So I found this website via searching some phrases and decided to join (against my better judgement!). I am looking for suggestions for schools for my youngest child. I am being vague and obscuring some details so that this doesn’t identify us/her.
First, we love all of our kids equally, of course. We have 4 or 5 kids - the oldest 3 or 4 are either in college or graduates. Our youngest (“bonus baby!!”) is a junior in HS. Our oldest kids were very much academic superstars in HS. I am not trying to brag - and it was nothing that my husband and I did, TRUST ME. They just are very much self-driven and incredibly intellectually talented kids. They all attend/attended “top” Ivy league schools, where they also did well. They are each “their own people” (we joke we have one of each “type” - the class president, the athlete, the drama kid, etc) and very much perfectionists. They all attended a private HS, had top board scores, very high grades, won lots of awards, yadda yadda.
Our youngest is equally “her own person” and a superstar but in a different way. She has a lot of great strengths. She’s the nicest person in our family. She is very kind hearted. She is incredibly well liked. The kind of kid that others (teachers, folks in the neighborhood, my older kids’ friends visiting back home) say, “She’s just so genuinely nice.” What our oldest have in intellectual talent, she has in people skills. She also works/tries very hard. She was not a good fit at the private school my older kids attended and so she attends our solid, local suburban HS. She gets mostly Bs (some As) in regular, college-prep and honors courses. She will probably take an AP course next year as a senior, but she has not pursued the same kind of HS classes my older kids did. She recently took a practice SAT exam and scored roughly 600/600/600. Her GPA is around a 3.2 (unweighted).
Youngest child was dragged along for all of the college visits we made with the older kids, though for most of these she was only in middle school. Seems like we’ve seen all the “top” schools that our older ones were interested in/ended up attending, but absolutely nothing that was less selective.
I am not naive to think our youngest is a good fit or has a snowball’s chance at any of these schools. We need to figure out what schools might be realistic options for her, and a good fit. It might seem weird because we’ve had 4 go through the process and land at those schools that everyone seems to want, but in some ways we feel like we’re totally new to this.
At my older kids’ private school, there was a lot of hand-holding and advising even in the junior year from the college advisors. Youngest daughter’s public HS has (understandably) much less support and won’t have programming until the spring (I think).
Can folks suggest names of medium-sized colleges that might be a good fit for a nice, happy, well-liked, hard-working B-ish student with ok but not great test scores - maybe in the Northeast, Midwest, or Northwest?
I don’t know if a big public university would be a good fit…can anyone provide insight from their own kids who are this type (hardworking, friendly, not academic superstar student)? I am thinking that because she works for those Bs, that she might get lost in a big public university in big lecture classes. But perhaps that’s actually the way to go?
I am thinking schools with 5,000-10,000 students might be a good idea (she says she doesn’t know, we’ve asked her). She thinks she wants to major in English, but is not firmly committed to any major. We need to start to think about when we might visit some of these schools (Spring break or summer).
Is there a list of these kinds of schools anywhere?
Anyone have a similar kind of child (profile/attitude/personality) - what kind of school ended up being the best fit for them?
Thanks in advance.
