My HS junior D totally not motivated about college application - What should I do?

OP, you’ve received some good advice here. I’d say that you probably don’t need to worry as long as this kind of attitude is fairly typical of your D. If normally she is the planning-ahead type, the kind to go and do research on things she’s interested in, or the type who normally has strong opinions about anything she’s considering doing – then her attitude towards college is a big change from that. I would call that a red flag that you need to pay attention to.

What I mean by that is that a lot of very high-achieving kids suffer burnout during their last couple years of high school – like it’s all just too much. For years they’ve been pushing themselves, and now that the end is in sight, they’re beginning to realize that it isn’t an “end” – it’s just signing up for 4 more years of the same. Some of them just start to balk. They may not even realize that that’s the emotion that’s driving them – they just avoid thinking about or talking about college choices or college applications. If your D is not just calmly neutral, but actively avoids talking to you about college, that could be what is going on. Fear of the college application process could also enter into it – it’s a huge decision and many kids worry that they’ll choose “wrong.”

However, if you feel that this is pretty typical of your D – if all her life she never really was gung ho for any activity or any school subject, but just pretty much accepted what came her way or whatever you suggested – then this is just normal and you are going to have to do more of the research yourself than some parents do. Don’t worry about people who tell you that if your D isn’t motivated to do the research herself, she should be made to take a gap year and work or whatever (although obviously if that’s what she wants to do, you should encourage her to do it). Some kids are really overwhelmed by the huge task of choosing one college out of the hundreds of good schools in the US – but that doesn’t mean they should just be left to their own devices, to choose a school at random or because their best friend is applying there. You’re her parent; you know her best; you can suggest some schools you can visit that you think she might like. Visiting campuses often wakes an interest in students that that giant Fiske book does not evoke.

Good luck! But do pay attention to her level of interest. It’s true that if she is legitimately apathetic about the whole notion of even going to college, all the best efforts of her parents will not be enough to keep her from dropping out midway through. She has to want to attend – not because she thinks it’s what’s expected of her, or because she doesn’t know what else to do with her life, but because she has a reason to go to college.

"Don’t worry about people who tell you that if your D isn’t motivated to do the research herself, she should be made to take a gap year and work or whatever (although obviously if that’s what she wants to do, you should encourage her to do it). "

Totally agree. My daughter with excellent stats just wasn’t up for the college admissions task alone at 16 ( her age the summer before senior year). She was totally ready for her top 10 college at 18. Some kids aren’t really ready to manage the application process on their own. That by itself is no indication they won’t manage college well on their own.

I agree with maya54. My daughter was very similar, and she has always been someone who takes a long time to make her mind up about choices. She is very visual/spatial, so if she hadn’t seen it, it didn’t really register. So when dropping my son off at college the fall of her junior year, she drove with us, and I made two stops along the way; one at a huge school, and one at a very small school. Just to see her reaction, and how she interacted with the situation of the tour. They weren’t schools I could see her in; I just wanted to show her two extremes, which I told her. It was a big eye opener for her. I next planned a driving college tour February of her junior year, based on what I thought would be probably good fits. Once again, diverse, but any would have the majors she was interested in, and her stats were a match. I made sure to also explore the surrounding towns a bit. She was in no way ready to make those decisions at the time, but she was ready for the introduction to those schools. By Fall of her senior year, she had enough memory of the places to make informed decisions, and she did the admissions applications herself, and decided on the best fit. She has since become much more proactive in college.

Catbird: Amen on the Gap Year! Re: fishing: Read “Deadliest Sea.” Lots of info about commercial fishing, open water survival, and the Coast Guard.

A Gap Year also allows her to pick up valuable info from her peers who are in college – most important, they’ll talk about how much they have already taken out in loans.

