I guess I am asking how has CC been helpful (a good experience) or has been a bad experience for you or your kid?
We found the college specific forums super helpful. We found out notification dates for EA here first for some of her schools and it was helpful to read about major specific questions, honors college programs, etc… It also helped her psychologically to read the awesome credentials of other students who were waitlisted and rejected so that she didn’t internalize the decision and take it personally.
I found the parent forum late and for me it’s helping to channel some of the excess energy I have now that our process is done and hopefully helping someone else.
I hate that “what are my chances” forum though. I answer for some if I’m familiar with the schools but it’s such a darn long shot at the top schools that we are all just guessing. I wish there would be more recent pinned posts about checking the common data set, running NPCs, and more guidelines for what constitutes a well balanced list in terms of acceptance percentages. Plus a pinned post about the applying to a rolling admit school early to have an early acceptance in hand. We had a situation in my daughter’s school where a student didn’t listen to advice given, and didn’t apply anywhere that had a higher than 30% admit rate. Needless to say the student did not get the outcome he intended. Kids can be very myopic and forget that they can’t stack themselves up only based on their own school/bubble and extrapolate that to the college search.
I’ve been lurking for a year and the most helpful thing was finding out about the common data set. I found that very helpful. It also helped in shaping my and my kid’s thinking about the application so that she approached it as telling a story about herself. On the negative side, reading other people’s anxieties did ramp up my own anxiety more than necessary.
Several years ago, I posted about an issue one of my children had and a person reading here who lives close to the college contacted me and helped me immeasurably. Two thumbs’ up for her and CC!
Agreed with post #2 that it can be anxiety producing reading everyone else’s angst.
I’ve been reading it for years. It can be very helpful. There are a lot of folks who post regularly who really know what they’re talking about.
By you need to sift. There are parents and others who post who are here to push an agenda and who see their favorite schools through rose colored glasses and can be unreasonably critical of other choices. Only you can decide what to accept as good advice and what to ignore.
I caution you: if you want to talk yourself into something, there is a crowd waiting and willing to help you. Nothing you read here will substitute for thinking things through for yourself.
Wow, I have lost track of the number of times CC has helped me, beyond the wealth of information I’ve received.
- People supporting me after my son fell ill with a severe mental illness - cards, gift certificates to restaurants, gifts, and prayers.
- Making friends with YouDon'tSay, who we discovered lives a couple of blocks from my sister - my dad had taken her sons to UT football games in the past! YDS was a big help to my family in Austin after my nephew passed away in 2015.
- Stayed with a CCer outside of NYC when we attended a relative's wedding right downtown. The wedding was at 2 pm the day the Pope was in town, and the logistics were driving me nuts! So the offer to stay at her house was really appreciated.
- Through another contact on CC, I was given the opportunity to speak for an annual NAMI Texas (National Alliance on Mental Illness) conference.
- There were over 10,000 views of a blog post by my ill son that the site administrators kindly let me share.
- Learning about ABLE accounts, special accounts my son can deposit money into without being penalized for Social Security eligibility.
- Learning about the new chicken pox vaccine.
- Getting great advice about every vacation destination I've been to the past several years.
I know there’s more, but those are some of the highlights. What an amazing community! I thank all of you for your participation in it. 
For my kid, he used CC to sift through to find interesting scholarship programs which aligned with his interest. He would not have found them if it were not for CC. For me, I found out about Honors Colleges which offered great merit money for being a NMF. We applied to two but decided not to attend. What I don’t like is when people attack you for not agreeing with their position on such matters as AA. I also helped one or two supposedly international applicants by reading their essays and giving some advices with no thanks. Won’t be doing that anymore.
Thanks to College Confidential, my kid has a National Merit full ride to his first choice school. Hello debt-free college education! This is excellent for my son, but it’s also saved our retirement.
Granted, my kid put in a lot of hard work to make sure he he hit the score level he needed. Even so, if I hadn’t learned how National Merit works by reading about it here on CC, he never would have taken the PSAT at all because it’s optional in our school district and only 5-10% of the kids take it.
In addition, we found out about the Elks MVS here, which brought us another $1,000 that S will use for summer program his major requires.
Yes, it is a great resource. Have only used it as a parent. Honestly don’t want my kiddos lurking here and getting stressed about school. It was very helpful for prep school admissions. I do wish that people wouldn’t be so snarky. Can’t say how many posts I have read by people who have been on CC for YEARS who state, go and look up ( five year old thread) or I said this already ( and point you to some post they repost every year. Would be great if people were kinder to one another and esp to kids who got rejected.
In too many ways to list. When my kids wanted to know something they would say, “Go ask on cc!” And I’ve made some wonderful friends on these boards, even vacationing with some of them.
Of course, you need to take some of what you read with a grain of salt. Listen to the people who have been her awhile rather than newbies who speak in absolutes. And avoid all chances thread!!!
