Thanks all for your thoughtful responses. I do learn something from each of them. You guys are a great help. I appreciate the words of wisdom.
Funny how I feel like I’ve never been through this even though I just did it not too long ago with D16.
My kids have not had this experience. The one at the larger school knows almost all of her professors well, talks to them, goes in for extra help. Even in classes with 150 students, they have discussion groups or labs that break the big class down. My daughter at a smaller school knows the professors she wants to know, ignores the others, sometimes talks to the TAs. Those reflect their personalities too, as the first one is friendly and wants to talk and be involved and the second one just wants to learn what is required and if she doesn’t need to talk to the professor, she doesn’t.
@twoinanddone - Ya, just a generic comment and categorization, sorry, didn’t mean to imply that was the experience at all big schools. I had a friend whose son used that reference all the time and it surprised me the first time I heard it. He just wanted to be at a big school where he could be anonymous and sit in the back of classes in a large auditorium and never talk to the teacher. Until him, I didn’t think about anyone wanting it that way! But of course, you can know your professors or TAs anywhere (big or small), or not know them anywhere (big or small) too.
Much harder to avoid that contact at a smaller school, though.
cardinal2020mom, visits are a way to show interest, and some admissions departments pay a lot of attention to demonstrated interest so that their “yield” stats are high in rankings.
I always said that the more kids I had, the less I knew. Each one was so different.
@cardinal2020mom - I’m not sure why you responded to my post by talking about choice of major, since I didn’t say anything at all about that.
Again, my kids didn’t start thinking about specific colleges until late in the summer before their senior years.
Of course we were always aware of the state university system as essentially a default option. (where the kids would have ended up if they didn’t embark on the ritual of making a huge deal out of the college application process).
My observation was that they weren’t even starting to give much thought about college environment (big vs. small, social environment, etc.) until spring of their junior years, when the kids start taking SAT’s and start talking more about colleges among themselves.
My son told me, for the first time, that he was interested in LAC’s, toward the end of the summer before he started his senior year. The context was that we started getting a large amount of mail because of his National Merit status, and when I asked what to with them, he asked me to save the ones from LAC’s and any that seemed to be offering large merit awards, and ditch the rest. He told me that one reason he was interested in LAC’s was that of the kids a couple of years ahead of him who had graduated and went to college, the ones who had chosen LACs seemed to be the happiest with their choices - so that is nothing he could have gotten from a brochure or web site.
You seem to assume that a 16 year old kid ought to have a clear idea of what sort of college environment he wants.
My experience was different. Partly because we didn’t give much thought to it early on, as I never anticipated that my son would score so well on the PSAT & SAT. But even my daughter (the younger kid, with more exposure from being a bystander to her brother’s college app process) changed her view on what type of environment she was looking for fairly late in the game, in September of her senior year, shifting her view from wanting a small/midsize environment to a preference for a larger, more diverse environment.
So yes-- your questions might seem reasonable to you, but there is no particular reason to assume that to your kid that they are meaningful or even appropriate. I mean-- when I was a kid and thought I knew what my major was, size and campus social environment never entered into the picture. I had my mind made up at around age 14 or 15 where I wanted to go… and all I cared was that the college offered my major. (Then I changed majors to something entirely different… meaning that my teenage choice in hindsight was made for all the wrong reasons, though certainly not a problem given that I was at a large enough university to afford me plenty of options for changing my mind)
@calmom I was trying to make the point that I didn’t think I was asking for too much. But, apparently. based on his behavior and the consensus on the responses I am.
I got it. In general, most kids don’t know where they want to go or change their minds even if they think they do.
Thank again for your thoughtful reply.
@cardinal2020mom my son is also a jr. this year and was dragged along with older sister to visit schools her jr. year. I also confess that patience was not my virtue in trying to get my son to start thinink about the whole college process going into this year. But I did eek out enough info from his to start to put together a list of schools. While some consider it too early to put pressure on them for decisions I found it to be a motivator.
Because he is not academically strong, I wanted him to know that if there were certain schools he was interested in, he needed to aspire to work harder to get there. After picking schools based on location, we looked up the average GPA and SAT/ACT scores on College Data and went from there. He knows he is not a strong test taker so he has tried very hard to keep up all of his homework and project grades and keep his GPA up. As the end of the quarter draws near, he has the highest homework averages he has had so far in high school. So that whole motivation idea seems to be working for him.
Also, we looked at what each college requires as far as high school classes. This has been important as his top pick requires an extra science class that, had we not known about, he would not have put on his schedule for next year. Even though he won’t start working on his senior schedule until Februrary, I am not sure it is something his school would have picked up on.
It has also been nice to have a preliminary list bc of admissions rep visits to his high school. He has gone to 5 and after one visit last week from a school on his list, he came home and said he didn’t think the school was for him anymore.
@VaNcBorder thank you. I believe I’m in a similar boat. I do agree that I may have been a bit on the pushy side with him. However, I do feel motivation is big. As I stated previously, he will attend college school visits at his HS. I hope that gives him a good sense of the school community.
When it comes to college requirements, he’s good to go. Though he’s not at the top of his class he’s taken the classes required by the tippy top schools. His choice.
Happy to hear that your son has been motivated by those visits and his grades have been on the up tick.
Junior year? The only urgent matters are that your son is taking the standardized tests or setting his mind on doing them.
At this stage in high school, my son did not want to visit colleges, read about them in guidebooks, talk about them. He had seen plenty of colleges as a high school debater on tour.
He made no tours of colleges regarding admissions prior to applying to them.
He took all the standardized tests, without prepping for them beyond taking the practice test in the test booklet.
