<p>I know it is mostly waiting now through end of April. Some acceptances have started to trickle in. But most will be out by end March. I assume our decision to pick one school will be by May 1. Question is: have you and/or your s/d given thoughts to how you will pick the school. Do you already have your top pick. If your d/s does not get in the top choice, do you have a priotized list to pick from? Or, will you decide after all the decisions out? Do you plan to visit one or more schools now/after acceptance and then decide based on that. Or, have you already visited the schools where you are expecting acceptances from? And if you have gotten trickle down acceptances, and already know you will not be interested in a school (based on better acceptances received), are you declining now, or will wait until the last day to decline. </p>
<p>Just curious on what your thought process is for elimination/selection in the event of multiple acceptances.</p>
<p>For us there will be two factors: love and money. If schools are close cost wise the nod goes to the one most loved if they are close love wise the decision will be for the one that costs less. In the event of a tie on both counts I guess a combination of prayer, roh sham bo, and one potato two potato :)</p>
<p>historymom, I assume you already know the love part. So do you already have a priotized list of love+cost part, or you will prepare the list after getting all acceptances.</p>
<p>Actually the love part is as my D puts it “In constant flux” Her top four or five switch places on a daily basis. But when the FA offers and last two decisions come in she will figure it out from there.</p>
<p>It isn’t until the actual acceptances are in hand that one can really think clearly, and choose amongst the acceptances, with the clutter of now moot colleges that rejected out of the mind. If there is any question about which school amongst the acceptances, we plan to visit the accepted student events, and compare on that basis.</p>
<p>For my 3 kids, every school decision they ever had to make–high school, college, grad school–seems to have been made on the very last day possible. Money was never a factor, just love, and I hope they are less wavering when it comes to life partners!</p>
<p>With each we revisited favorite schools after acceptances were in.</p>
<p>Ds applied to 15 colleges. He’s gotten acceptances to 5 (and figures he’s sure to get acceptances to 2 more; the rest he’s uncertain about). Cost will be a big factor. Dh is planning to make a spreadsheet to compare colleges. The final contenders will be visited in April. </p>
<p>Ds has his favorites, including the very first EA acceptance he received. But he knows very well that money is going to be a huge factor in all of this.</p>
<p>Kid has been admitted to most schools, but Financial Aid won’t be known until March. So, Financial Aid is the issue for us. Fortunately, Kid is happy with the Safety School (friends will go there, though not the best school he can go to).</p>
<p>Probably end up going to the school with the lowest cost of attendance (with some adjustment between safety vs. reach school, though not much). If there is a tie, we have set aside spring break (week after Easter) to visit colleges. Fortunately the colleges are out on Spring Break during March, so will be in session to visit.</p>
<p>At this point, we have received some financial aid from most of the colleges, but not their final offer (kid qualifies for ABC scholarship, but additional scholarships not decided until later, etc.). So, no one is out of the running yet.</p>
<p>Haven’t really thought how much more we would be willing to pay for the Reach school vs. the Safety school. I’m thinking $10k/yr is the max, although there is a hard $ limit too (which I know the safety school is under with no additional financial aid).</p>
<p>Cost is a major factor with my son, who, fortunately, likes the two schools that granted him acceptances with full tuition. He’s still waiting on a bunch more, but at least he is happy with the first two schools. Many of his friends are very worried about money, and they spend a lot of time looking for scholarships to help to offset costs.</p>
<p>My son managed to be accepted only by schools he hadn’t visited yet. (Well he’d seen a tiny bit of Harvard over a reunion weekend.) So the month of April was spent visiting schools and seeing what kind of a case they made for themselves. It came down to two schools and he sent in his acceptance the day before it was due.</p>
<p>My S has a list of 4 or 5 top choices (all reaches) if he doesnt get accepted by them, then we will have some travelling to do on Spring Break to those that he didnt sit in on a classs but accept him.</p>
