My experience was closer to today’s kids than most. I went to one of the most competitive public high schools in the country. My good friend in high school was admitted to UC Riverside despite being in the bottom third of my high school class. Most people I have met that are my age (that did not attend my high school) just went to college locally or went where their parents attended.
I applied to 6 schools and got into three (Ohio Wesleyan, Occidental and UC San Diego). I was told that my high school inverted my class rank and May have got into UCLA if I raised a stink but preferred my other options.
My older daughter applied to 11 schools and 12 schools for my younger daughter. I received a little help from an outside counselor (she did tell me about Occidental and a few smaller schools I had not heard of at the time) and took an SAT prep course over a couple weeks. But, most of the process I just had to figure out myself. My younger daughter had an outside counselor who we bought 6 hours from. I was pretty much the college counselor for both. Both my daughters used Khan Academy and SAT prep tests from a book. Both went to a College prep Catholic high school but their experience was a little less tense than mine.
I don’t think any of the UCs cared or even knew about high-school-determined class rank even back then, since the UC application back then involved writing your courses and grades into the application and calculating a GPA by UC’s method (which may have been slightly different from now) – no transcript on application, but final transcript after matriculation to verify.
Also, back then, UCR was probably one of several campuses where having the minimum GPA (something like 3.3 as recalculated, or as low as 2.8 as recalculated with a high enough SAT or ACT score) would result in admission.
In the mid 80s, UCR and UCSC were the Merced of today. I don’t know if they discarded the gpa from 9th grade or not…which was wretched but I finished HS with a 2.79 and a 1030 SAT or 1070 SS but I think it was just one seating back then (so 1030). BU. Syracuse (but not the desired Newhouse which I had to transfer into) - no problem. Only Northwestern, my dream, was out of reach of the 9 I applied to.
Very different world than today. I knew zero about test prep but thank god I learned b4 my gmat where I got a 630 (high in the mid 90s) because I fixed my SAT shortfall through constant self study which was the English section. I couldn’t even get past 400 til my 4th try on the hs SAT. And had zero parental or school direction.
Yet many a fine college admitted me and my dad’s full pay $$.
At the time I was told UC’s took top 1/8th of California students so pretty notable that a kid in the bottom third of my high school class got into a UC. Not the same as now but still notable.
Someone in admissions at UCLA told me about the class rank issue and even suggested I get it corrected as my high school made a mistake (didn’t seem to have an impact anywhere else). I called because I had a few friends that got into UCLA but not UCSD and was curious why.
The target (then and now) was top 1/8 statewide, but it was defined in GPA (and somewhat SAT and ACT then) terms, not by high-school-determined class rank like is currently done in Texas.
I do not recall any possible way for UCs to know my high-school-determined class rank when I applied.
My kids’ experience was very different from mine. But my own experience differs from a number of experiences above.
My parents knew about schools as both had PhDs. They came from immigrant Jewish families where the first priority was making sure the kids had good educations. My mother was very smart but my father was pretty close to as brilliant as they come (as one of my examples, the chairman of the MIT Physics department told me that my father was one of the smartest people he’d ever met). They had the same desire to make sure we had good educations. We were not rich but were not poor and my parents were able to pay full tuition for me and my siblings (as I recall, tuition, room and board was $4K annually). I did very well in school, had a summer job writing software, and was painfully shy and without any social skills. I was skipped twice, but unskipped once because I would have been taking classes with my sister. I graduated high school at age 16. I applied to three Ivies (Princeton, Yale, and Cornell) and what I thought were two safeties (University of Michigan Honors College and University of Rochester). We had visited Cornell and Rochester when my older sister applied to college and visited Princeton and Yale. I don’t believe we visited Michigan. I got into all but Yale, which waitlisted me if I recall correctly.
My two kids were different from me and each other. ShawSon is exceedingly bright but is also severely dyslexic. We ended up having to partially home school him because honors math classes were painfully slow for him (he did junior honors math in 3 hours a week in one semester) but he was not learning to write the way his very highly regarded suburban school taught English. He did not want to visit schools because, he said, he did not want to fall in love with a school that had a 10% chance of admitting him. Instead, he said, “I will do a very good job on my applications and I will apply to more schools and then we can triage if I get into a lot.” We were nervous because we did not know how schools would evaluate him – he could not take a foreign language but at the same time the deputy superintendent of schools wrote a rec saying that she volunteered to write a recommendation for him because she was confident he was going to make a significant impact in the world. So, he chose to apply to more than 15 schools including five (?) Ivies, all the top NESCAC schools, and some safeties (Bates, Rochester, Vassar, Sarah Lawrence, and UMass Amherst). He got into a lot of schools and we went to accepted student weekends/visits to three schools.
The whole holistic admissions process made ShawD anxious (and she was anxious to start). ShawWife is Canadian and thus our kids are dual citizens. ShawD learned that Canadian schools would judge just based upon grades and SAT/ACT scores and so we visited 7 Canadian schools. All said that they would admit her so she only applied to two and went to one of them. However, she transferred after the first semester and happily attended a US school that a year prior, would not have met her criteria.
