Just found out the community college where D23 is now an AA degree student will be almost entirely online during fall semester. No big surprise given the circumstances, but I know she was holding out hope she could go in-person. She is homeschooled and is used to quality online classes, but she was hoping to be able to attend school in-person next year. Oh well. She can still slowly work on her research project and do both her main sports-related extracurriculars.
Hey Parents. A PSA here and probably something you might want to discuss with your Class of '23 children considering their age and maturity. Recently this news story came out concerning some student behaviors at 2 of the âEliteâ high schools in the city:
No idea what will eventually happen but Masterman and Central are special Admission high schools so the students involved could easily be expelled. This reminded me of the case in 2017 of the Harvard admits that had their Admission rescinded for doing something similar:
and this is a follow up podcast that you can listen to or read the transcript:
https://www.npr.org/transcripts/758281834
I had my son listen to that last year and had a talk to him about it. Even if kids canât understand the harm of these kinds of posts they should at least be aware that everything they do on the Internet might be there forever and can come back to haunt them in the future.
So D23 and i have been working on her college spreadsheet, and have realized that if sheâs going to position herself to get into a music program (even a non-performance one, since she doesnât want a performance degree), sheâs going to have to build a killer admissions portfolio over the next two years.
So the next step is to start contacting programs to request information and find out what precisely theyâre looking for in admissions portfolios. I mean, auditions are straightforward, fine, but requirements for portfolios where the entire description reads âThree pieces you recorded and mixed using professional softwareâ is so vague as to be impossible without further clarification. Would it kill programs to tell potential applicants what they actually want to see?
And then next summer, assuming the pandemic is under control by then, we tour selected schools and if at all possible she meets with faculty at them.
This is already feeling like itâs moving frighteningly fast.
S23 had a big Monday. For his birthday he received a discover flight class, and he went up with a flight instructor in the morning. His instructor let him do everything. Taxi, take off/land (instructor on the feet), flying around the city. He loved it so we may have our colleges narrowed down. Lucky for us we have one of the top Aerospace schools (University of North Dakota) in state. Oh, and his drivers license showed up in the mail!!
Baseball is still going strong here. Limited to one out of town tournament, but still plenty of games over June and July (50+).
Congrats on the DL and flying, @roper1313 - I did private pilot stuff in my early 20s (never finished it because I ran out of $$ at the cross-country portion of the process) and loved those early flights. Hated the instrument part, where my instructor would put the hood on me and send the plane into a dive. Ugh. I am a control freak and that was the WORST 
S23 has started driving in our neighborhood; you canât get a permit until age 16 so heâs got a few months until then.
Final grades - 3.68 GPA for the year, all As and a B for spring, which, considering he did not handle online instruction well at all, is pretty great.
Sophomore year sked:
Geometry
Algebra
AP World
Bio
Spanish II
Chorale/Health
Literary Genres (sophomore English required course)
Heâs doubling up on math to get on the calc track; somehow his previous school throttled this process, even though he was in âhonorsâ math there. He qualified for honors Bio but the adviser told him not to do it because even though he was capable of doing well, his life would be unending homework and stress.
Heâs been to something like six BLM protests over the last few weeks and feels pretty passionate about the issue, as does his older sister. (Both attend pretty homogenous schools and feel pretty miserable about that also.)
He has reached out to the county Dem organization about volunteering once heâs back at school, so weâll see how that goes. We had a spate of racist videos surface on TikTok in our area, and thatâs been depressing to see. But the experience has, I hope, really cemented for them the importance of policing their social media posts.
Does anyone have a spreadsheet for comparing colleges they think is great? I need to slowly start doing this. DS23âs only conversations about college thus far is that he doesnt want to stay in the midwest anywhere close to home. But as he has older friends starting the college search process his ears are opening up a bit more and I would like a place to compile info.
@roper1313 very cool - can you tell me a bit more about how to get S23 started flying? He is very, very interested in aerospace engineering, and I thought, what better thing to do than to learn how to fly too? And also learn the engineering aspects of flying? Heâs already on the engineering/computer science track at school, but really needs to step up on ECs outside of school (esp since he stopped basketball and band (basketball because it would be a lot of hard work to catch up to his peers (and he wants to focus on studies/engineering instead) and band because he was satisfying that credit at school).
@JaceyK look up local flight schools in your area and schedule a Discovery Flight for your son. My husband is an FO with United Airlines, and CFII (flight instructor). His previous profession, he was a hardware engineer in reverse logistics for consumer electronics and flying was always his side hobby/passion. The first time he seriously thought about switching professions 9/11 happened and wellâŚyea. His career in engineering kept climbing and he was making good money in a director role, but he wasnât happy I could tell. Around 2018 I starting suggesting he think about flying full time and he started exploring his options. 2019 he quit is job and started pursuing his ATP licenseâŚgot hired by United Fall of 2019âŚand then this year Covid-19 hit lol. He may be facing furlough here soon if things donât changeâŚ
âŚanywayâŚTwin A is wanting to do aerospace engineering and has his dadâs airplane obsession gene so my husband has started teaching him ground school and has him on course for his private license by the time he graduates.
