Which is part of why I started this with {w,sh}ould. Like, we agree on why they shouldn’t, but why wouldn’t they be. You keep saying happiness is a continuum, and I agree with you, but there’s a difference between being slightly lower on a continuum of happiness and being unhappy.
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Peer fit.
Please define peer fit.
Because when I hear that mentioned my first reading is “My kid is better than those people”, and I want to hope that none of us are taking that position here.
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I’m really curious what these areas are - do you mind listing them?
I’ll just add that sometimes areas of interest are defined in very specific terms that schools don’t offer a degree in that very specific term when in reality it doesn’t necessarily matter at the undergraduate level, e.g Neuroscience or Astronomy just to name a couple.
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If there is no decline button on each of the UC’s student portal than you can email admissions.
Just google UC campus name admissions for their email address.
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Nearly everything in life, including happiness, is measured against expectation. For college admissions, it would be exceedingly rare if an applicant is equally happy with all possible outcomes. S/he would feel happier with certain outcomes than with the others (or equivalently, less happy with those others).
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I don’t think it’s a matter of better than or less than, but more wondering if your student can find their people. If your student is a brainy, cerebral type, a party school might not feel like a good fit. My kid is science nerd who thrives on rigor and competition. For a school to be a good match we need to be confident he can find what he needs through the regular curriculum, honor college, etc…
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Yes, it’s about managing expectations and I think we as parents can do a better job of that!
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This is interesting because my S22 and S23 have very similar stats to your S23. Without realizing that they were employing any specific strategy, I can see in hindsight that this is what worked, based on their results. They were accepted to true safeties, but waitlisted at reaches and even solid matches where the demonstrated interest was slim to none. With S23, he was even waitlisted at a school that was arguably a safety, but where he was basically a “stealth candidate.” They were both admitted to a couple of their reaches (including 1 that claims they do NOT consider demonstrated interest) – all of those acceptances were from schools where they had shown a lot of demonstrated interest - not just campus visits, but zooms, emails/interviews with AO’s, made sure to show up when the AO visited their high school, did the “optional” video, emailed updates, etc. (With the exception to this being that my S23 applied to a Cal State school and that was a whole different ballgame.)
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Just a general thought that we should make sure that we as parents are raising resilient kids. Having expectations and goals are good, and with that having some preference for schools is natural… but at the end of the day, the most important factor is always the student and what they do with their opportunities. So, a student with a good mindset who has to go to a safety, instead of the Ivy they wanted, will still find a lot of success.
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Among many other things, peer quality.
Peer quality also often determines the level at which classes are taught.
Networking.
…
…
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I think this is different than what I was interpreting some of the statements I read above to mean. I believed that people were saying that even if their children weren’t miserable at a safety, that they wouldn’t be happy. But it’s like saying, we’re going on vacation and here are the options we’re looking at:
- Relaxing vacation in a cabin by a wooded lake (i.e. unlikely to be known outside of the local area)
- A stay near Moab with Arches and Canyonland NPs (likely to be known by those in the know and from a wider area)
- A stay in Yellowstone National Park (world famous location)
All of them are going to offer nature-y opportunities and things for someone to enjoy. Would they maybe be happier if they visited Yellowstone than the lake an hour from their house? Quite possibly. But I wouldn’t turn my nose up at the cabin by a wooded lake, which sounds delightful. Also, there are people who prefer the Moab area to Yellowstone. Could be the climate, the desert scenery, etc. You can’t really say that Yellowstone NP is objectively better than Arches NP…they’re just different, even if one is more famous.
All of this to say, I think of creating a balanced college list kind of like choosing types of vacations…once you decide on what’s important for you, you can find different options that will work (and work within your budget). Even if you might be more excited by one option than another option, one should be happy with any of the options on the list.
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My S23 has a superstitious way of opening his admission decisions…he waits to open it next to some neighbors. So far, it’s worked out for him, but it is really a test of patience as the process can take a day or two after decisions are in. It backfired on him a bit over the weekend as one of the Friday schools sent him a congratulatory email on Saturday…so he saw that email before doing his lucky routine.
Today is a big one for him with Rice. That’s one of his top 3 schools.
