolated state school
I think I am forgetting one. Anyhow, something like that might help.
P.S. Never take an impressionable kid to Pepperdine. The Pacific Ocean meeting the hills of Malibu, plus kids’ tv shows are too enticing. They wanted to attend Pepperdine before we even got to the campus gate.
You could do something like that tour somewhere, with a good variety in a relatively small area, (wouldn’t work in Wyoming for instance) and that may help narrow down the types to be more specific later on.
Here’s what I don’t like about the concept of a four year roadmap for choosing colleges: it implies that the only point of high school is to end with a favorable college result, and that everything along the way should be viewed through that lens. If it makes your kid feel less stressed along the way to begin thinking about college early, well, you know your kid best. But I think for most high school kids, particularly those self-selecting into boarding schools, they already put plenty of pressure on themselves and don’t need that reinforced by starting the college process, no matter how gently, in 9th grade.
We encouraged our kids to try new sports or activities, find things that interested them, and figured it would work out in the end, which it did. We didn’t start visiting college campuses until spring of junior year for each of them, and found that it was plenty of time for them to get a feel for what they liked and didn’t like. And honestly, they changed so much (as people and as learners) between ages 14 and 17 that I don’t think starting the process much sooner would have been all that helpful anyway. We also pushed back on the notion that they had to visit every single college they were interested in before deciding whether to apply. Definitely important to visit any schools that the kid might apply to binding early decision, but otherwise we focused on the “type” and location of schools they wanted and then applied to other similar schools (i.e., “if you like Amherst, you’ll also like…”).
Here’s what we did in terms of visits with older (non-athletic recruit daughter):
- Freshman year: No college visits
- Sophomore year: College visits to wife's and my alma maters (was a good contast...large urban university vs. suburban LAC) over Spring Break
- Junior year: Bulk of college visits over course of year, with big push in summer
@soxmom Funny. That would never work for this kid who likes to do everything and try everything. So no worries there. Unfortunately, said kid would also like to visit every school. For our family, it’s not to end only with favorable college results though that’s a consideration. Instead, it’s to find an awesome fit and spend educational dollars wisely. It’s also to make sure that our kids consider various paths. I think you can get to the same place in many ways. But it helps to have a plan and some alternate routes. The college process is pretty uncertain so knowing what you want as a student is helpful. I think visits and thinking are a good place to start. So is speaking to people in various careers.
It took a lot to find a good BS so I expect the same time commitment for college.
@bloomfield88 Good point about Pomona, it sound absolutely perfect. Then again so do all the 5C schools. And that trip with a little bit of everything sounds like a good beginning.
The best roadmap IMHO has your kid figure out:
What do I want out of my education?
What kind of social experience do I want- fish out of water, in my comfort zone, combination of both?
How do I want to express myself out of the classroom/lab/library?
What is the optimal next step after college- get my ticket punched to go straight into a job which I don’t hate, or to try out a few things for a few years after college to figure out a path, or go to grad school?
How hard do I want to work?
Does it stress me out to be challenged intellectually and to question my beliefs, or does it make me stronger?
Once your D figures that out, AND you’ve got confirming feedback from her school about where she stands academically as an applicant, you’ll be in good shape to explore a tidy list of appropriate places. Overlay that with your financial constraints/willingness, and you’ll have a list of appropriate length, and the college counselors can help make sure the final list has reach/match/sure bets on it as well.
It’s the kids that don’t figure this stuff out in HS who end up with random lists all over the place. If your D goes through a “checklist” of figuring out what she’s looking for, actually kicking the tires on colleges will be a breeze.
In addition to SoCal and NorCal, it would be easy to do a similar, diversity tour in other parts of the country. If you happen to be located in or are traveling to: North Carolina, Illinois, Massachusetts, Indiana, Virginia, Pennsylvania, Texas, or New York, then you could arrange. I am sure there are other states.