<p>I also am the parent of a B+ student who is now hearing back from colleges, so I thought I would share the results and my advice. </p>
<p>I sympathize with many of the parents who have been posting to this thread. I was a valedictorian, #1 in my class, etc., and was accepted at every school I applied to (I wound up at Northwestern). I expected getting my kid into college would be easy -- and it is for kids who are the A and A+ mega-SAT score students (my son has a friend at Harvard who was a teen Jeopardy champion; was there any doubt Harvard would take him?). Though he got all As in elementary and middle school, by my S's sophomore year it was pretty clear that he wasn't going to be Ivy League material (can't blame this on my husband, either -- he went to graduate school in econ at Univ. of Chicago). While this made the college search more difficult, it also made it more interesting.</p>
<p>My son has a 3.3 unweighted GPA (based on the inclusion of his 1st sr. semester grades) and a 3.8 weighted GPA; also SAT scores of 590CR/590M/640W. Has taken 5 AP classes and all other honors classes during HS, but has not done very well on the AP exams (he has never been a very good taker of timed tests). He also has participated in a lot of ECs, including a lot of volunteer work and he was the head of his school's a cappella group, though he is not an athlete (he took fencing lessons, irregularly). I think he wrote a great CA essay and some very good supplementary essays, but I know that the essays are the most subjectively evaluated of all application information. He also got recommendation from teachers who really like him and care about him.</p>
<p>He applied to 16 schools because, to be frank, we had no idea where he might be accepted; for most of them his gpa and SAT scores were at the low end of the middle 50% range. His personal requirements were that the schools have marketing/advertising majors, be small to medium-sized, have a decent Jewish population (he is one of 6 Jewish kids in his high school and he is sort of tired of being the token), and be in a well-regarded college town or in a metropolitan area. Two of the schools were large, public universities with great reputations, but he did not apply to any school in state. As of today, he has heard from 7 schools (the 2 public universities and 3 private colleges) and has been accepted at 5, and waitlisted at 2, which were two of the 5 reach schools he applied to. He has gotten merit $$ from every school but the last one to which he was accepted (and we may still hear from them since he just got his acceptance last week). The two public universities gave him $3,000/year and $2,000/year; the 2 private colleges gave him $12,000/year, making them competitive with out-of-state tuition for state schools. </p>
<p>Based on our experience (at least so far) there are schools that really want your B+ child and are willing to him him/her $$ to go there. Even if my son doesn't get into another school, he would be happy going to any of the schools to which he has been accepted. I would recommend reading books like "Treasure Schools" and "40 Colleges That Change Lives" for ideas on schools that might fit your child's academic and social personality --there really are dozens (if not hundreds) of them out there. </p>
<p>To conclude: Try not to get hung up on where you want your children to go to college; help them find colleges where they will be happy, intellectually challenged, socially active, and not overly stressed. Once your child gets excited about finding those schools, you and he (or she will) realize that there are actually a surfeit of options that meet most of their requirements.</p>