ETA: We had never heard of ds1’s eventual school before joining cc. But everything about it sounded perfect. And it was.
Also, there is a learning curve. I once wrote a post about the five stages of cc – denial, etc. I think it works best for parents to start reading cc in sophomore year, when there still is time to make adjustments in the college admissions plan. Also, it’s a great place to obsess rather than in front of your kid.
Through this forum, I’ve been able to
- find out notification dates for my decisions ahead of time
- seek advice from other posters
- help other students with the college admissions process
All in all, CC has been hugely positive for us, but not before it added a large amount of anxiety. D1 found CC and started looking through the results threads of schools where she intended to apply. The threads had her convinced that she was going to be rejected from every school and have no where to go. The anxiety this induced was enormous and a bit unecessary considering the range where she was applying. It did, however, prompt us to add a true safety to her list. In the end, she was admitted to nearly every school including her “dream” school. She decided to attend the safety instead. Not only did it offer a very large financial package, but, after visiting several times, she really ended up likeing it much better. Two years in, and she is having a wonderful experience. We would never have had that without this site.
For D2, the site has been great at helping us identify schools that would fit my daughter. Many of them would not have been on the list if not for this place.
I have to say, it also is a great contributor to peace and harmony in our home. For a variety of reasons, I find myself being a bit over obsessed with the college process. I can vent those feelings here rather then burdening my daughter with them. I’m not in any way suggesting that my daughter is uninvolved, she just doesn’t feel like talking about college all the time. CC is a great safety valve for that!
We had never even heard of the college DD attended. I posted a query here about colleges in CA, and got tons of excellent suggestions…and made a few IRL friends in the process.
DD was able to pay it forward by offering personal tours toma few CC families touring her school.
She also was taken to dinner by a former frequent poster…and that was really a nice treat!
We joined here after DS was accepted to colleges…or at least had his list all made. But I frequented the music majors forum for a long while…great camaraderie over there for our performers.
A CC parent IRL also helped us find housing for both of our kids for grad school.
We found this site a little late in the game. There is very little information on the schools my son was interested in. We did get some help on one of the schools here. There is also very little information for pre-veterinary students. We did get great information on what to pack for college, moving far from home, dealing with my daughter’s mental illness, and some great travel information.
I don’t like how so many people put down schools outside the top 20, 50 or 100. Many of those have top programs for certain degrees. So many of those schools are wonderful and shouldn’t be overlooked because of a statistic. Land Grant colleges may not be the flagship but can be a superb fit for pre-med and pre-vet students. They can also have great merit.
I now hang out here to watch for people looking for schools like these and answer questions from what we have learned.
CC has been helping us since before my children were in 8th grade, when my son announced his desire to go to boarding school. I was both ignorant about the prospect and deeply intimidated by it. The wonderful people in the Prep School Parents forum helped me immeasurably and have remained my home base on CC. I still miss a few people who have left the forums and am grateful for the stalwarts who remain to provide guidance even after their own children have gradated from high school (or from college, in the college forums). I also learned from CC pretty much everything I needed to know to help my children in the college application process. It takes work. I try to get hard info and form my own opinions, but I also heed the opinions of people I trust, and it takes time to learn who those people are. By now, I am a hopeless CC addict, but I hope that in the next few years I will be able to help a few people as I have been helped, before my experience becomes too dated to be useful!
My dear penpal that I met through her daughter, when the gal was a hs senior. We’ve been through her college decisions, tales of weird teachers, travels, ups and some pretty tough downs, at times holding each other together. Engagements, marriages, babies. Kid’s jobs and our own.
We’re two different women. A gift.
Never met, though we could have.
Let’s see, with first kid, CC really helped me to understand the landscape of admissions, release some anxiety, and get some great advice about letting go. With my second, the advice about timing and structure of athletic recruiting was pure gold, both in terms of the specific sport and D3 generally, so that my kid was ready to push the ED button, knowing that he was as well informed and ready as he could be. Nowadays, it is more of an outlet for me to contribute (or, as my kids would say, butt into) to conversations about other people’s process, allowing me to feel a little more useful in my empty nest.
I’m with @gallentjill on this subject. The biggest positive was that I had an outlet for venting my angst. I was able to research and obsess about the search without creating too much domestic anxiety. I caught some grief for always reading CC, but I am sure the family preferred that to me venting at home.
Objectively, I found out about merit aid at DS '14’s school. We stopped there while visiting some elites and he really liked it. DD '17 also got some merit targets that I probably wouldn’t have known about without CC.
For DS’20, it is a different kind of search than we did for the first two. I look forward to the class of 2020 3.0 to 3.4 thread (keep your fingers crossed) when it opens.
As a parent of a HS senior this year I was able to negotiate and increase a scholarship offer from one of the Colleges on our short list… it would have never crossed my mind but read about others success doing so on CC!