3.5 is far below your standards? I’m letting my kid get his license even though they got a C or two. I in no way equate grades to maturity or ability to be safe in a car so grades and car privileges were always separate in my house. I’m not perfect and I don’t expect my kids to be either. (Our insurance policy considers anything B average or above to qualify for the good student discount).
Some kids do well when pushed. If I nudge mine, he just digs his heels in deeper and resists. I don’t want him hating learning. My daughter thrives with “mean teachers” as she calls them with high standards. My son, if he isn’t interested in a subject, there is zero ways to coerce him into submission and it creates more drama at my house.
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@Gatormama Where are you located?
3.5 is .5 below my requirement to drive. First an 89.5 is an A here. It was a reasonable requirement when I made it. He had never gotten less than 100% in a class. I don’t feel like I can go back on my word. When you get a C because you literally refuse to do any of the work besides take the tests, you do not get privileges. For him, grades equate to mental health, which in my mind equates to whether he is safe to drive. It would not be a fair requirement for a lot of kids but for mine it is fair and the 4.0 does actually mean something in relation to his ability to drive safely (mostly respond appropriately when he gets pulled over).
Due to scale, we have to do some calculations to get his GPA - hoping it improved some. I guess we need to do unweighted GPA too since some scholarship applications ask for that as well.
Question - does any one have a college list template where we keep our research in? i.e. an excel spreadsheet with colleges potentially interested in with columns containing NPC, size, major offered, distance from home, merit offered, etc. I am fixing to tackle college mail to input all of this so that he can start narrowing down his list.
I have an excel sheet I keep research in. Mostly because I was finding I would write off a school for one reason or another (usually price) and then forget and waste my time trying to track down likely price all over again. It most likely would not be helpful to others because it is generally musical theater and diversity related. A couple of set up hints. Put every school you look into on the sheet, even ones that are a hard no. Make a column for location and start with the state postal code when you enter the information (that way you can reorganize by state if you need to). Make a column for total COA (who cares how much is R&B or fees at this point). Most schools go by unweighted GPA for scholarships, by the way. I also had a school size, study abroad, and a “hard no” column (so I can organize with that at the end). Again, the trick is to put the “no’s” on the sheet!
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Good suggestion - especially recording the No’s (because if you’re like me, I forget and end up going in circles lol).
Oh, now you’ve triggered my particular nerdiness!! Apologies for what I am certain will be an overly long and very excited response.
I have four children, and had spreadsheets for D17 and D19, have one for D23, and D25 (yes, only a rising 9th-grader, but she is also an overplanner) got me to start one for her earlier this summer after being on me about it for (I am not exaggerating) over a year.
The crucial thing: The spreadsheets are going to differ depending on the needs of the child. I mean, yeah, there will be some basic information needed across the board (college name, location, zip code is nice if you are like me a GIS nerd, total and undergrad enrollment, 50th and 75th %ile ACT/SAT scores, NPC results once you get down to a manageable number to run them all, and the like), but a lot of what will be the most important ones will depend on the child. So for D17 there was a measure of proportion of faculty on the tenure track (yes, she’s the child of a college professor, how did you know?); for D19 there was distance from extended family; and for D23, there’s average sunlight during the darkest part of the year (which turns out to be surprisingly easy to get—lots of people need that information for designing solar electricity systems).
My suggestions, in no particular order:
- If at all possible, involve your child in the construction of the spreadsheet (which may or may not work early on, depending on your child’s level of interest—for D23 it took having one already in existence to get her interested, whereas D25 is the main driver for hers)
- Use a shareable system, so most likely either a shared Excel file on Office 365 or a Google Sheets document (we’ve used the latter for ours)
- If you must have columns including things like USNWR rankings, keep it hidden when it isn’t actively in use—it’s too easy to be distracted by other people’s rankings when you’re trying to create your own (though it’s interesting having them as a point of comparison afterward!)
- Before making cuts to the list, create an archive copy of the sheet you’re working with in case you decide later you want to bring back a college or two, so that you don’t need to re-research all the data (which was a lifesaver for D23’s list, when at one point we realized we had cut a bunch of colleges wrongly because of a sorting error on our part—we simply went back to the archive sheet, made a copy of that, reapplied the sort correctly, and sliced the right colleges off the list)
- Start with only the columns you know you need, and then add columns as new needs come to the surface
- I would strongly suggest that you have some sort of financial health measure—endowment, endowment per student, and Forbes financial grades (though those are only available for private colleges) are probably the easiest, but whatever you choose it’s an easy and worthwhile “first cut” (or second cut, if you started out looking only for colleges with a particular major) to narrow the initial list
And finally, choices will ultimately be qualitative. Yes, there will be some purely quantitative cuts—D23 refuses to apply to any college with under 3k students, or with a minimum monthly average kWh/m²/day of sunlight below 2.5—but you’ll eventually need what my D23 calls a “vibe check”, and you may not be able to have a column that captures that, and that is fine.
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@Theaterforme You of course know your kid best. I just know that dealing with my own sons mental health issues for many years which peaked at an inpatient mental health admission last year, I learned a lot about my kid and what they really need for support and to be successful. Changed my approach to kid #2 quite a bit.
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In NE PA, @Novacat9191
I just use Google Sheets.
I had different categories for D19, b/c she had a whole theater concentration.