God I’m ready for this process to come to a conclusion. Having been through the waitlist process with S21…I feel for those of you that are sweating it out.
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yes and no. my kid may be better than those people in xyz, and those people may be better than my kid in abc. My kid wants more people around him that are good in xyz. A little bit of abc is good to have, and that’s ok. But he really wants a lot of xyz kids. The word better is a red herring.
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Student 23 ended up only applying to 4 “safety” schools that were visited prior to application, no reaches. We knew they offered guaranteed stats-based admissions, provided specific ABET-accredited programs of interest, offered specific ECs of interest, and could be in budget with stats-based scholarships. Our student limited the college search to specific states, which was not my idea but made the research easier.
I thought we should build a college list from “safety schools” on up with a few matches/reaches for Student 23 with the goal of having opportunity to pursue specific ABET-accredited CS/engineering major(s) at a college that meets our student’s other interests and preferences. Because of the competitiveness of CS/engineering admissions and due to questions as to if the often-attended state university would meet our student’s interests, developing a college list with “safety” schools (guaranteed admissions due to stats) was important to us. The kid should be able to study what the kid wants to study.
During our high school counselor meeting in August, our student shared the list of 4 colleges and explained “why” each was on the list. Our student asked if other colleges should be added and “Do I need reaches?” Our student seemed relieved when told that the college list reasoning was solid and you don’t need to apply to reaches unless you want to. Based on that discussion, our student applied to the 4 “safeties” and moved on. In late fall, we revisited 3 of the colleges to gauge interest in submitting more applications – there was no interest. Our student selected a college as “very likely” in December, and then became fully invested this month after interviewing for and receiving a competitive full-tuition scholarship (big surprise!) at that university. Love the college that loves you.
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Congrats on a very successful college application process!
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@neela1 and @socalmom007, even small colleges have a couple thousand people. It could be the partiest party school, and your kid could be very much a study-hard-party-never type, and I am certain there will be a couple hundred people who fit your kid’s profile.
Is the problem, then, that we’ve been swindled by all the USNWR-type lists to think of colleges as monolithic entities, and so we think that because Option A College is of type P while Option B College is of type Q that there is no Q at OAC and there is no P at OBC?
I hope we’d treat a college education more seriously than and differently from a family vacation.
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Analogies may by their nature be imperfect, but they are nevertheless often useful.
If you feel that the analogy is so imperfect as to be unuseful, then explain why it doesn’t work.
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Wow, this thread is moving so fast today!
RE potential majors for my S24 & the difficulty, finding not highly rejective safety schools:
He is truly undecided, and he has struggled a bit to define the things that are interesting to him. But we’ve been talking about it and exploring different ideas and areas for the past six months. He is kind of circling around and narrowing in on some thing like human factors engineering. He likes thinking about how people think and how they interact with their physical environment and how they learn and how they use technology to interact and to learn. So this is clearly in the realm of psychology, but the “cognitive“ field, rather than educational or clinical which I found to be more heavily, supported at many schools with higher acceptance rates. But he is also a math and science kid (but not biology! 
), and really wants to incorporate those areas into whatever he does. He’s pretty sure he wouldn’t be happy just studying psychology on its own. So he wants to have an option for combining it with something like computer science or industrial engineering. There is also a possibility he would prefer to go in the direction of something like computational linguistics, which he has been learning about in the past few months and finds really fascinating, but doesn’t have a lot of exposure to yet.
For all of the schools I have researched I have looked at the psychology department to see how much depth they have in the cognitive field. And then I have also tried to see does the school have a pre-defined way to combine that cognitive psychology with either computer science or some kind of engineering-ish field (I have tried to be pretty broad about what this might mean). And, for schools that don’t have a way to combine them, the school could still stay on the good fit list if it has a linguistics department that has some classes in computational linguistics, and any way to get some technical studies at the same time.
(I looked at graduate schools in human factors engineering and most require a bachelor of science in some kind of technical field. Just a bachelor of science in psychology for most of the programs I looked at isn’t sufficient. So if that really is the direction he wants to go, he would need to double major in psychology and computer science or an engineering field, but he really doesn’t want to do heavy duty engineering so something more like industrial engineering is a better fit. And it turns out not too many schools offer industrial engineering.)
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