It really varies. My S22 had an excellent GC who met with him 4/5 times between the end of junior year and the first half of senior year. She reviewed his 2 potential common app essays and recommended one over the other and was helpful in encouraging his TO strategy. She reviewed his school list (very realistic for him) and suggested one or 2 additions to round it out. As we are full pay (and were willing to pay for whatever school he wanted to attend) and weren’t seeking merit, we didn’t get into FA discussions with her. That being said, not all the GC’s at our HS are nearly as good. Some only meet with the kids 1/2 times and aren’t helpful in terms of selecting colleges etc (beyond hooking kids up to SCOIR). Ours happened to have prior experience as a private college counselor which is somewhat unusual for a public HS so we definitely lucked out (as kids are assigned alphabetically). Fortunately S24 has the same GC.
I agree. And also for a dyslexic student. I’m not sure where that came from. I don’t think he identified as a math-oriented student at the time and was interested in behavioral economics, strategy and politics. When he went to college, he became an accidental math major as I suggested he take a math course every semester as they had no reading. Plus, if he was interested in econ grad school, what they cared about was his mathematical abilities. He inherited a lot of my father’s mathematical abilities (my dad was once described to me as a virtuoso mathematican among theoretical physicists). It turned out that ShawSon didn’t even read the text books except for one course – he only did the problem sets and took the tests always got A or A+. The course where he needed to read the book before doing the problem sets was Real Analysis. In either Real Analysis or Groups, Rings and Fields, he got the highest test scores in the class but the professor gave him an A- because he didn’t attend the lectures.
I think the attraction of Sarah Lawrence were a) a fairly fluid curriculum; and b) an attractive female to male ratio. Probably all of the safeties except Rochester (which is a very good school across a lot of fields) and UMass Amherst were odd choices.
The private school that my kids attended (where I still work) has dedicated “college counselors,” not guidance counselors. It’s a college prep school where 99.999% of the grads attend a four year college. The college counselors are very good and very knowledgeable and they offer a lot of help. It goes without saying that that is the exception and not the rule…it certainly wasn’t like that at my high school back in the day…
Our public high school has an unusual mix of very wealthy students (even the literal billionaires kids attend the public….the private are for rich kids who cant quite cut the highly competitive nature of the upper level classes at the school) and a significant minority of low income immigrant kids. The GC’s do no college counseling. We have several dedicated college counselors but the wealthy kids are highly discouraged from using them so that they can devote their resources to those who can’t afford a private college counselor. It’s the same with the drivers Ed class offered at the school. They really encourage the wealthy kids to take the class at a private drivers Ed school by reserving the best times for thise who truly need the school to provide it.
I applied to three schools and got into all. I only visited one of them, Princeton, because my parents were afraid I would get in and they wanted to dissuade me from attending. Their plan backfired.
I went to a public high school in a small town in a southern state in the late 1970s. Students who went to college went to the local Big U. I wanted something different, to go out into the world and meet new people and see new things. Nobody knew what to do with me. I made my own way.
I don’t think we did any SAT prep in those days. I didn’t, but I was a good test taker so it did not matter.
My kids applied to more places and had more choices, more college visits, and were better prepared. Their stats were good. (Arguably mine were better because I took those tests cold and did as well.) Their guidance counselors were weak. One kid had no idea what he wanted and ended up at our very strong local Big U after all that essay writing and traveling. After four years of college and then four years working, I think he has a better idea what he wants to do and the grad school application process will be more meaningful to him. Other kid also had no idea what he wanted to study but knew he wanted to play his sport so that desire landed him at a solid but far away LAC. He almost stayed near home and attended the local U. He would have if not for that last minute chance to play his sport a few more years.
The biggest difference? I knew I wanted to leave home and go out into the world and so I worked to achieve that. My kids were happy enough where they were and could get what they wanted near home. (Kid two would have stayed close if not for the sport.)
Do you think your kids are more risk averse than you were at their age? Mine definitely seem more risk averse. I was totally ready to just hop on a plane, go far away to a school I had never visited, and figure things out once I got there. My kids want to be more sure of things first.
Yes, I think that is part of it. They have become bolder over the years. I had a learner’s permit at fourteen and a drivers license the day I turned sixteen. My kids got their DLs the year they were sixteen but it was with some coaxing on my part. Once they could drive, they were excited about the freedom but they did not look forward to it the way I did.
I don’t think my kids are more risk averse, but they certainly have a lot more opportunities available here. I knew I needed to escape from my deeply impoverished home town in the UK and I was never going back after college because there was nothing to go back for. Even so, most people who grew up there didn’t leave. My kids grew up in a place (Silicon Valley) where the main reason to leave is that there’s so much here that it’s too expensive.
My college journey was pretty simple and unlikely to be realistic today. I told my parents (who were teachers though neither had a university degree) when I was 8 that I’d decided to go to Cambridge (as I recall because they were better at rowing than Oxford, though I’d not visited either place). I skipped a grade in elementary school and another in middle school. Fortunately they sent me to a selective middle and high school (90 minutes each way by bus from home) that sent significant numbers each year to Oxbridge (an experience somewhat like “The History Boys” film) and was mostly top of the class in science and math. Applied just to Cambridge at 15 and got in, then took a gap year to work and grow up before I went to college.
I see that in my kids, too. They grew up in a larger city with more opportunities. They had friends, family, stimulation. Life was good at home—and familiar. Why leave?
fwiw H was more like the kids. His own parents were refugees so forced to leave home. He grew up in a place he loved so was reluctant to go anywhere else.