Iâm not going to lie, itâs expensive. Weâre obviously saving on instructor fees but flight hours arenât cheap. Itâs a great investment though for someone who really has that passion for planes!
Weâve just used Google Sheets, because then the child and I both have edit access for it simultaneously. (Added after I finished this: Wow, this got long. Itâs a long process, though, so yeah.)
Hereâs the way itâs gone with each kid (D17/D19/D23):
[ul][]At the outset (late 9th/early 10th grade-ish), I got their thoughts in a way that sets limits on what colleges go on the list. For all of them, this included majors and such (for D17 it was âIâm interested in a college that has strong STEM programs but that isnât a highly STEM-focused schoolâ; for D19, it was a very specific and not overly widely offered major; for D23, it was any one of a set of music-adjacent majors) plus whatever else they already had (for D23, a minimum number of hours of daylight at winter solstice, so basically a latitude cutoff). I did not allow any measures of reputation or prestigiosity or such at this stage.
[]I included my own limits on the search (the biggest one being no private colleges with endowments <$100M).
[]From that, I built our âlong listsâ. For D17 it was about 350 schools, which was too big, but lessons learned. D19âs and D23âs were just under 200, which is manageable. This list contained, in its entirety, the name of the college, its city and state, its zip code (because Iâm a GIS nerd and like to make maps for fun), the website address, the name(s) of the major(s) of interest offered there, and their endowments (since iâd had to google that anyway).
[]I then went over the list, and decided if there were any schools to cut given what I know about them. (Iâm an academic, so Iâm pretty plugged into networks that let me know if there are any places with wildly waving red flags.) There were only about 10 or so of these in each list.
[]Each child and I went over what was important in terms of environmental/non-academic stuff for them, and we created columns for those, and split up the research work. (IMO important that the child fills in most of the information, but some stuff is more specialized, so I looked for thatâso, fârex, things related to financial stability.) For D17, this included things like the size of the college (smaller was better for her), for D19 it included proximity to family and winter temperature (respectively, closer and higher was better), and for D23 it included things like kWh/m²/day (higher is better). For D23, since sheâs looking at non-performance music stuff, weâre already looking at audition/portfolio requirements for the various majors.
[]We then did the âbig cullâ (for D17 and D19; weâre not there yet with D23). This was a qualitative review, including things like âFloridaâs out, because hurricanes frighten meâ or even âI canât go to a school where one of their colors is brownâ. This got us down to 50ish, still with no limits allowed based on prestigiosity, and neither of us were allowed to cut a school the other wanted left on. Simultaneous with that, for D19 (since she was looking at a pretty specialized field; thisâll pretty certainly be the case for D23, as well) we requested information from a handful of colleges on the list that seemed interesting but where she wasnât certain it would work.
[]At this point, things got to chill til late 10th grade. (Occasionally, though, weâd add a column, if one of them decided she wanted to know something about the colleges on the list.) D17 and D19 too the ACT and SAT spring of 10th grade, and so the flood of junk mail began. This led to a handful of colleges being added to each of their lists, including a couple that they applied to. (None that they ended up going to, though.)
[]End of 10th grade, we cut the list down to about 30 schools. Affordability was part of the discussion in this round, and we went through the net price calculators together in a number of cases. (I filled in the NPC results for all the other remaining schools afterward, so that all the same information was available for every school.) We had a qualitative discussion on likelihood of admission for these schools, too, and made sure that the list included a range of possibilities. (This was easy for D19âshe was mainly interested in state flagships and had no interest in prestigiosity, so there was lots of guaranteed formula-based merit aid available. D17 was into selective LACs, so this was all a bit more fraught.)
[]Coincident with that, we came up with a list of schools to visit that summer. We live far away from everything, so we knew that we couldnât visit every program of interest, and that weâd have to pick a geographic region. Weâre fortunate to have a lot of flexibility in the summer, so with D17, we visited 14 schools in the Midwest and mid-Atlantic the summer between 10th and 11th grades; with D19, she felt like touring with her sister was informative enough, so we only visited four in the South during her summer. The important thing at this point isnât to visit specific schools, but rather to visit different types of schools: big state flagships, research-intensive privates, a couple SLACs, regional comprehensives, and so on. (Of course, since D23 is looking at fine arts stuff, her list of schools may have to be more focused on specific programs than her sisters were. Weâll see. I do think itâll still be vital to visit a range of college types.)
