This isn’t a new concept for a discussion thread; but I’ve been reflecting on things we have learned along the way, or things I’m bursting to tell parents with younger kids. DS20 is now in the final phases of the college application/ selection process, and these are the things I would go back and tell myself:
The essays! So many of them, all slightly different enough that there is no cut and paste. Different lengths (250, 500, 750 word limits). All seeming to seek a creative and authentic voice! We saved every single one that he wrote, and would start with each new essay request (scholarships, research programs, general applications) by seeing if we already had the starting materials to work with. Most frustrating were the applications where submitting one round of essays 'unlocked' the next level of application with even more questions to answer. The lesson I took from this was to narrow down the application pool as much as possible and save everything you write. He only applied to 6 schools (and associated scholarships, honors colleges etc). I can't even imagine what it is like to apply to 10-20+
Letters of recommendation: I really hated these, I'll be honest. I think for some kids and in some schools this is really a strong point for them. For other kids, and in certain schools, it felt like agony. Teachers who didn't submit until a couple hours before the deadline were one challenge. But the other was having to go back to the same teachers and ask for letters for schools, ROTC, scholarships, extra programs etc. My kid felt like he was imposing. My own view is that people ask for LORs from teachers that will give them a strong one, so it is a strongly biased source of data. But- that's coming from someone who doesn't like them! Lesson learned: not sure really, except that you need to line them up before the end of Junior year.
Don't click the "I'm interested in receiving email" button on any standardized test. For a while, staying on top of his email box took dedicated time daily.
For parents that have their oldest/ only going through the process- read these forums early and often (without getting weird and obsessive) as you figure out the ropes. Also, try to find a more experienced parent in your school district for insider tips. I had no idea until my son was a junior that kids could take AP classes as Freshman or sophomores. I didn't realize that NMF/ NMS came with great scholarships at some schools. I didn't know that his school required volunteer hours to be in NHS, and that Boy Scouts service activities wouldn't count towards it.
Positive learnings (i.e. things I'm glad we did): (1) apply to at least one school with rolling admissions that he liked, with good merit aid. Pressure was largely removed his senior year as he already had a couple of good options. (2) focus on fit/ cost over prestige. Ensure that you don't get too caught up in where all the other kids are going to go. (3) Be open to big changes in direction. S20 went from being very focused on service academies or ROTC last year, to realizing it wasn't right for him at this point in his life. Having an open dialogue and supporting him through the process was positive for us both.
I didn’t mean to turn this into such a monologue! If you stuck around this long, thank you. The other parents on CC have really been a huge help to me as we have gone through the last 12-18 months. I’m happy to hear what others have learned along the way.
I would tell parents of youngers to not get caught up in any hype around what others consider prestige in a college or the like. Your kid is on his/her own journey and what fits for your kid and your family is what matters. Pay attention to NPC calculators and look for colleges that are good fits and are affordable. Be realistic and be straight with your kid about what is affordable NOW (not when the decisions start coming in). Don’t be afraid to look out of state at colleges you and your friends have never heard of. Join CC and read, read, read!
My oldest took AP courses and received AP credit for them. Check the college websites to see what scores are needed and what classes you can get AP credit for.
You don’t have to submit your AP scores until after you know which school you attend, only that school will need the official scores.
So when your student sits for the AP exams spring of senior year, just put that college’s code on the test booklet and they should get the AP score report for free.
I did not know when my oldest applied, that the high school could send transcripts in the summer. My S took advantage of that and applied to his top choice in July for higher merit chances.
I did not know that my S’s school accepted CLEP exam credit. I could have had him take the math, science and history one and he could have saved some money (his school charges tuition and fees by the credit).
If the college says they don’t require the essay portion of the SAT, take it anyway.
Dedicate time in February/March of senior year to apply to local scholarships. My kids got several and although they were only one year awards, they helped.
Excellent post, I strongly agree with your points! (Well, #4 sounds like a weakness of HS counseling unfortunately!). Interesting thoughts about the LORs. I suppose that just the act of asking for them and keeping track of them is a good skill for our kids.
Having an early rolling admission is a HUGE mental boost if you have any good fits that do rolling!
After reading these, I think my main recommendation is to know your high school. Some of the lessons listed here would not apply to the high school my kids attended.
