I toured… 4… and applied to 2. Got accepted to both. I remember being sick as heck when touring the one school and I got home afterwards and puked… My mom was like, do you want to apply to that one? I’m like honestly I don’t remember anything about it other than wanting to hurl… so, uh, no? LOL.
The other one that I toured and didn’t apply to, I knew I hated pretty much the moment we got there for the tour… I remember sitting through this welcome thing, and then afterwards asking to leave. The funny thing is, quite a lot of my coworkers went to that school and they’re always amazed at how much I hated it from the get go.
I think there was a definite mindset in my region (great Seattle area) for many decades after WWII that there was no reason to travel hundreds or thousands of miles to college when we had good local options for those who wanted to continue their education. And, for those who wanted to get right to work, Boeing and other companies offered good wages and benefits.
I was a first-gen college student, navigating the application process on my own. At first, I applied only to the local (flagship) state university, along with all of my friends, assuming I would live at home and commute, to save money. When I found out I qualified for a National Merit scholarship that would make attending a regional LAC cheaper than attending the state U, I applied last minute and was accepted. That campus was 250 miles from home, and my first visit was the day I arrived in my 11-year-old Datsun packed to the ceiling with everything I thought I needed for the semester. There was no one from my suburban high school at the college while I was there.
My oldest applied to half a dozen schools; we visited two of them. He ended up choosing the same LAC I had attended. My youngest always knew that she wanted to go there, too, but I forced her to apply also to the state U, as a backup. Fortunately, she made it into the LAC.
When I was in high school (class of ‘84), virtually all of my college-bound friends were headed to either U of Wash or WSU. In our local demographic, very few people went to the East Coast, or even to California. My kids went to a high school about four miles from mine. By then, a new branch of the state university had opened up a mile from their high school, and the default choice for many of their classmates was this new branch campus, especially for the many students who had taken Running Start classes at the local community college. For both my kids and me, high school counselors offered no guidance (and my kids’ principal wondered aloud why so few students went to college out of the area . . . ).
Same here. If you lived in SE Michigan in the 70’s, you could get a great job with the car companies (Ford in my area) right out of high school, and many did. I had always wanted to work in a hair salon (still do) and got a scholarship to beauty school which was considered a fine option (and I graduated third in my class of 650). If you wanted to go to college, that was fine, too, but you didn’t need to go farther than Dearborn, Ann Arbor, Ypsilanti, or Lansing to do so. Wayne State, Henry Ford Community College, Oakland Community College, and Lawrence Tech were also fine options. I don’t recall anyone being “counselled” into or out of whatever plans they had. We all just got on with whatever lives appealed to us.
I’m curious and it would be great if parents shared which college they attended, especially for those of you who somewhat serendipitously ended up at an LAC.
I applied to UMass Amherst, CU Boulder, URI, Kenyon, Hobart & William Smith, and Skidmore. Got in to all except URI. Ended up at CU then transferred junior year to UMass Boston for financial reasons. Best thing that ever happened to me—met DH at school
In Boston.
Right?! It was my absolute safety so I was in total shock. My mom wanted me to go to Kenyon, HWS gave me virtually a full ride, but I chose CU. It was 12k per year for OOS tuition at the time, so cheaper than Kenyon even with airfare. It became too much for her as a single mom after a couple of years, so I came home and went to UMass Boston.
It’s funny, my mom is still mad at URI, and when both of my boys applied there she was not enthusiastic, lol. She’s very loyal.
I think I may have posted this before, but when I was applying to college in the 1980’s, my parents were vehemently against any kind of test prep for the SAT’s because they were worried that if I got too high a score I would have potentially been accepted at a college that would have been too hard for me.
My son and daughters had friends who took standardized tests 5+ times…
I lived in CA but went to college at Syracuse U. But I remember in Summer, taking classes at Palomar Junior College - for I want to say $5 a credit. So $15 for a class.
I can go one better, I did it to myself! There were thick practice books for sale but I refused to get one. I was under the delusion the SAT was accurately measuring readiness for college and ability level and I didn’t want to do anything to give a misleading result. I somehow thought taking the test cold was “best”. Boy, the things I wish I could tell my 17-year-old self.