[]The next few months, the list stayed pretty static, but we added columns to the spreadsheets as they came up.
[]Late 11th grade we got it down to 20, which involved difficult discussions about affordability and program strength and such. They asked teachers for letters of recommendation. Over the next three or four months, we worked together to whittle that down further to the number she ultimately ended up applying to (numbers listed below). We were chasing merit aid, but each child was allowed to apply to one hyperselective that doesnât offer merit aid just âfor funâ to see if she got in (D17 applied to Colgate, D19 didnât use this option).
[]Applications began the summer between 11th and 12th grades (particularly for D19, since state school application portals often open early), though of course the bulk of the work was fall of 12th grade.
[li]D17 applied to 12 schools, which was too many, especially since they were mainly privates with supplemental essays. D19 applied to 8, an arbitrary limit she set for herself junior year; amusingly, the school she ended up going to was kind of an âaccidentalâ application, because they allocate housing slots based on when you start their application, so she started the application when it opened before sheâd firmly decided to apply there, but found to her surprise that it was a crazy short application and sheâd submitted it before she thought she was done.[/ul][/li]In the end, the spreadsheets included the basic statistical information for each college (student body stats, selectivity details, local weather, and such), but also a lot of stuff tailored for each kidâso D17 but not D19 was very interested in measures of social equity, and D19 but not D17 was very interested in what might be called âschool spiritâ detailsâand so their spreadsheets differed in those ways, among others. D23 is already very interested not just in things like the amount of sunshine in the winter (seasonal affective disorder is a thing, yâall), but also whether thereâs a college radio station there, so beyond the basics her spreadsheet will be tailored to stuff she wants.
@dfbdfb Super helpful thanks! I like hearing what other kids thought important to note. Totally laughing at the âno brownâ in the colors as I could see my one kid saying that as well. Curious as to the 100 mill endowment cut off for you?
I think this sophomore year will be helpful for him to slowly start getting an idea of what major he might like. Or at least what he does not want. He has lots of friends going engineering but PreCalc and Accelerated Chem this year may solidify whether engineering is a maybe or a definite no for him. My S23 loves a bit of everything and I think the idea of picking only one thing is stressing him out thus he doesnt like to discuss majors yet. I can see him in business, prelaw, economics, but really not sure at all what majors he would be open to.
He likes the idea of warmer weather but he says skiing and mountains would be great as well. I can see him happier in a bit more urban/suburban not too remote area and I think school size will vary for him based on where the college is located (as in 2000 students in a city location may feel normal but 4000 students in a rural might feel too small). He loves music and I can see him doing something recreationally with it or perhaps a minor or something music business related so thats something to consider. Time will tell if he wants to be recruited athlete as well so that will be a huge factor too. I definitely think hes going to need a college with some school spirit where he can feel involved in some way with sports or music (even if its just an active club sports/music scene).
Knowing my kid theres only 1 state school he would be open to going to right now (and thats our states biggest college but it is a bit competitive to get in). Hes saying no to midwest but I think theres lots of great options that may be good fits for him if he can get over the fact the school is in the midwest. He will still be hours from home and away from us which is his plan.
Glad it was helpful! And my kids are kind of weird in knowing what major(s) theyâre interested in from fairly early on (probably because theyâve been semi-attached to academia their whole lives), but there are other initial filters you can use, too, whether geographic or size of school or whatever.
The $100M endowment cutoff (only for privates, Iâll stressâpublic institutions require a whole different way of thinking about finances) is the absolute minimum in my mind to let me feel secure that the place would still be there a few years later. Ultimately, out of the privates that D17 and D19 applied to, only two had an endowment below $250M, and those were both >$150M. (Yep, I remember these numbers off the top of my head. And what, is college financial stability always top of mind for me? Why do you ask?)
Basically, endowment money means that a college has a cushion to use in times of financial stress like the current one. Thereâs other important financial stuff, too (e.g., the amount of the budget taken up by debt service, whether theyâre operating at a structural deficit, and so on), but endowment is the easiest number to find, and so it makes for a simple first filter.
Our spreadsheet was based on major (D19 was theater tech, after first thinking on envi. sci.) and then money. Everything else was secondary. We are considered full pay for most schools but have no actual $$, despite what FAFSA tells us, and nothing saved either, since both kids have been in private school since preK.
We kept places on the list based on likely merit aid and - key for us - whether the school allows stacking. We have the chance to get a couple of work schollys that are nothing to sneeze at; if we could get a school that wouldnât pull back aid if we got the schollys, it ranked considerably higher. (There are not a lot of these schoolsâŚ)
So the spreadsheet - also in Google sheets, which is so useful, b/c itâs available everywhere we happened to be - had an academic tab, a financials tab and a deadlines/portfolio/audition tab, b/c of the theater aspect.