The one thing that I wish I had done was to sit done with a parent who had older kids when my oldest was in 8th grade, to learn how all of this works for our high school. You want to get the inside scoop from someone who has lived it. We made mistakes with my our oldest that we were able to avoid with the youngest because we knew the system at that point. Of course, we made different mistakes with him. The problem is that you don’t know what you don’t know.
Keeping a list of activities, awards, and volunteer work through high school was a helpful reference in filling out scholarship apps.
When the local newspaper ran their article in spring 2018 of the senior awards night, I made a list of every local scholarship received so I could see that we didn’t miss any when DD was applying to them in 2019.
Dual enrollment credits have been very helpful. For DD’17 who went to cc, it saved her money on gen eds and she could take fewer credits per semester. For DD’19 having 22 credits done will allow her to fit a hefty BS and a minor in 4 years. Both appreciated getting their math credits done at home with me to tutor them!
Kids need to learn the difference between hype and what is actually a good value for a bachelors degree. There’s a lot of misinformed talk about prestige, but 80-85% of high school graduates choose an in-state university over a private or out of state school. Even many in-state universities have hyper-competitive majors, making changes in major difficult or nearly impossible (UT-Austin and Texas A&M are notorious for this). Students need to have some freedom to explore options without having to worry about transferring and lose credits. That’s why there’s been such an explosion of growth in regional state universities.
I can’t agree more about rolling admissions. Parents, find one that you can sell to your kid as a hidden gem. Once they get that acceptable acceptance you will see a lot of the stress melt off of them. Also, a lot of these schools give amazing merit and the kid can be near the top of the class for research and internships.
@me29034 - completely agree. I think this really came to light for us because we moved from out of state the summer before DS20 freshman year. So- new school, new neighborhood, new state. I think that was the true hindsight for me- find a friendly parent in the school who can help you navigate all the less obvious points. CC is good for advice and information, but the ‘inside scoop’ would have also been really helpful.
@TS0104 - the guidance services have been surprisingly absent for the entire high school process, unfortunately. It may be in part due to (what feels like) a lot of GC turnover, so not much relationship building. I see other parents on CC refer to sessions sitting down with GCs to talk about what schools they will/ should apply to which was never offered where we are. This was another example where requests for LORs from the GC needed multiple reminders. So- the combination of our ignorance of what should be going on, with their lack of resource led to a less than ideal situation. I can’t get overly bitter- DS has three great options, a couple of which have good merit aid. Just one of those things that I will definitely share with other parents in the neighborhood as they get started.
Having been on CC for a couple of years, read thousand of threads, and going through the college process with D20, one of the biggest issues is parents not thinking about how they are going to pay for college until their kids are in high school when it’s too late.
Invest early and often in a college savings plan and much of the stress of how to pay for college will be resolved as the stock market gains over 18-21 years will have greatly outpaced the increased cost of college tuition. Thinking your kid will be NMF or get a 35 ACT is not realistic. Chasing big merit, is a reactive not a proactive way to plan and afford college.
So my advice for parents with young kids, have a college saving plan and I guarantee you will have many more college options come senior year.
Three in an done (with applications at least). Lots of good points. I’ll add just two others -
If your child is doing an activity/event/project/leadership opportunity/trip/whatever around sophomore or junior year that is a little out of the ordinary, encourage them to keep a journal or at least write something down immediately afterward that reflects on their experience. Facing the essay topic can lead to total amnesia.
Realize that when you start the journey you never know where you'll end up. One of my sons applied and was accepted to schools as a business major. By the time orientation came at his chosen school he was pretty sure he wanted to switch to a science. Now as a 2nd semester freshman he's enrolled in that science major, really enjoying the classes, doing research and thinking about medical school.
The fact that 80% of the accepted students have stats which are below your kid’s does not mean that your kid has an 80% chance to be accepted! The “admissions chance calculators” provided by college advice websites are meaningless, and most provide unrealistic expectations. Do not use them!
Tell your child to do their best at high school and to challenge themselves, tell them to step outside their comfort zone, tell them to engage in ECs which are meaningful to them. DO NOT tell them “you need to do X, Y, or Z, if you want to get into A Good College”. Your kid should not be stressing out about whether their grades during their freshman year are Good Enough For Harvard, they should not be anxious about whether the classes they are taking are The Right Classes For Top Colleges, they should not be unable to sleep because they are worried whether their ECs aren’t Good Enough For An Ivy.
