You don’t have to convince me. It’s just in her head now so if and when the time comes I would have to convince her.
I thought you were full pay. Why do you think Princeton would offer you $20k?
In the very first post, OP said they are not full pay. EFC has been calculated anywhere between $30K to $40K on NPC calculators.
Still not understanding. If that’s the EFC then that’s what he would likely pay at a place like Princeton so why say “if Princeton gives us $20k”?
No, @kevinfromOC, you don’t need to convince her of anything. She needs to do this herself. Once admissions come in and if there is more than one affordable school, SHE NEEDS to do the work to separate the wheat from the chaff and find out which schools’ reputations are deserved and which are not. There is a fun thread about the silliest reason a student rejected a school (I am paraphrasing) with an amusing list of what we parents would think is ridiculous. But its their choice (within the budget).
Many if not most students have at least one “drive by” school: one that they are scheduled to visit and when they get there they don’t want to get out of the car, and instantly take a dislike to it for typically no good reason. Fo my older s it was Dartmouth, for younger S it was our very affordable State Flagship. Absolutely hated it from the minute we got there.
And while there are in fact some free colleges , some with some catches - Berea, College of the Ozarks, Alice Lloyd, Deep Springs (for guys) and the service academies (why didn’t she consider one of those?) I of course meant automatic full tuition, not free ride (note to self- don’t type and watch The Voice simultaneously) . That said, there ARE schools that should be affordable (your target seems to be $15-20K OOP or with her taking some student loans) with an auto full tuition. And, she can get a job.
As for whether its a good/bad thing that adcomms reading cc might recognize her application- well, the sense that she doesn’t care all that much about any particular school (doesn’t sound like she’s interested in any particular research, hasn’t looked at what specific things are being developed at or worked on in any research labs at schools, what things going on at schools she wants to participate in and to which she brings something special, aside from her sports), IMO, that’s not going to exactly put any feathers in her cap for the big scholarships you are trying to target. They are more likely to offer it to someone who clearly knows about aspects of , and would be a huge asset to their community. Tepid interest (or interest in “gimme the money” ) doesn’t typically bode well. That is not going to impress the folks doling out the BIG scholarships.
He’s not saying that. He’s saying if Princeton comes in at $20K. There are a lot of moving parts in OP’s financial situation, including the older blind sister’s potential college enrollment. He does not know how the financial aid packages are going to turn out for a number of reasons.
That is not the question and not the issue. SHE has to demonstrate, in the “why XXX” school essay why they should want her. Right now you present it as mostly that she is a strong URM hockey player student and she just wants their money.
If prestige isn’t a factor for the OP, she should have applied in early Nov. (when the apps were free) to UA Huntsville. Strong engineering, wonderful opportunities in the research park, auto full tuition scholarship and very affordable COA with tuition paid… Bingo. Done. Or at least another option along with the other admissions already snared.
Kevin, I see this latest development as EXTREMELY good news.
You thought your D had no particular criteria in mind as long as the college had classrooms and dorms and was affordable. Which in my mind is a little troubling.
But you’ve just learned that she does not want a party school. Big step forward IMHO. Whether or not the school in question is a party school isn’t terribly important right now- but your D is developing a decision framework for herself, which IS important. Given the number of schools she’s applying to, I think it’s frightful to contemplate having to sort through the list in March- with limited time, and potentially some back and forth on the financial package.
If the only viable (affordable) option come April is a party school, then she’s got a choice- live at home and commute, attend the “party school”, or take a gap year, get a job, and apply to a completely different set of colleges. I can’t imagine that happening-- so she gets to make a choice among a handful or two or three or four handful of schools and again- now knows at least one way to cut the pile into a manageable number to compare.
Even the most gifted spreadsheet maker is going to have trouble comparing pros and cons of 20 colleges. So demonstrating that some options- at least right now- are less interesting to her than others is a big and positive step.
None of my kids were shmoozers (still aren’t) so I totally get that and respect your D’s position. IMHO it’s worth one more email from you to her staying “the following universities have some leeway/judgement calls in how much merit aid they award. Just in case it makes a difference between affordable and not affordable to show them some interest right now here’s the list of schools. Your college counselor can help you draft a quick email which demonstrates that they are high on your list, without you having to engage in a protracted back and forth”.
And then drop it.