He spent no time reading college guidebooks or looking at college websites.
He let us (parents) compose the list based on our perception of fit to his interests.
It was like that old joke when the student responds to a teacher, “My brain is full. I don’t need to know all this stuff.”
Come senior year, we had a good list of colleges in which he had good prospects of admission based on his test scores and grades. He applied to 7, got into 6. He visited three of them after admission, had visited two others on the debate circuit prior to admission. He attended an outstanding university, majored in economics, spent a year abroad, has made a fine career.
I say let your son grow into the process. Nothing is urgent except his high school performance and tests.
I just talked with a woman whose son is not going to college next year. He is fully qualified but just doesn’t want to deal with it all. She said “there is no purpose in my pushing him.” We talked about his various alternatives, all of which are wonderful.
I am not suggesting that will be your son’s path but if you meditate on it a little, it is a bottom line security: that all will be okay even, if next fall, he still isn’t motivated. But chances are he is just being a normal junior with his mind on other things and will start feeling it soon enough.
@cardinal2020mom, I’m in the same boat. My daughter is a junior and has no interest in visiting colleges. We’ve stopped at several colleges on the way to vacation spots, but she’s only gotten out of the car once. Drives me crazy.
She has some friends who are seniors that are applying to schools, though, and that seems to be generating a little bit of interest on her part.
I wouldn’t worry about the major so much. I’d probably worry, too, but my daughter has an idea. It really is pretty early to know what major they want, though. Aside form making sure there’s an engineering school or nursing school if that’s something they might want, I wouldn’t stress too much about that.
I agree with @intparent that it could make things difficult logistically if you wait too long. I told my daughter that I want to at least visit the State schools by the end of junior year. If she likes one of them, we might be done, but if she doesn’t, we’ll have to get moving.
Whether one thinks OP is jumping the gun depends on one’s perceptions and the local HS culture.
From the HS culture of my public magnet, starting to think about colleges junior year was actually considered a bit on the late side as most HS classmates were already starting to plan their academics/ECs/DE/outside research with local college Profs partially with college applications in mind.
And for certain higher ed programs such as the Federal Service Academies, waiting till senior year would be too late as one needed to start the process for finding a political nominee and other areas(physical fitness training, demonstrating leadership in ECs, etc) sometime in one’s junior year at the latest in order to have a completed application package on time.
This was also reflected in my public magnet’s student handbook which had an entire chapter devoted to college advising and checklists to be mindful of at each grade level…including freshman year.
Some of the private/boarding schools college classmates and relatives attended had similar practices in this regard.
Granted, that is admittedly far from the norm. However, depending on the individual student/family and/or the HS culture the student’s a part of…starting to think about colleges before senior year isn’t completely unheard of or necessarily unhealthy.
The point is that the son isn’t thinking about it, but the parent is. Noone can force another person to think about something. Some kids have their heads in the sand because the transition, leaving high school and home for the unknown, is hard for them. Some are super busy and focused on the present. Some are burned out and might not really want to go. Many reasons. Rather than having a timeline for him, it might be good to find out why he is resistant, or if his timetable is just different. I always found that these conversations were more likely to happen while driving around in the car : ) I still think it should be in his control as much as possible, so if he is not on board, so be it, but more likely he will come around.
@compmom My son has that easy going, go with the flow, everything is going to be alright personality. 99% of the time everything IS alright. However, having gone through this once before I am the better expert at it than him. Part of me feels that this is his way of figuring it out on his own. He already attended 1 college visit at school and didn’t tell us. As you said, there are probably other reasons as well. I will back off due to my realization that I have made this the main topic of conversations with him.
@cobrat you are correct. His HS sounds very similar to yours. There are definite grade level checklists for college planning. When he does share info with me, I do find out that his friends are talking about college. Maybe he’s doing it more than I think. Maybe he is stressed out just as I am and I make it worse. Ugh.
@WalknOnEggShells it’s good to know I’m not alone. I am certainly not concerned at all about a major. I, myself, changed majors 4x while in college. So, I get it. He has visited to 2 state schools and 3 out of state schools previously which give me some comfort. Best of luck to you and your daughter.
@Endora thankfully testing is not a concern. He is 100% on top of that. He has chosen which date he’ll retake the SAT and which date he’ll take the ACT. I have not once felt the need to explain to him the importance of the testing. His goal is to be done with testing by the end of junior year.
I’ll be blunt. If my kid wanted me to pay tuition, they darned well better get out of the car and participate at least minimally in the process. I had one enthusiastic kid and one less enthusiastic one about the college search. But given the level of sacrifice for our family to cover most of their college expenses, non-participatin was not a choice.
That’s why I said it was fine to work instead of go to college.
I took my daughter to see a couple of colleges early Junior year to give her a flavor of what she is working toward…also so she could see a large and a smaller school.
Also kids are different…when I asked my eldest to come up with a list of colleges, she did so. For the younger, I had her look at College books…but after a while she just said “Mom, you like to research on the internet…can you help me come up with a list of colleges?” I did, and she ended going to my top pick for her (based on her critera) but then so did my eldest!
@intparent, I think the reason she didn’t want to participate was that I started very early. We were stopping at colleges during her sophomore year of High School. I think I started things off on the wrong foot by being a little obsessive about it. I was worried about how we were going to pay for college, so I showed her (or I should say we drove by) a bunch of schools that give merit aid.
I think the big turn off for her was that the schools were all very small. She has shown a little more interest at the bigger schools we’ve driven through:-) But if she still isn’t getting out of the car in her senior year, then I’ll be picking her school, and it won’t be private!
We did a few visits soph year while on vacation, too. Now I did discuss it with her before just going to a college. But still…