For S23, the columns are:
location, distance from us, size, endowment, application fee, tuition, R&B, total COA (I ignore all the other categories that colleges dream up, like books, personal expenses, travel), meets 100% need?, avg. non-need award; any scholarships we would aim for; academic notes like honors college etc; is stacking allowed; CSS used; majors; avg GPA; 25-75 of ACt/SAT; admission rate; what’s most important for admission; academic reach/match/safety; financial reach/match/safety
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We have also used Google sheets. Our categories included: Name, Location, Enrollment, Acceptance Rate/Admission stats/Middle 50, Total cost, Merit/additional FA info, App dates, Endowment, Travel time, Major, Notes. We had a separate page for specific application info (Deadlines, Supplemental Essays, Demonstrated interest, Letters of Rec, App fees, etc.) so she could use it as a checklist.
I agree with – and share a nerdy spreadsheet fondness for – @dfbdfb. D21 was looking exclusively at small, liberal arts schools. Things like advising and how easy it would be to change your major weren’t relevant. D23’s categories will include OOS vs. in state acceptance and % of students, which didn’t apply to D21. She’s also more undecided on major, so understanding what potential majors might be for her, and how competitive those are, will be good to know. D21 didn’t consider any schools with prevalent Greek life or D1 athletics, but both of those are priorities for D23.
All that being said, you can Google “college list template” if you want a starting point.
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Great post! Totally agree. Totally agree a lot of the columns dependent on the kid. General admissions stats don’t really matter for us because my kid is musical theater. So my chart doesn’t contain that. And shareable is key!
oh i love google sheets too! I hope you all enjoy making these spread sheets. there are some great ideas here!
we did this for D16 & S20 - but with our 4 kids, we are very cost-centric and merit-focused as we really hope to have them graduate without loans. So ours were/are very financially focused.
on the financial side, one thing we did was to figure out AP and DE credits, if they would apply to each school and majors of interest, what scores were needed to get credit, and if the schools charge by credit hour, or by the semester. The AP scores did not influence the ultimate decisions on any of our 3 so far; but they helped with figuring out finances.
Programs of study mattered in particular to D16 who studied architecture. It was a puzzle. Was a 4 year undergrad and 2 yrs masters instate better than a combo 3yrs UG+2 years MA OOS? That took a lot of figuring out; but ended up all for nothing honestly as she transferred after 1.5 yrs! So - i guess with that in mind, i’d encourage you to have safeties and instates in this list as well in case there’s a transfer back home.
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We’ve gotten a few recommendations for Princeton Tutoring. I know they do virtual, but they might have local tutors available for the summer as well.
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My soul is heavy. I am likely doing to leave my job and lose the tuition benefit. I want to stay but unsure if my mental health can take it. I am not sure how much more I can sacrifice myself for my kid’s possible benefit. I feel like I have failed my children.
I’m so sorry. It sounds like you’re dealing with a toxic place to work? That’s not worth two more years of stress until your kid graduates, imho.
On the positive side, it’s an amazing time to be looking for another job. Lots of openings, not sure if it’s relevant for your field, though.
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Not necessarily much comfort in the moment, but if your job is wearing you down to the point that your mental health is suffering, then that can’t be great for your kids, so trading your own health for tuition sounds like ultimately a good trade.
After all, successfully raising one’s children isn’t measured in tuition benefits.
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Really dumb question - when y’all refer to 25-75% ACT/SAT, are you recording the ACT/SAT score range for the top 25% vs 75%? Why? And where do you find this specific information? I know that where your kid’s score falls in their (the school’s) range plays a good role in merit based monies, right? This is my 3rd kid, and I am finally sitting down to learn about all of this. With hubby being unemployed for almost a year now, finances are going to play a huge role in where he goes to school.
As for where I find them, I usually just lift it from the stats listed on the USNWR site, but they’re available a fair number of places.
And they’re reported percentiles—the crucial ones to my mind are 50% (which is the median, though some places you find the average instead, but honestly for a 50% measure they’re generally very close and both equally useful) and 75% (which is the 75th percentile—the point where 75% of all entering students fall at or below that number—and which is thus an incredibly useful benchmark for gauging merit aid possibilities). I don’t find the 25th percentile numbers as useful, but sometimes colleges only report the 25% and 75% values, so you can use those to interpolate the 50% value.
You do have to remember that 50% is only the median (or mean, depending), which means that a solid chunk of applicants are admitted with lower scores—it’s easy to get the mindset that an average is a minimum, especially on CC. However, it’s a dicey place to be for those of us chasing Big Merit Aid™.
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The 25th and 75th SAT/ACT percentiles mark the boundaries for the middle 50% of admitted students. You can find the SAT/ACT percentiles along with a breakdown of the percentage of students admitted within each range, GPA percentiles, and even class rank on a college’s Common Data Set (CDS). You can find the CDS via a simple internet search (e.g. ASU common data set).
I really like the level of detail of the CDS and used it for every college D14 and D19 were interested in and will definitely use it for S23. We used the data to create a college list of safeties/matches/reaches and also to hone in on important factors to us like demographics and the importance of different elements in admissions.
Many colleges have merit aid eligibility guidelines listed on their websites. For example, WVU has a matrix that shows how much estimated merit aid your student could receive based on SAT and GPA. Alabama also has a scholarship chart. You may have to search around a bit, but the information is out there. People on these forums are a wealth of information too so don’t be afraid to ask away.
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