We visited Princeton with one of my kids. Signed up for the tour. Signed up for an “informational interview” on campus. Signed up for a Q&A that some professors were doing to talk about their research and their work. It was all fantastic. As we were leaving, I asked our regional Adcom who had come over to welcome the group of families who were still there “How important are days like this to you guys when you make a decision?” and her response was “It’s not important to us, it’s important to YOU” with a nice smile.
Message received. Princeton doesn’t care if you show them the love or not. Won’t change the admissions outcome, won’t change their aid outcome since it’s all need based. You want to hang out on a hot day in July in NJ when the humidity is 98%? Have at it. But that’s for the families, NOT for the adcoms.
However- once you move down your list, there are some schools which are going to take a whole bunch of factors into account when doling out the money, and getting their yield right (i.e. kids who they accept actually show up) AND getting the finances right (targeting the most money to the kids they really really want to come and have signaled a high likelihood that they will show up if admitted) is quite important to them. So I think it’s worth one more email to your D and then you drop it. Her counselor may be more persuasive on this count BTW.
You can’t keep up with all 1123 posts? But seriously, to recap something that I mentioned many many posts ago, if our other daughter also attends college, then the Princeton cost for D1 drops to around $20K
And it was just an example - plug in any top 50 school in place of Princeton.
@KevinFromOC I have to say, I admire how you keep your sense of humor through all of this. I am following your journey with your daughter with interest. She sounds like a special girl and I know she will bloom whereever she is planted.
@KevinFromOC I totally agree with @blossom. Her having a negative reaction to a potential party school is huge. My s20 insisted early on that he didn’t care where he went and through the early visits I was concerned that he wasn’t paying any attention. Every school was ‘fine.’ I was picturing him calling us from college one month in telling us he absolutely hated his school and was taking the next bus home.
Then we hit a school that he immediately hated, and that opened up the can of worms. I think he needed to see us go ‘okie dokie, cross that one off the list’ without a fuss. It freed him up, I think, to find and express things he didn’t like.
Then my Mr… Opinionated found something dreadfully wrong with pretty much every school (except for 3, so, there’s THAT) since then. Hopefully you can avoid this with your D20. On balance, this is positive development.
@jym626 When your kids were looking at schools, suppose one of them had a misconception about one particular school. Would you discuss this with them, and maybe point them to an article that might clear up their misconception? That’s all I’m talking about here.
Or, I don’t know, maybe you would not say a thing to them about it, and insist that they discover the misconception on their own. That’s not me. I’m going to talk to my daughter about the pros and cons of each school, how she feels about them, and if she brings up any points that I believe are incorrect, you can bet we’re going to discuss those.
You may want to investigate these:
https://www.tuskegee.edu/programs-courses/scholarships/freshman-scholarships
https://www.pvamu.edu/faid/types-of-aid/scholarships/university-scholarships/
@KevinfromOC- My s’s read and loved the book” The Yale Daily News’ Insiders Guide to Colleges”. It gives a fabulous description of what it is like to go to those schools from the students’ perspective. So from the get-go they got a generally realistic perspective of the school. They’d didn’t read or put much stock in stuff like Student Review. I highly recommend it (another free tip). It gave DS#2 an idea of what he wanted (or so he thought). He ended up making a different decision, but it got him , HIM doing the research to find schools that seemed to have what he thought he wanted (kids do have that nasty habit of changing their minds).
If either had a warped idea/misconception of a school, I made THEM do further research to support/refute their idea (and no, Reddit was not a reliable source, and neither were on cc). I didnt do that for them.
My D applied for one of the big awards at a top ranked school. She had very high stats, was the HS Val, and had several strong ECs both in school and in the local community, leadership positions, great essays, letters of rec, etc.
Not only did she NOT win any big merit awards to this top school, but she was waitlisted. She did eventually come off the WL but chose a different school.
So…where did the merit come from? Schools that were great…but lower down that food chain…Pitt, Ohio State UMD-CP (good but not huge merit), Lehigh gave her huge merit (she showed a TON of interest to Lehigh). She was accepted to schools such as Emory, UVA, Cornell etc…but no merit (to those that have it).
