@RedwoodForest Yes she will probably add SDSU, but she is in top 9% of her graduating class and will qualify for ELC, and she meets the historical criteria for the state path as well according to the UC calculator. She will be guaranteed a spot at a UC with space (but won’t accept Merced or Riverside). Her safeties are in Washington and Oregon, so not too far away.
@Knowsstuff
You totally get me.
@PepperJo Yep. You think it’s only you then on this site you see all the other people doing the same thing… Lol.
As far as kids being close or far away… We let our kids decide… Both could’ve been on the east coast and we live in Chicago… Looking back on this… That would of been expensive just to go visit them a few times each. It was more a fantasy… We would get to go to Boston or New York… Go shopping and eating etc etc… Personally it would of sucked.
Now one was 2.5 hours away and she is now 1. 5 hours away and I have to tell you… It’s great. We can just go and do a farmers market in the morning with her. Do some shopping have lunch /dinner and be back home to walk the dog.
My son we get to go 4.5 hours away… Board the dog for 1 day. Go visit him and an excuse to go to a Michigan football game. Sometimes we stay over with family and sometimes we just dig in and drive back.
We can always go to the east coast for a vacation or weekend.
@PepperJo, As the parent of a Williams grad I have to admit my reaction to your initial post was “Aw, too bad.” My son had a phenomenal experience at Williams and would do it again in a heart beat.
But . . . for sure Williams’ insular mountain village environment isn’t for everyone. If your daughter visited and has misgivings, I’d say let it go. If she hasn’t visited, maybe apply and address again after her acceptances come in.
@PepperJo Don’t want to get too off topic, and wish I could PM you but we also were in that 9%. In fact, she finished 12th in her class and still didn’t get a spot at one of the 5 UCs she wanted to go to. The 9% is offered where they have space, and I think for 2018 the only space was Merced and maybe Riveside - neither appealing to her. Big caveat there!! You might be fine, but plan for the unexpected. Even SDSU is hard now (she was admitted early there and invited to the honors college, but declined). This year blindsided a lot of college counselors I heard. If you want to be ensured a CA option, I strongly suggest you apply to some privates in-state, many of which give generous merit aid for students with high GPAs and test scores. Wish we’d known how crazy the UCs are but it all turned out good in the end.
I should of mentioned. Yes apply to a lot of matches /safeties. The reason our original list was so long was that there were a lot of matches and safeties due to the stories you hear kids not even getting into their safeties. We had safeties to our safeties.But it got the kids learning about great schools that they would never of even considered. When one kids friend got into one such school my kid goes “that’s a really great school” 
@Knowsstuff Safeties to our safeties…I like that! Good advice!
If I were you, I’d be thrilled that each and every one of those schools dropped off the list in favor of schools in the cities and states you mentioned.
From the west cost, Dartmouth, Cornell, and Williams are long flights followed by long drives all with very harsh winters. Pretty areas, but hard to get to from the west coast. Unless there were something really specific that a kid wanted to study at one of those schools and that school offered the best programs in those areas, I don’t see the attraction over other schools of that caliber. (I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that Penn and Georgetown might be a tad pre-professional for a kid interested in schools in Chicago, Rhode Island, and Boston.) Would Swarthmore be a better choice? There are always the Pomona and the consortium.
I do agree that asking for a “parent pick” is not unreasonable.
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@momrath
She loved the campus when we toured in April, especially the library. She just felt it was too far from a major city. And yes, it was quite a trek to get there! She applied for WOW but didn’t get in because we are a full pay family. I wanted her to have that experience hoping she would change her mind.
@LoveTheBard
We have been crazy enough to visit about 30 schools across the country, including Columbia, Swarthmore, Dartmouth, Penn, Williams, Harvard, Brown,RISD Holy Cross, Clark, Northeasten, BC, BU, the Claremont Colleges, Stanford, 3 UCs, and about 8 in the Pacific Northwest. She is visiting Davidson (only School in south she’ll consider) and UChicago next month. I love the idea of her being relatively close to an airport, and my husband who was born in Chicago, has warned her of the weather. She is unfazed by that, Penn got eliminated because the dining hall was too crowded and the campus was swamped with tourists of all things. Georgetown was eliminated because she doesn’t have time for a third subject test. Several got eliminated because of the 10% acceptance rate. Others were too remote. She has no desire to stay in California unless it’s Stanford (ha—good luck) So I know she’ll make the right choice for her, but some of the cuts just made me sad because I wanted her to give them a real chance. It’s not a huge deal, I was just venting. Of course I’ll be miserable if she moves across the country too ?
I know exactly how you feel. Our list was way too long and had to be trimmed for apps but I kept having feelings of regret - especially as we eliminated “matches.” I kept having a fear that we eliminated the wrong ones and maybe he would have a better chance at one of those. We got it down to 9 apps and it all worked out. I was very glad that he did not apply to more because 5 of them had supplemental essays. Any more would have spread him too thin.
Good luck!
Davidson is a terrific school. Folks from my area call it “Amherst of the south”. It was our kid’s reach school and she did not get accepted.
It’s a lot closer to a city and easier to get to than Williams and Dartmouth…but it’s not located IN the city. We toured almost 30 colleges between our two kids…and Davidson had fabulous facilities and a gorgeous campus. But…it’s also very small…and some students don’t like that.
Your daughter sounds very mature, OP. I agree that it’s good in culling the list now. I’m a very anti-huge app list person - I feel like we are feeding the beast with all these apps and in most cases kids end up hurting the majority of apps because they don’t have enough time to put into them (excluding UCs which is just another checkbox).
I would max the list at 10 and her reasons for the cuts seem to make sense.
Agree.
We had 3 parent picks in S18’s list of 11 schools. He ended up at one of them and loves it!
@suzyQ7 funny you say this. With my son it seemed like when he narrowed it down he did like 2-3 apps at the same time cutting and pasting demographics. A lot of the essays were the same or similar and more cut and pasting and adjusting. He actually got through them rather quickly which made us like nervous. One rule was that we got to double check before he hit the send button for mistakes.Yes we found some. We had him do some safety to the safety ones first for practice so he understood the process. This helped and took the pressure off.
What he found out was with all the applications was there are only so many different questions of information they can ask and only so many essay topics they will ask. Lot of it was the same questions reworded. This made him very comfortable once he saw this pattern. Maybe this is unique to engineering. But everyone asked why he wanted to be an engineer… Cut and paste… Add name of school. Add something specific about that school. Done!
You might be sad these schools got cut from her list, but I think it is good when they cut from their list…it means they have a better idea of what they want and are not applying to too many.
I just want “them” to be happy and that includes completing school with a major that can be used in today’s climate lol. Our genes make kids that have a tendency to “Fall in Love” and that will trump all life goals, previous aspirations, and any plan that had been set forth.
2 out of 3 have done that so far, we will so how this one does. As far as the school? I don’t really care anymore as long as the stay in and don’t give it all away for a “relationship”.
There was one Mom pick on my older son’s list. It ended up being his second choice in April and he waited till the last day to make his choice. I know that at that age, I felt really strongly I wanted to be in a city where things were happening.
I find the whole concept of a “parent pick” completely weird. The parent isn’t the one attending school so why do we have a pick.