<p>My son will be a senior this fall. We have taken him to a couple of universities, including Vanderbilt and NYU. We also have a college tour planned this summer in Florida (our home state). He loved NYU, but we simply can't afford it. He doesn't seem to know what he wants in a college, and even though I encourage him to research schools online, he doesn't. I don't know if he's overwhelmed by the possibilities, doesn't know where to start, or just doesn't want to think about leaving home. He LOVES high school, and has a lot of good friends here. Any advice would be appreciated. I'm not really sure how to help him other than to tell him about schools I am aware of, which is probably really limiting his possibilities. He has a 3.7 GPA and scored a 30 on the ACT.</p>
<p>I would suggest…</p>
<p>Tour a large state school (UF, FSU).
Tour a medium sized private (Vandy and perhaps another that is not so ‘reachy’, Tulane as an example).
Tour a couple small liberal arts colleges (Furman, Wofford, Rollins).</p>
<p>See what he likes. He may really prefer a certain category of school. After that, get the Fiske Guide. Read about the schools that meet your criteria. Evaluate them for cost and admissions. Run the NPC at each to see if they are affordable.</p>
<p>My son has the exact stats of your son. I have been driving the bus and identified a good list of schools that we cna afford and I think he might like. He has to choose from this large list the ones he wants to apply at.</p>
<p>Talk with him about what he’d like to do after HS graduation, and whether he’d like to just have a year off. There is nothing wrong with taking a gap year (or two) while he thinks about his personal and professional goals. Lots of kids (and even more importantly lots of boys) really, truly, are clueless about these things. It is OK for them to be clueless, provided they keep ambling in a more-or-less forward direction until they do figure things out.</p>
<p>He might not really be interested in leaving home just yet. If that’s the case, are there decent community colleges within commuting distance? </p>
<p>Happykid did no research (and I do mean no research). She let me figure stuff out, hand her lists, and then she’d look at the the websites that interested her. If your son is fine with you being his research team, that is OK too. It does make it easier for you to pre-screen for affordability!</p>
<p>I did all the work. They just had the fun of looking at colleges. They showed no willingness to do this research. They did for grad school.</p>
<p>With my kids, I also did most of the research, though they did have strong preferences. Seeing schools they did not want to go to sometimes helped as much as seeing schools they did. We started by looking at a big state u., small liberal arts, and alternative school, all in the same area, to get some general guidelines.</p>
<p>When my son acted disengaged and bored about the whole thing (he also loved high school), I told him one day that it was fine with me if he did not go, and if he worked instead. Then I told him that I was going out, and if he ever wanted to visit colleges, he should decide where and when and I would see if it fit in my schedule.</p>
<p>This reversal threw him into action and when I got home he had a color coded schedule ready!</p>
<p>He ended up at a great school and is now 25 and totally self-supporting.</p>
<p>This transition seems to paralyze some. It may mean he is not ready, but it may very well not mean that he is not ready!</p>
<p>Ask him what job he’s going to get after HS graduation. That’s the alternative to going to school. Maybe he’s fine with going to the local CC?</p>
<p>College right after school isn’t right for everybody.
Maybe he’s fine with moving to his own apartment and supporting himself, as another option.</p>
<p>I did most of the original search for my son’s future college. I flagged schools in the Fiske guide that I thought he’d like, he narrowed it down to a list to visit, I did all the legwork in arranging the visits, my H did all the driving. After the visits, S was able to make a smaller list to apply to. He did the apps by himself! After acceptances, he made the final pick. I felt it was ok to help a lot at first, until he started getting excited about the whole thing. Seeing the schools helped make it real for him, but not everyone needs to do a lot of visits.</p>
<p>My rising senior doesn’t want to look at all. He’s convinced that his father and I (both engineers) will push him into engineering! But then when someone asks what he wants to do, he says, “Be a chemical engineer.” The kid baffles me. Knowing him, he will not accept help from us even if we volunteer to do the research. I think he will end up taking a gap year and earning some money, which is really fine with us.</p>
<p>Like other posters, I agree about getting a copy of the Fiske guide. My D1 spent time looking it over herself. D2 asked me to go through and flag the colleges I thought would be good choices for her. She was pretty sure she wanted an LAC, and be in the north or western states. She had a few ideas on major, too.</p>
<p>I went through Fiske and flagged about 40 schools. We discussed them and narrowed the list down to about 20, and went forward from there with detailed research, some visits, etc. We are down to about a dozen left (hs junior), with three more to visit.</p>
<p>Look at University of Miami</p>
<p>I would take him to a local CC or tech school and tell him “This is where you’re going unless you come up with other options.”</p>
<p>Figure out where his high school friends are looking.</p>
<p>FLmom- my older son who just graduated college told me as a HS junior that he “couldn’t look at that book, it’s too random”. He seemed disinterested, and his guidance counselor was useless. After I finished being infuriated, I thought about it and realized he was actually right in a way - the college guides are so overwhelming that it is hard to know where to begin. </p>