So…
Who do I know who DID receive huge merit to a top school such as Duke etc? My co-workers daughter. Her stats were very good, but not outrageous. She held multiple leadership positions within the local chapters of several national organizations. She was also very, very active in the arts, was invited to perform in parades in a few cities throughout the country, and was interviewed for a magazine about the work she was involved with (she worked with a well known therapist). She turned down full merit to Top School to attend an even higher ranked top school.
Your daughter has strong academics and is a top hockey player. What else will she contribute to the school community? What are her other interests? Opinions? What gets her going, exactly? I agree …expressing her dislike for party schools is a step in the right direction.
I see her getting guaranteed, automatic merit based on stats to schools that give it, provided she hits the “submit” button. As for the competitive awards… she really needs to show why she would be an asset to the community. She needs to do her research, show her spark and curiosity etc.
I’ll put a different spin on @twogirls assessment. To me what a lot of schools are looking for is someone who is very unusual and will help their recruiting profile in the future. The kid who ends up with leadership positions in national organizations or interviews in magazines not the classic high stats valedictorian with great but typical ECs that they see really frequently.
In our case S18 was the typical high stats (top 1%) kid, senior class president, lots of community service etc. D18 had similar stats but very little of the rest. Where she did stand out was applying for an audition-based BFA with those stats. That was sufficiently unusual that she was offered significantly more of the non-auto academic merit scholarships across the board, even at moderately highly ranked schools like UT Austin and UCSB.
So I’ll predict that OP’s D will get the best merit at places that value what makes her very unusual. That’s most likely at places that are relatively lacking in diversity and really want a high stats URM that will help them attract more diverse students in the future. Geographically that points towards the Mountain West and Midwest. In terms of schools it’s going to be places that don’t have formal existing large merit programs to attract NHRP scholars (though she would obviously still get auto merit there) and don’t offer significant amounts of need-based aid that they can target to attract lower income OOS URMs.
I agree that being a standout is important…not just for merit purposes, but also for acceptance to highly selective schools.
My nephew was top 1% (rank and scores) and had a very impressive resume coming out of HS…yet at the same time his resume was quite typical for HS students. He received an email from Yale asking him to come for an interview. The funny thing was…he never applied to Yale! After making sure this was legit (it was), he went on the interview. They rejected him. That’s ok…he had lots of other acceptances (received huge merit to the U of Miami but turned it down).
I think that this student will be accepted to many schools. The issue will be affordability. The way to maximize affordability (merit) for schools where it is not automatic…is to show interest when appropriate, take the time to write great essays, and make every attempt to present yourself in the best possible light. The stats are there…congrats! As noted above…schools that value the additional things she has to offer will likely be the ones offering big merit. This takes time…and a lot of work.
Any updates? Have been wondering how your daughter is doing and if she has finished up her applications. Hope you are doing well!
Yes. As far as application submissions, I think we finally see the light at the end of the tunnel. In the last month she’s submitted applications to Vanderbilt, the UCs (UCLA, UCSD, and UCI), Clarkson, USC, and Rice. So that would make 20 school applications submitted to date. She has this habit of waiting until the last possible day to submit the application in case she wants to tweak her essay!
That leaves 3 or 4 more to go- JHU, Princeton, RPI, and maybe one more. It’s difficult (much more so for me than for her) to let elite schools go that I know she stands a great chance of being admitted to and would flourish at, but are simply unaffordable - schools like Cornell and MIT. She keeps getting a ton of e-mails from Cornell encouraging her to apply, but their NPC calculator gives us a price that’s not even close to within the realm of possibility.
But she’s not out of the woods yet - there’s still several scholarship applications and a couple honors school applications due with various schools in the next couple months, not to mention a few outside scholarship applications as well!
It’s a lot of work! And made especially complicated by the fact that she’s 2000 miles away - coordinating things and getting feedback from her about colleges that have contacted her with answers or admission information is challenging!
So the schools she’s applied to are :
- Alabama - accepted
- Arizona State - accepted , accepted to Barrett Honors College
- Pittsburgh - accepted
- South Carolina - accepted
- Miami Ohio - accepted
- Northeastern
- Stevens Institute of Technology
- Rose Hulman - accepted
- Colorado School of Mines - accepted , invited to apply for Harvey Scholarship
- Utah
- Michigan State - accepted
- Worcester Polytechnic Institute
- RIT
- Vanderbilt
- UC Irvine
- UCLA
- UCSD
- Clarkson
- USC
- Rice