Can you provide some guidance on how best to use and navigate this site? My D is currently a Freshman so the fun/stress is about to get real. Thanks 
I found the “search forum” box on the top helpful, the individual college threads that corresponded to those on my daughter’s list and most of all, the Parents Forum.
Thanks for the help
Enjoy high school with your daughter. It goes by in the blink of an eye!
I know it-- the first year as blown by and I’ve seen all my nieces and nephews go through it already so I’m prepared to be at graduation day before I know it.
In the Top Forums list, click on Financial Aid & Scholarships to start learning more about the money side, and click on Parents Forum, then on Parents Cafe for more relaxing reading.
Thx, appreciate the help. We do have a outside consultant as well but jeez I’m already overwhelmed and we haven’t even really even begun,
Stay away from Chances altogether. And some of the high ranked school forums can be daunting. Generally — parents give better advice than kids out here. So keep it in mind as you evaluate info you see.
Ditto staying away from the “chances” forum. Look up the common data sets for the schools on your list. That will give you a much better sense of if your daughter is in the ballpark.
If you have an idea of a couple of colleges your daughter is interested in, check out the threads from April this year and previous years (after people know where they got in but before they’ve made their final decision) on “this school or that school?” People give a lot of detailed advice on those threads and it can help you find more schools to look at, too. (For instance, I went to Wash U but never applied to Emory or Vanderbilt, which are often lumped together as similar schools to Wash U. There are threads for “Wash U vs Emory” or “Wash U, Vanderbilt, Rice, UCSD” (I’m making that up, I don’t know if that exact one has been done) where you can think, yes, my kid is similar enough to me that I know Wash U could be a great fit but of course it’s now really hard to get into so what else should she be looking at?
Good to know.
My niece is graduating this month from WashU and she loved it.
It is pretty early to be making a college list. A 9th grader has limited grades, has not yet hit the hard parts of high school, and has no test scores. They haven’t got much in EC accomplishments, and may in fact develop different EC interests in HS. Which is perfectly healthy. Any thoughts they have on majors now may very well change – one of my kids changed her major thoughts senior year based on her HS coursework, and is now a PhD student in that subject, but it wasn’t what she or I expected she would pick in her first couple years of HS. You never know about finances, too – you could win the lottery, or have a significant business or job downturn, or a serious health issue could occur. Your kid might think now that they want to go far away or stay close to home, but that thinking could evolve by fall of senior year. It is also easy to burn a kid out if you push test prep too soon and too hard, or just are always parsing their actions with an eye toward college admissions.
I guess the point is that your best things to do now are to make sure she is on a math track to get through at least AB Calculus in HS, taking a reasonably challenging courseload with strong grades, and trying ECs and digging in deeper on the ones she likes. Regarding courseload challenge, she does NOT have to take every AP offered. She should take the ones she is interested in, but college admissions isn’t about who can take the most APs. Colleges like interested and interesting kids. Academic grinders don’t always get the best results.
If your child has a particular major in mind, time spent in the major-specific forums can be useful.