Don’t let your kids waste their high school years focusing on Building The Right High School Profile For An Elite College. Don’t let your kid spend their high school years believing that acceptance to a prestigious college is The Prize For Doing The Right Things In College. Don’t let your kids spend their high school years looking at acceptance to a prestigious colleges as the only way that they can validate their worth, and the worth of all they accomplished in high school.
I so agree with the LOR point and was just thinking there should be a centralized service where the teacher/counselor/coach could upload a letter and then other organizations could be added to receive them. My D20 has really started to feel like she’s imposing when asking for additional letters for scholarships. I really don’t know how the teachers do it - I suppose it’s good that at least the Common App makes the college part easier.
On the Letter of Recommendation piece, I definitely assumed that when my daughter went back to the same teachers for a recommendation for something beyond the common app recommendation (ie she had already asked for a college rec, but then also needed one for a scholarship or something else), that they could recycle the original one they wrote for common app. So hopefully it’s not an entirely new imposition, but merely a minor administrative request for them to re-send what they had already thoughtfully crafted. That’s what I had assumed and hoped at least. Maybe some scholarships and programs have unusually specific questions that they ask recommenders, such that they have to write an entirely new letter??? But otherwise, it should not be a big deal to add on (whereas of course the original letter requires much thought and effort, and deserves a lot of gratitude!!).
@EmptyNestSoon2 - I think there is an element of truth to what you say, and we had actually assumed that these could be ‘cut and paste’ exercises. However, what we found was that the focus of a ROTC LOR, was slightly different than his Eagle Scout, honors college or engineering scholarships applications. In our case, of the two teachers that best know his strengths as a student, one announced his retirement at the end of DS junior year, and the other seems to work best with hours to spare before a deadline. Neither were impossible hurdles to overcome, just led to my perception of it being a least favorite element of the process. Again- I think is some schools and for some schools this is a really strong part of the application.
@MWolf has wise advice. Watching the US admissions process from my somewhat protected perch in Asia, I was shocked by the extent to which the process seems to have kind of overtaken the rest of high school in the US. I didn’t start reading CC until sometime in S19’s junior year, by which time his course was more or less set, but I could feel how difficult it would be to avoid getting caught up in it all in a US school environment. In our case, we basically followed a strategy that would have been appropriate when I was growing up - do your best, have some fun, try and figure out what you like, what you are good at and where you’d like to spend the next four years. It was pretty stress-free and everything worked out fine. We were lucky. Based on advice I read here, I did push him pretty hard to work on his essays during his junior year summer, and I think that saved him a lot of grief in the fall. Other things I learned about on CC that were of great value included Early Action - it was wonderful to have a few acceptances in hand by December rather than sweat it out until March - and merit scholarships. I just assumed S19 wouldn’t receive any help of any kind, and I still remember being amazed the first time I ran a few NPCs and projected merit money popped up. People talk mostly about how merit money helps from a financial perspective, but in our case, I think the fact his school believed in him and wanted him enough to make the award made a big impression on our son. I also found the advice on ED to be very valuable - we thought about it, evaluated the potential advantages, realized S19 did not have a clear first choice, and didn’t do it. We did put a lot of effort into visiting schools, a first round to help him figure out what kind of school he wanted - turned out he had a clear preference for LACs - and a second round to visit schools where he’d been accepted. He visited his current school for the first time on that second round and immediately knew he’d found a home.
And tell your kids to be super appreciative to the teachers that do write them. A genuine “thank you” is enough but one of my sons applied for a bunch of things and one teacher was so graciously willing to write numerous letters that my son bought him a 12-pack of the teacher’s favorite canned water as a thank you. The teacher was tickled to receive it. I also would thank the teachers myself when I saw them in person.
The one thing that stands out for me is how much the college landscape has changed over the last 6 years when my oldest applied. Merit money has significantly decreased and the hoops to get any has significantly increased.
I agree that the LOR portion of the application is difficult because it can give an advantage to students whose schools do a good job keeping up with this.
It is still just like this for most kids. CC gives a very skewed view of it because it is filled with the top students and their parents who are applying to elite schools. There a lot more kids like my S20, who took one AP class and a few honors classes, whose only EC is a part-time job as a lifeguard, and is only taking four classes his senior year and one is gym. He got into all 4 colleges he applied to and is going to U of Arizona next year with a very nice merit scholarship.