Within the academic tab I gathered size, distance, all the stats on middle 50 gpa/sat etc, admit %, lists of schollys/charts if the school publicized them, majors, any unique features, and rated them reaches, matches or safeties.
Financial tab listed tuition and R&B, avg. non-need-based award (not that illuminating really), meets 100% of need or need-aware/need-blind, cost of application (this stuff really adds up), CSS used, etc.
In the theater-specific tab, we listed the facilities, professor/staff notes, whether the undergrads had competition with MFA students (this can really cut down on opportunities), portfolio requirements, whether they participated in Unifieds âŚ
When all was said and done, there were 30 schools on the list but only about 10 were ever remotely considered all the way through.
And it ended up being a lot of unnecessary work, as she only applied to the school she got the scholarship from. But itâs great practice for S19, who will not get the same scholly and has much higher aspirations.
@Gatormama The tabs on Google sheets does sound like the best option as we have split household as well. It would be great for him to share at both houses most easily.
I am so much more of a âfeelâ person but I am trying to be practical and more statistical. I tend to be pretty organized but spreadsheets are not really my powerhouse so I was looking for ideas on how to be more systematic in approach.
Our process for D20 was not nearly as elaborate, mostly because she had a strong idea of what she wanted - large school w/ football, Greek life etc; within 4ish hours from home; and with a Nursing program, bonus if direct admit. She knew 3 she wanted to apply to and after research she added 3 more for a total of six. We were very glad she hadnât applied to more when it came down to make a decision!
D23 will be much harder as sheâs really not sure what she wants OR what she wants to do. Sheâs leaning towards psychology but that doesnât really help narrow things down much! Sheâs wicked smart so could do almost anything ( except vet/med school - too squeamish!) and has a good shot at scholarships etc. Weâre starting our search now by looking at schools that have a BS in Psych vs just a BA, as well as those that have a neuroscience concentration or minor. This would leave wiggle room to go in a few different directions once she got to college and really learned what she likes. All paths currently lead to Masters and probably Doctorate so long term costs will definitely be a factor.
D20 moves in to her dorm next month and Iâm feeling very burnt out on all things College so we probably wonât do very much with D23 until the Spring.
@JaceyK I agree with @Momof3B search for your local flight school and see if they offer a discovery flight. Our initial flight was great. S23 just turned 15, so Iâm working on a schedule/budget for flight instruction. He is a 3 sport athlete, so he has limited time available. No matter how you slice it flight instruction is expensive, but if it is a passion, Iâm willing to find a way to support it.
Just checked AP Scores for the twinsâŚOye VeâŚwe have some tears flowingâŚ
Twin A:
AP Bio- 1 (OUCH!!)
AP Human Geo- 2
Twin B:
AP Bio- 2
AP Human Geo -3
The AP Scores do not match up with their class grades at all. Before quarantine hit and school went online in March, both twins were pulling Aâs in both classes. The last grading period was P/F.
Their AP Bio teacher was AWFULâŚlike seriously, I donât know why that women was allowed to teach that classâŚso many parents and students had issues with her.
AnywayâŚIâm going to go get them some ice cream now to sooth over the upsetsâŚI told them itâs just a test, weâre still incredibly proud of them.
@Momof3B, kudos to you for putting it in perspective and getting ice cream.
@Momof3B, college professor here saying: I donât trust AP score-based placements.
In my experience (admittedly on the humanities side, not the sciences or math, but I have a lot of colleagues in those fields who feel the same), the important thing is whether the student has had the experience of a rigorous course (which, in most cases, AP courses are), not how they scored on the exam.
And, of course, thereâs the ongoing debate over whether we should be placing students into advanced coursework in response to a single sitting of an examâthereâs a reason that vanishingly few college courses have grades based on a single exam, and that the one or two midterms plus a final model is disappearing. (And thereâs also good reasons that a slowly increasing number of highly selective colleges arenât awarding credit or placement for AP exams no matter the score.)
So your kids shouldnât worry so much about the exam scoresâin the end, what they learned in the course will be more valuable than anything they could have gotten out of the experience.
@Momof3B Does the school publish the aggregate scores for the school? If they do and the average is low then parents could push for changes for those classes that do have low averages on the AP.
1 Like
@momof3b - the nice thing is that they learned probably more than if they had taken regular classes in those subjects; right?
question: does anyone know about PSAT testing this year? we want our sophomore to take it; but with all thatâs going on, I have no idea if kids will be taking it at all. Heard anything?
Iâve been seeing the value of a strong PSAT score junior year. Doesnât mean those national merit scholarships will be the same in 3 years but I want our daughter to practice and study for that one.