“LACs are not worth fighting with parents / in-laws. LACs may be fine, but they are not worth having issues within the family.”
Which is it …
A) You have learned and now believe LACs are great options to consider but you don’t want to fight a battle with parents so you’ll cut them out, regretfully
Or
B) You don’t really believe us when we say that LACs are good options. You think they are still second tier and you never heard of any of them so they can’t be good
It would be nice if you were honest about the reason for not considering LACs.
^ yes but it’s still puzzling that colleges that were essentially exclusive prep school reserves until the 70’s are seen as not prestigious enough, or that student- centered schools (let alone empowerment schools) would be seen as ‘finishing schools’.
I get not knowing about Williams or Wellesley, but inventing weird things about them… It’d be like saying ‘there’s nothing good out west, that Stanford school can’t be any good’ or 'technology is for idiot savant, I forbid you from applying to MIT ’ .
Because when we’re talking Williams, Pomona, Harvey mudd, or Wellesley, we’re really talking about that level of weird distortion (Ivy+ colleges brought below UC’s, below the level of ‘good’…)
Since californiaaa cares about rankings and prestige it’s just weird s/he’d skip obvious prestige colleges. However, since odds aren’t better for his/her daughter I’ll leave it at that.
I DO hope her/his daughter or him/herself will fill out all these request info forms for each private school considered. Although californiaaaaa doesn’t believe interest matters, adcoms believe in it and *they * will make the admission decision.
^ Eh, why bother?
UMich/UVa/UNC/W&M/UW-Madison (definitely the first 2, anyway) are just as prestigious as McGill/Toronto/St. A’s/TCD in my mind and all are publics, yet the last group will be applied to while the first group won’t be because they didn’t make someone’s ranking cutoff.
Does that make logical sense? Who cares. Many people’s perceptions of prestige don’t make sense to me.
@circuitrider maybe all this shows why at least some visiting is a good thing, better than picking by some ranking and dismissing a whole category of colleges. Even if exploring closer to home, just to get the feel of some options.
We did like Wes, very much, but our visit was maybe 8 years ago, when D1 was looking. In fact, Wes was the tour where she learned what mattered to her in a college, not just to us.
I am wondering why this thread is now so long. OP is bound and determined to have her kid go to only a UC, or a USNWR top 25 college. All she originally asked is how long an app takes. She has no clue about how difficult it is to get into those schools, isn’t interested in why, and thinks LACs are second rate. OP’s kid will get into a UC for sure, and might get into a top USNWR college. We are all spinning our wheels. Good luck to your child OP, and please reconsider making her apply to 30 or more colleges.
Maybe because just as we wrap up a spot of advice, (no, takes longer than an hour,) OP throws in a new wrench. Can’t she reuse essays, I don’t care about fit, my grad school experience was x, the UK geography snafu, what’s wrong with Berkeley, I don’t want to do visits, my elders don’t approve of LACs, and more.
Sheherazade. Thousand and One Nights. The thread goes on.
If this is true, it is probably also true that the OP’s father was not born in the US either. Yet he gets to badmouth LACs, which its is apparent he knows little about, and dictate what schools the granddaughter considers? SMH
We can still carry on even with these constraints. Many people have constraints, (logical or illogical) no PE/swim requirements, within 300 miles from home, at least 200 miles from home, etc, and still are able to find schools.
So the school cannot have “College” in the name. Maybe Wesleyan University can sneak in. Oh, wait rare but extant gun-point mugging at Yale was preferrable to poor neighborhood.
Are the elders watching USNWR National LAC rankings? In that case Wesleyan and Bucknell as well as Colgate are off.