Thank you OP for this thread. This was/is my daughter to a T except her stats weren’t nearly so high (still a pretty darn good student though). She is a senior now with just a few more weeks left before she graduates from high school, and I can say that this was a very stressful year for both of us because she took such little interest in the application process and researching schools. I’ve had to nag her the whole way and if I wouldn’t have, I doubt she would’ve gotten anything in on time. She truly hated me last summer. And in addition to her lack of enthusiasm with the application process is that she doesn’t really know what she wants to study, so we couldn’t select or weed out schools based on that aspect. I basically picked the schools that she applied to. One positive was that she was very OK with visiting colleges and actually loved doing interviews. She also competed at two scholarship weekends (which required a lot of schmoozing) and was awarded two full tuition scholarships at two pretty good women’s colleges. She got great merit aid at another highly ranked LAC. And she was admitted to one of the seven sisters colleges. She was invited last week to go on a final expenses paid visit to the seven sister college and I asked her if she wanted to go once more, and she said “Oh, not really, it was pretty there - I liked it”. But she couldn’t offer any other reasons for why she might want to attend the school. I’m still rolling my eyes at her disconnection and refusal to put any kind of real thought or consideration to where she will be spending her next four years and what she is expecting to get out of those four years. She will probably attend one of the schools that she got a full tuition scholarship to but since it doesn’t offer a big variety of majors and she has no clue what she wants to study, I’m going to insist that she take general ed courses that will be sure to transfer to a larger state university if she finds herself in a situation where her options are limited. The replies on this thread have been very helpful in opening my eyes to why she might be behaving this way. My husband has told me that she just might be feeling overwhelmed, but I couldn’t see how a little apprehension would practically paralyze her. And it’s not that she doesn’t want to go to college - she really does - last year she proclaimed - “I am NOT going to XXX down the road and living at home - no one is going to deprive me of my college dorm experience!” LOL - that is basically the only input I’ve had from her! (And no - there’s no correlation to her applying to women’s colleges (she applied because they recruited her for athletics) and demanding a college dorm experience - she’s not gay I’m sure - I just think she’s ready to fly the coop). At this point, after pushing her the whole way, she has five good options and has pretty much made her decision - but she still can’t articulate why she picked the one she did!

I sometimes felt that way, and then remember my college application process. First choice, where my Dad had gone and a college I could trust to be good at everything. The only thing I did was tell my GC to take all the women’s colleges off the list, four years of a girls high school was enough.

Many kids are fine with blooming where they are planted. And perhaps they are wiser than the ones who agonize about tiny differences between a bunch of perfectly fine choices.

My S is the same way…it’s normal. Not for CC posters, but in the real world it is normal!

@mathmom Well, I guess that was the only other opinion that my daughter has shared - that she is perfectly fine with going to a women’s college even though I know she is going to want to date young men. She really enjoys having female friends - it took her a while to get to that point where she had a group of close friends and she wants to continue that type of close friendship in college. I have prodded her about this several times, but she insists she will be fine. The school that she is pretty sure she will be attending has a cross registration agreement with a nearby highly ranked co-ed university and she can take 8 credits per semester there. So that will help. But that’s another reason I’m insisting on her taking gen ed courses that will transfer - if she feels too stifled in the single sex environment, then she should have no problems transferring most of her credits to a co-ed school. And yes, she says that she can be happy anywhere - she insists she doesn’t care what kind of dorms, cafeteria, architecture, her school has. So, I think she is going be OK.

OP: Why do you think engineering? Has she done any ECs to support that career?

In retrospect, I really missed the female friendships I’d had in high school. I never had close friends like that in college. But I’m pretty sure that if I’d gone to a women’s college I’d have had another four years without getting to know any men. I think it’s a great choice for many women though. And I think most women’s colleges these days have less artificial ways for women to interact with men.

If you are good at math and science and aren’t committed to research I think engineering is a good option. Looking at my dh’s life chasing grants and with the NIH and NSF budgets being slashed year after year, I would not recommend science research to anyone. I ended up in architecture, but I’d have been a happy structural engineer. It never occurred to me to look into it.