Exactly one of my concerns. One of his sibs LOVED it there, but they are two very different people. And my son claims he will not live it anywhere. College is just a hoop one has to jump through. He is weird.
If college is just a hoop, how does he justify seeking-status?
@ucbalumnus He freely admits that he is being status conscious. I THINK his argument is that he is hedging against not liking engineering after all, and that if he ends up as a 18th Century Poetry major, he at least will have a pedigree degree. OR it could just be that he wants to be one of those kids next year who gets talked about as ‘did you hear CypressKid got into OverHypedUniversity!’ I’m not sure. But he claims the former.
@CountingDown - part of his Mr. Spock tendencies was to include only schools on his list where his scores (GPA/SAT) are at least the 75%ile for the engineering admits. His Mr. Spock-like tendencies were evident during high school, also. And, so, we are also losing the opposite argument with him - why don’t you throw a couple reach schools in there. Nope! Why would he apply to a school with a single digit acceptance rate, you silly parents! The only logical way to do that is to apply to 10 of them, or none of them. Sigh.
@momocarly Well, that is what he hope will happen to him. That once he is in a career path he feels is a road to somewhere, he’ll chill a little bit and find some things to have fun with.
He understands the very real chance that he won’t get into any of his top four; he also understands that there is an outside chance flagship won’t want him either (but that would make him the single outlier in our high school for the past four years). He claims that, in that case, he will take a gap year and regroup. He is dead set against going to a school which doesn’t meet his exact requirements for the career his 17-year-old mind is convinced is what he wants. That being said, we are going to pull our one and only Parent Card (since we are writing the checks around here) and insist he apply to a state school (which has his major) which has rolling admissions, to at least hedge against his really regretting being the only kid in his AP classes having no college option. He doesn’t realize how much that will be NOT FUN for his senior year.
@PurpleTitan - I THINK it is because he is hedging against not liking engineering (that is what he says). But it could be more about ego. He is surrounded by recruited athletes going to schools quite a bit above their fighting weights and dual legacy kids who also are fighting a bit above their weights where they are going. He simply wants what THEY got, since he really has worked his tail off and sacrificed a lot in high school to do well. And, isn’t that the message we tell our kids their whole lives? Word hard and good things will come to you! His older sibs went/go to pedigree schools and he hearing about the completely ridiculous things his sibs have access to (brother had brunch with a princess on Saturday) simply because of where they went to school. And he knows how remarkably UNremarkable his siblings are. And I know this is not a popular message around here, but his sibs are pushing him to aim high - that with his grades/scores he can go somewhere great. I could disown his older siblings and/or get them to STOP TELLING HIM THAT, but, the former seems a bit drastic and the latter has not worked at all.
The best thing that happened in this household…our kids never saw or read anything about rankings before they went to college. They did their college choices based on what looked right for them. As it happens, both attended great colleges.
Some people get too wrapped up in rankings…and not enough wrapped up with other reasons to choose colleges.
I would urge this student to look at the characteristics of his status schools…and find some other colleges that meet those characteristics. With 3000 or so colleges in this country, there have to be some that have similar characteristics to the status schools.
I don’t think a parent is out of line telling older siblings “In this family, we each run our own race”. You don’t need to disown them, but if you observe a somewhat negative dynamic building in your son’s college search due to the influence of the older siblings, I think you’re within your right to ask them to butt out.
If you’ve used the Spock metaphor in front of your son, I’d like to encourage you to shift the narrative a bit. There are families (and communities) where your son would be the NORM, not the outlier. So any sort of label (even if you mean it in the “it’s so cute, you’re so smart and analytical”, vs. “You’re so robotic and out of step”) can be pretty unhelpful.
Your son sounds plenty “normal” to me; I know dozens of kids like him both from my own experiences as well as kids in my children’s classes K-grad school. Getting a hedge on NOT liking engineering is a very healthy and productive consideration right now- a lot of kids either love the tinkering piece but the heavy duty quant piece is less interesting once sophomore year hits, or they love the quant piece but not so much the tinkering. One of my own kids shifted out of engineering and into a different quant field- still plenty of math (the true love) but not the rest of it.
Maybe your son just needs some breathing room- especially if finances aren’t controlling the decision??? He sounds like a very special kid and I’m sure he’ll do well wherever he goes.
FWIW, I completely love your son. And I look forward to hearing of his admissions adventures over the next year.
Interesting… most prestige/status seekers seem to think that only reach colleges have enough prestige/status/exclusivity for them.
What colleges would he apply to after such a gap year? Assuming that they are less selective than his current list, why not include them this year, so that if he gets shut out of his top four and the state flagship, he is likely to be able to go to one of those without a gap year?
