It was very weird. I mean they all have those miserable emails where they plaster the kid’s name everywhere in a bid to grab attention, but this one kept sending things that played on anxieties about missing deadlines, etc., and they were just relentless. Literally daily. Small regional college. I first noticed because they were emailing me, too. Winner for best mailer strategy was a small state university: beautiful design, frequent enough mailings to stay on the radar but not enough to annoy, right-on copy. And no email.
No, it was a kid-driven process. The problem lay in exactly what you pointed out earlier in your post: knowing you have the money. I’m a nearly-median-income single parent, and I don’t have enough money to pay a state U COA – in other words, very normal for America, though not for this forum. She was (and is) responsible for 1/3 of in-state cost. Which meant that unless she was going to walk out with fairly significant debt for a 22-yo, she was going to have to work and save and keep the grades and scores up. Which she did. However, given the things she thought she wanted to do with her life, the flagship – any in-state – was also going to be the wrong place. We just don’t have the faculty and…well, anything much for going in that direction. It’s also exceptionally difficult to go from here to one of the pipeline grad schools – considerably harder, if you ask me, than going from a decent high school to the undergrad schools that do the subject well. So I told her that if she genuinely wanted that life, which certainly wasn’t required, she was going to have to want it real bad, and (a) pole-vault herself into one of the top privates that do have good depts in that area (the top schools are the only ones that offer enough fin aid to make it conceivable; mid-tier privates are well out of reach), (b) try to go abroad and hope political situations and exchange rates remain favorable, or (c) fight like hell for four years to get there from state flagship. A and B both require a fair bit of planning if you’re going to get there without money, especially if the fin aid situation’s further complicated by divorce. It’s not something you roll up to sophomore and junior year and start exploring unless you have cash. Visits alone become an issue, because the money isn’t there for that kind of travel, so then you’re looking at alternatives and eligibility for the poor-plane programs and the like, and those have to go on the calendar early.
In retrospect, all the choices were bad. I could’ve said, “Babe, you’re 13/14/15 years old, I’m not going to take your ambitious seriously even though you’ve been talking about them since you were four years old, you’ll figure it out on your own,” but obviously that’s not great. I could’ve been more stagemama, freaked at her for having the wrong kinds of ECs for the field and not shiny enough scores and grades and insisted she change her life to line herself up for college apps, but I can’t bring myself to be that psycho. And she could’ve dropped her ambitions, not tried, etc., but that’s…weird and I don’t see how it’s good.
In the end, her decisions and the actual things she did with her time took her to a place that’s difficult but honest. Yes, she’s interested in the field, but she figured out pretty well what the people who wind up there are like, and just doesn’t like them or their high school EC friend groups, also she didn’t want to do school like a psycho. Which I think is great. Yes, if you don’t like the people who tend to congregate in an area, don’t go there, you’ll probably be miserable. And doing anything like a psycho is probably not great if you have any choice at all about it. So my guess is she’ll actually follow her interests and allied subjects in college and somehow find her own path through. The pipeline schools aren’t necessary because if she makes any kind of career there, it probably won’t be anything close to a standard one.
Despite all that, though, I think the process is weirdly and unhealthily – abusively – binary. If you know you’re going to go to Local State U, not interested in anything else, and have enough money for that (she has friends in that situation, and, like your friends’ son, they had a very low-stress app process), or you just have loads of cash for going more or less wherever you want, fine, no stress, no thought need be given, you can shut the industry’s hectoring out and do admissions at your leisure. Otherwise? You’re a child getting too-personal-sounding emails and texts from literally dozens of adult recruiters every day for years, and you have to pay some attention to them, and you have a labyrinthine app process to contend with. And to the rest of the messages from universities and high schools yelling at you about college and success and scores and tests.
Did she get something out of the experience, yeah; I wrote about it in the other thread. But I’m not a bit convinced it was worth going through for what she got out of it.