Naviance is either something your school subscribes to or they don’t. Our school uses it to track applications, letters of recommendation, and extracurriculars/resumes. The guidance department would have given your son a user name and password that he can use to log in. He would be able to use the “compare me” feature to see how many students from his school have applied to a specific school and whether or not they got in plus see how his gpa and SAT/ACT score compare with those who have gotten in over a set period of time (ours is 10 years). We found it helpful but if it isn’t used by your school, it won’t be of any value to you since it relies on data from students at the same high school.
Thought of as a group, the prospective itinerary for visiting these colleges might overwhelm you. With research, however, you could begin with the one that seems most suitable. To me this would be preferable to an all-or-nothing approach.
That’s helpful, @TS0104. We would have been remiss as posters not to alert the OP to a controversy that could impact (whether to strengthen or weaken) the environment at Oberlin over the next few years.
Don’t worry about Vassar and interviews. Vassar does alumni interviews. (My spouse is an alumnus who is asked to do interviews of three or four local students each year.)
Next stop, IMHO, are the small PA LACs that offer merit aid, Dickinson, Muhlenburg and Gettysburg, etc.
Add Susquehanna, Ursinus, Allegheny for some great safety schools.
Visiting schools during the school year is tough. My D gets 3 days of excused absences for college visits. The challenge is figuring out if we should use those now for fall visits or save them for accepted students days. Most schools only offer tours on Saturday mornings, not Sat afternoons, and none on Sunday, so it’s virtually impossible to visit more than one school in one weekend unless you want to just walk around on your own. I find this so frustrating! But yet they have tours twice a day on weekdays when seniors are actually in school. Sometimes it’s also hard to find a flight after school on a Friday so you end up having to miss school on Friday just to visit one school on Saturday. We did a LOT of tours over the summer which most people advise against but we actually enjoyed them because we got so much one on one attention. Assuming your child is a senior now, it’s too late for that, so no use worrying about it.
We found visiting a couple schools in an area made sense. Even if they didn’t all meet all of her criteria, it made us feel better about taking a plane ride if we could see at least 2 schools. And we ended up with some surprises with schools we didn’t expect her to like which she did, as well as schools I expected her to love which she didn’t. (I.e. College of Wooster was a total add on and she loved it, Denison was our primary reason for going to OH and she didn’t like it at all). I feel like it’s very tough to envision yourself there until you see it but I know many people on here total disagree with that. I guess my D is just not as adaptable as many other kids on CC. She also has very generic possible majors so it’s hard to narrow things down by the strength of her major. She feels like she has to see it to believe it .
Are Lafayette and Franklin & Marshall also ones that offer merit aid? Or are they just need-based aid?
@nextstepcollege Do college visits on your Feb trip. The state of Florida offers the Benacquisto Scholarship. Full rides (tuition + room & board) are available to out of state students in many of the schools, including the flagship UF, along with UCF, USF, and Florida State, which has a great music program. If you prefer the smaller LACs, the choices include two public 100% honors colleges, New College of Florida in Sarasota and FAU/Wilkes HC in Jupiter.
^^Lafayette - YES. Franklin and Marshall - NO.