<p>No point devoting a lot of energy to it until the verdicts are in. Daughter did not get into her her top four choices during last year’s admissions ugliness, though she was better qualified on paper and in terms of the other talents and experiences she offered them than their median accepted students. We threw together a whirlwind tour to attend visit days at the two she did get into, one of which we had never visited. She ultimately chose the one we hadn’t visited prior to her acceptance. None of us anticipated this outcome for her applications. We wasted a lot of energy and effort on “what if” that all went out the window when she got the news from the colleges which she loved.</p>
<p>From having watched 3 D’s and their friends go through the process: a lot of personal development can happen between fall and spring of senior year which can cause big changes in college preference. Good to allow room for possible changes in “fit”.</p>
<p>I had a strategy for the application process that shifted and twisted and changed so much that I’ve kind of given up on strategy. The original plan was to have visited all schools before applying, but that didn’t happen. We did a visit last week(to a RD school) and have another one next week (to a school she’s been accepted to). I just don’t want to have a crazy mad dash between April 1st & May 1st. That leaves 2 schools unvisited. She will probably get in to one of them, so that might be an April visit.</p>
<p>D & I had a talk about choosing based on more than prestige. I want her to pick the best school for her, not just the biggest name.</p>
<p>For my ds#1, he settled on a favorite pretty early and we have to dissuade him from applying ED because of $ concerns. He was lucky to get a merit scholarship from that school and he was done. </p>
<p>For my ds#2, that was a tougher decision. As he was weighing his decision, one of the schools write to push for an answer citing the need to hear soon so that they can reallocate the scholarship $ should he decide against attending there. By early April, he ended up with 3 schools that changed places on his preference list almost daily. [The re-shuffling of the parent’s list was not in sync with his.] The April visit during an accepted student weekend at one school helped.</p>
<p>So our strategy was to discuss his thinking every few days and help him with arrangements for sleepovers/visits to the three colleges. Since we have already stated what we were willing to bear financially during the application phase, we kept our focus on his feelings toward the schools and what he thought he wanted for his next 4 years. I relieved some of my parental angst by posting on cc for advice and passing along some of the comments.</p>
<p>In the end it was a love+cost, 11th hour decision.</p>
<p>April will be busy for us, as we have visited very few (per DS’s wishes). Ours will be based primarily on love, tho the practical will weigh in, too–any out of state privates will have to look pretty darn good to beat out our outstanding in-state school.</p>
<p>Always surprises for us right at the very end, so be don’t get inflexible. We did not get merit offers until the very end even from the EA schools. Some kids got offers with their acceptances EA from the same schools, so it was a surprise to get some of those offers.</p>
<p>We waited until all admissions/aid offers were in, and then my DS thought back about the schools (we had visited them all). He decided on his top two choices and we made a visit to both on the same weekend in early April–spent back-to-back nights on campus at each and he <thankfully> came away with a clear preference. Check and done!</thankfully></p>
<p>We also did back to back visits/revisits at the top 2-3 choices once decisions were in. The kids all decided within a day or two of the visits and then we had them sleep on it a few nights before sending in the deposits. They never looked back.</p>
<p>Even though I love the schools the kids chose, it was hard for me to see the “thanks, but no thanks” responses go to a few schools (the one problem of a well crafted list, you really like them all!).</p>
<p>My son chose not to visit schools because he didn’t want to fall in unrequited lov and instead decided to a) do a really good job on his applications; and b) apply to a few more schools than his peers (he ended up with 16 schools). We live in the Boston area, almost all of the schools to which he’s applying are in a 3.5 hour radius, but he’s only visited Brown and Tufts formally. If only one acceptance comes in, we’ll be done. If a few come in, we’ll visit them all. But if a lot come in, we’ll do thought experiments to reduce the number that we will visit. If possible, he’ll stay over as he has at Brown and Tufts, because he felt he got a much better sense of what they are like than from the tour and walking around during the day.</p>
<p>None of his schools give merit aid (except our state school which has given him full tuition) but at the moment, at least, we’re not going to get FA and we should be able to afford college, so that will simplify the decision.</p>