Of course, the other alternative in case of a shut out is starting a community college.
@blossom. We don’t refer to our son as Mr. Spock in front of him. I am a bit tongue-in-cheek here on CC. (and we wouldn’t really disown our older children, either). We are the opposite of helicopter parents (perhaps because he is our youngest) and he has a ton of breathing room. We are just trying to avoid an 18 year old, one year from now, really regretting the decisions his 17-year-old self made. But perhaps that is just a lesson he needs to learn. He is a three sport athlete and has only six weeks a year during which he can visit colleges - he won’t have the luxury of visiting any this fall (without missing one or more games, which he is very loathe to do). And we don’t have a private plane to jet off to wherever he needs to visit during those six weeks, so we do need to do a bit of pre-planning/airline ticket buying soon.
@southernhope. Thanks, we love him too. And, like all parents, when you’re kid could possibly make a whopper of a mistake, you try to pull him out of the way. Any mistake he would make would not be fatal. And he would learn from it. But since I’ve either had a kid in college or have a high schooler researching colleges for 10 years now, I selfishly want to be done with this part of parenting! I’d rather be planning a nice beach vacation.
My S19 is somewhat similar, he also used to say that he only cares about academics. After a number of visits it slowly surfaced that he prefers a small or medium school in a warmer climate, nice mid-size town, and other qualities. He still applied to a wide range of places but mostly reaches and our state flagship as we all felt exactly the same thing - none of the possible matches were worth paying significantly more than our state flagship. He ended up in exactly the kind of environment he wanted.
I think your son should realize that the quirks of the admissions office like 1 and 8 will have practically no relevance to his experience in college. For 6, he has my respect. Don’t worry, he’ll have fun in college despite himself 
I would tell him to add a safety or two to his list just in case he changes his mind at the last minute. Tell him that he doesn’t have to attend that school, but you just don’t want him without options this time next year. Other than that, I would leave him alone and let him figure out what he wants. If he wants only prestige, understands the risks involved, and has a backup plan, then let him deal with it.
(Also, after his first year or two in the workforce, no one is going to care where he went to college. At that point, they only care about professional productivity.)
^ Prestige and alumni network may matter for a long while after graduation depending on industry, but remind him that 18-22 year-old him who is actually on campus may actually care a ton about fit, fun, daily life which 17 year-old him thinks wouldn’t.
In my state, it matters more that you went to the flagship than a top engineering school. And, I have a friend who transferred from a Top 10 engineering school to the flagship just for the alumni connections. People on CC are concerned about “prestige” but most of the rest of the country really doesn’t.
In some states, the common notion of “prestige” tends to elevate the flagship relative to where it would be ranked by those outside the state.
However, there are some states where the opposite may be the case (e.g. New Jersey).
Prestige-chasing is a very self-destructive way of applying for colleges. What almost always happens is either a list of rejections, or worse, an acceptance to a college you can’t afford. What you need to do as a parent is put your foot down and use your veto authority. Tell him that there needs to be a reasonable list of colleges that you can afford with some reaches, matches, and safeties, otherwise he’s going to spend his first 2 years at community college. Cost is a precondition. This will teach him to make decisions based on cost-benefit, which what he should be doing when searching for a college.
@coolguy40, cost is not a consideration. We/he are very fortunate. I am not really concerned about his destruction, either. I am certain we can insist he apply to a true safety, despite his insistence he will not attend. I am more concerned that college does not appear to be something he is looking forward to, fearing 4 years locked in the library or the lab. I suspect most parents have the opposite fear - that their students will enjoy college a bit TOO much. But we want him to chill a bit and open his mind and heart more.
Your son is typical. Many of these kids are all over the place about college. Even in your description, you show this in that he is into name recognition, yet claims what his peers are saying does not affect him. Name recognition is a big topic among kids applying to colleges.
I was one of these kids once too. School was a turn off simply because i disliked someone going to it. Another off my list because my father was pushing it.
He’ll likely change his stances in time. Not necessarily for the better either
As parents, we want our kids to get what they want, are happy, do the right thing, make the best choices by certain universal standards. We try to protect them from mistakes they don’t see.
We don’t always succeed. In the college app process, we try to cover all the corners, so in the final reckoning, the choices are there.
So hang in there. Some of our kids are more difficult than others. Do make it clear if there are some important constraints, such as financial ones so they don’t come up as surprises.
My son had one key criterion for his college choice: that the college be “a place where it’s safe to be a thinker.” It had to have an intellectual life not just in classes but outside, among other students. The overnight that he participated in on “admitted students day” was a critical test in that regard. The next morning we quizzed him, “How did you like it?” “This will do,” he said. And so the search was done. We put down a deposit the next day.