<p>I went with a similar approach to Haystack & Compmom. We made a three day trip to the Boston area. It is a fabulous place to start (no, he did not go to school in Boston, nor did his younger brother). You can see a large small, a medium sized school and a small. You can see schools in the suburbs, schools in the city, schools that are technology oriented, schools that are business oriented, schools that are artsy and schools that simply have it all. It really helped him narrow down the “type” of school he wanted. In fact he realized there were only 7 schools that fit the bill for him! We did the same area, but different schools for S2 and although it helped him narrow down his wants a little, he wasn’t as specific as his brother, and it wasn’t as easy. </p>
<p>I then made a spreadsheet listing about 10 things that were important to him - and some that were important to me and not so much to him. We (me?) then picked a bunch of universities, & I went to Fiske & Naviance and filled in the # of students, male/female ratio, class size, Av SAT/ACT/GPA, location (state & rural, suburban, urban), percent out of state, tuition cost, # of acres, % Greek, ethnicity breakdown, % living on campus, and then got the Princeton Review’s admission rating. Pick whatever categories are meaningful to you, and that you might think will be important to him if he is not ready to discuss it. Put it all on one page and let him look at it. You will be surprised - when it is not so “random”, and all in one place he will be much better able to synthesize it. </p>
<p>And don’t be surprised when you do go on college tours, and he appears disinterested! It seems that many of the students tend to lurk in the back of the tour group with their heads down, while the moms walk with the guide and ask questions. The moms have pen and paper in hand to take notes, while the students are texting or shuffling along with their hands in their pockets. If every parent who’s child acted like this felt they truly weren’t ready and should have a gap year, the admissions process would be less competitive because a lot less students would be applying to college!! (Sort of joking, sort of being realistic on that comment). A parent knows her child - it’s possible he/she isn’t ready or meant for college, but it’s also possible they feel awkward, overwhelmed & scared. They may not ask for it, but they want our help.</p>
<p>Good luck!</p>
<p>This isn’t uncommon with boys. My own son was not interested in the college search, although he made it clear he very much wanted to go to college. He was happy to have me do the research, put together a tour, and he picked from there. He applied to about half of the schools I selected for him to visit.</p>
<p>I know the parents of two boys who didn’t want to look anywhere. They planned to go to college, but they were perfectly content to apply to a couple of nearby universities without even visiting. The parents were beside themselves, but the boys ended up in college and studying engineering – without ever visiting campus before showing up for orientation.</p>
<p>We talk so much about the “college experience” (and I’m one of those who savored college life and want my children to do the same), but some students don’t really care about anything besides just studying and getting a degree. Perhaps this shows up more in engineer types. :)</p>
<p>I did most of the initial research for DS1, then took him on a college road trip the summer before senior year. He enjoyed it, but was happy for me to do the planning. I found that when senior year started, it landed on his radar. Classmates were talking, the career center on campus routinely posted information about admission reps from college who were offering information sessions. He quickly became more invested in the process.</p>
<p>Honestly, without doing some initial college visits, how on earth would a 16 or 17 yo kid have any sort of context for picking a school out of a book (or even via a website)? I don’t see how it could anything other than overwhelming and paralyzing. Once a kid has seen a couple of schools and begins to get a sense of how they compare and what catches his or her interest, then you can have a basis for a conversation. (And yes, I know that not all families can make those visits, and that many kids go to local colleges, but presumably those kids are not being asked to pick a college out of a book.)</p>
<p>I did a lot of research as well. In particular, I narrowed the list down to schools thatwe could afford. From there, he started to look at a variety of schools, starting with size, region of the country. He only really loved a couple of them, but applied to a ton of schools, seeing how much love they were willing to give based on his stats.</p>
<p>We were able to fit in a few visits and I found that he really couldn’t fall for a place unless he saw it (with the exception of Tulane, which he loved from the presentations and the very idea of New Orleans).</p>
<p>The long list of colleges/universities is overwhelming. And the overall process of looking/choosing/applying/hearing back/deciding is monumental. (Then if you also add to that: college nights, college fairs, interviews, etc. it’s intimidating.)</p>
<p>Even my very motivated youngest son didn’t know where to look. My middle son seemed so uninvolved about going to all those “college nights” held at our hs, I was fearful he’d just blow the whole process. And my oldest son was so unaware, we knew we had to take the lead. Turns out, they all went to wonderful schools. Our mistake was forgetting what they needed: oldest should have taken a gap year.</p>