Current in-state tuition at California community colleges are $46 per semester unit, so a year’s worth of courses (30 semester units) would be $1,380 for tuition.
Supposedly, it was $5 per semester unit in the 1980s. Today’s price is an 820% increase. However, $5 in 1985 is about $13.74 now by CPI inflation, so the increase is more like 235% in real terms.
Have to echo others vis a vis the lack of guidance counseling back in the day. All we got was access to a computer program (in the guidance office) of sorts that spit out a list of schools (on a dot matrix printer) based on your input. Not super helpful. Despite my modest upbringing my Dad attended a selective LAC and had his master’s degree so he was familiar with the world of private colleges and the fact that they often provided significantly more aid than public ones - at the end of the day it was cheaper for me to attend any of the privates I got accepted to than it would have been to go to UMass where I got $0. Without this parental guidance not sure where I would have ended up - the GC was certainly of no help.
I only did about 15 minutes of SAT prep, which was trying the sample questions in the booklet that included the sign-up form. I.e. basically test format familiarization. It did not look hard, except if you did not know the vocabulary words, but it did not seem like a good use of time to memorize “10,000 SAT words” or some such.
Same, other than telling us to have a range of schools my GC was an elderly nun who was basically steering everyone in the top 50% towards the same handful of Catholic colleges. Higher class rank meant you had her full support for more competitive schools.
Everyone in the bottom half of the class got pretty bad advice and a lot of pressure from her not to apply to certain schools. I remember a whole class meeting where she basically told the students in the bottom 50% that they were selfish to apply to more competitive schools because they could jeopardize the smarter girls’ chances since colleges would only take so many from each HS. This was nuts, because at my pretty competitive school, even the person who was last in my class was super smart with solid SAT scores and a decent gpa.
I remember she was furious at me for not applying to any Catholic schools.
Yikes. I attended a good suburban HS in MA where the top two kids in my class went to Princeton and Yale, respectively – so there were always kids going to good schools; however, the guidance counselors were not super helpful. I was in the “smart kid” group so I knew a lot of those kids, like myself, mostly got input from their parents instead of relying on our GC.
Is there guidance counseling today? My kids (rich school district) got a powerpoint.
For some at privates, magnets maybe and I can’t speak to other publics, but I don’t think kids are given necessary counseling today in most places.
But kids and parents in many cases, are more aware, as colleges have done a brilliant job at marketing themselves and the necessity of their project. The ranking publications, while some dismiss them, have certainly helped out the “industry.”
Our kids’ GC had way too much on their plates on top of college-related stuff, so I felt for them. For the most part, the parents I know report that the GC did whatever you asked of them and then some, but you had to know to ask to begin with (and what to ask). That was our experience as well. Considering the number of kids they were each assigned, they did a decent job of keeping kids apprised of what needed to be done to apply to schools—timelines, AO visits, etc. , but a good deal of independence was expected from the kids.
School counselors in pubic school in CT act as case managers for kids with IEPs and 504s along with sped staff, they deal with counseling and support for kids with social/emotional issues, call the crisis team when warranted, etc. And they do all the college counseling stuff. It’s too much.
I took the SAT once, with an evening preparation course - seems like it met 4 or 5 times and was very rudimentary. I did take the PSAT.
I only remember visiting one school, though we may have stopped by CMU on one of many trips to visit family in Pittsburgh each year.
I think I spoke with a “counselor” maybe one time in all of high school, for 15 minutes. When doing course selection one year.
I applied to three schools, admitted to one. I would certainly not advise a student today making CMU the least competitive school to which they should apply.
In terms of testing, neither of my kids did much preparation. I remember buying one book, and both took a few of practice tests. My oldest took 2 ACT and 2 SATs, my younger just one SAT in high school. She took it twice previously for talent searches.
We visited at least 20 schools between the two of them, but there was a decent bit of overlap between their targets.
Neither had a useful counselor, so that hasn’t changed.
They applied to 7 and 13 schools. That’s the biggest change.