<p>PelicanDad: What you’re describing is not the kind of supplemental “counseling” that is making my hair curl. Good luck to DC and your family. Keep us posted.</p>
<p>I thought it was interesting that among many of my child’s 12th grade classmates this year, many students no longer take SATs at all, choosing to focus solely on ACT tests. Maybe as a way to avoid SAT subject tests in some instances, maybe because they perceive they will perform better on them than SATs? Some students take both in 11th grade then pursue the option that seems better for their testing style. However, I know more than 1 student who passed on SATs totally (and they are kids from areas that have historically been part of the SAT domain, not midwest kids). </p>
<p>Related to this, these same kids are also wealthy students using private college consultants. </p>
<p>PelicanDad - I think there is nothing wrong with using a private counselor, especially in your case given a personal connection with the person you wish to hire. </p>
<p>In general, I guess its fine to go the private counselor route if one can afford it. Part of me wonders how much it really helps or if it is just symptomatic of the hype of college admissions or parents too busy to assist. Part of me worries that those of us without the additional financial resources to go that route put our children at a disadvantage vs. their peers. :-S </p>
<p>Gotta share a great “only in a small boarding school” anecdote. We are working on D2’s 12th grade curriculum which is a challenge because the school only offers calculus thru AB which she is completing junior year. So we have been debating between AP stats senior year vs only doing 3 years of math plus taking both AP bio and AP Physics C (took B in 10th grade). And of course we are running the 3 years of math option past the college counselor to see whether that would be a problem for colleges. </p>
<p>So today she emails that there is an additional possiblity, that the math dept. is coming up with additional options which may include an independent course, She only heard about this because she is married to D2’s math teacher and he casually mentioned in the car on the way home! Love it…!</p>
<p>If it was major financial outlay, I’d also be scratching my head and wondering a little at the value I was receiving from the BS tuition. In this case, since she’s here and DC’s not, this will probably amount to 2-3 “coffee consultations” over the summer & given she’s performing miracles at a small, Quaker school, I’m thrilled to supplement her income a bit, so seems like a win-win.</p>
<p>@SquashBro: All those schools, except for Yale, are turribl. HYP or bust, baby!</p>
<h2>I kid.</h2>
<p>In other news, 7D1 met with her college counselor last week, discussed a few schools/testing plan/life in general, and SAS CC provided her with a fairly long and varied list of schools to check out in addition to the ones they discussed. Have had some direct correspondence with SAS CC regarding a specific question that SevenMom and I had…CC got back to us with an answer fairly quickly.</p>
<p>SevenDad – that’s great that your D was given a nice list of schools to look into. My D is having her first one-on-one with the college counselor soon. I hope it’s a productive meeting like your D had. </p>
<p>We also don’t plan to supplement the school’s college counseling.</p>
<p>I have a suspicion that some private college counselors get business by ratcheting up the paranoia. Has anyone read <em>Crazy U</em>? The book begins with a presentation by a private counselor to a group of “high net worth” parents. </p>
<p>SquashBro, you have to visit the colleges yourself. We visited many of your list; they all have beautiful campuses. It depends on how you react to the colleges. </p>
<p>@MamaBear16: I think simply having a meeting was a good start. I admit to being a bit surprised by the length of the “check these schools out” list that SAS CC provided my daughter. I wonder if the number will put her off the process (more work during an already work-filled junior year)…too many pages of Fiske Guide to thumb through?</p>
<p>All of this has made me think about geographic diversity wrt her search…meaning, exactly how comfortable are SevenMom and I with our firstborn living on the opposite coast? It’s not just distance, but also the costs involved with ferrying her to and fro, and of course we want to visit occasionally, too, right? I can pretend that those costs don’t matter…but in tandem with travel for younger daughter’s sport, they can add up quickly. Sigh, the joys of parenthood.</p>
<p>FYI, I don’t think we’ll be able to do too much college visiting this Spring Break. So it’s going to be one hell of a summer…</p>
<p>SevenDad, my oldest found it helpful to visit colleges. </p>
<p>Other parents have told me to visit colleges while they’re in session, but that’s hard to do with a boarding school student. Missing a few days to visit colleges could ratchet up the academic pressure, due to missing class.</p>
<p>However, many colleges now run Summer session for their own students. Many have summer session for camps, high school students, or adults as well. A fair number allow students to take courses during the summers. So, if you time it correctly, you can visit a college during the summer, and some of the students walking around will be currently enrolled college students. I know Dartmouth requires all students to take a summer term. Vanderbilt and Duke offer it, as do many others. The information’s on the college websites. </p>
<p>Spring Break is a good time to visit, though. The tours are much smaller than during the summer. I’d recommend making a few day trips to nearby colleges, if you can. </p>
<p>As to transportation costs, college students don’t come home nearly as often as high school students. They’ve also been known to take advantage of internships and such. </p>
<p>@Peri: I think we may do the day trip-able schools in the few spare days we have over break (the girls’ two breaks do not align perfectly and a few of those days are taken up with a national tournament for 7D2). But alas, the trip to the Claremont Colleges will have to wait!</p>
<p>@seven, maybe we’ll bump into you when we go visit the claremont colleges, too! :-h </p>
<p>SevenDad – I have the same question about whether or not we want out D on the opposite coast… it will make traveling and visiting quite costly. It’s hard to find time to visit schools. Missing a few days can be very stressful for kids at challenging schools. Summer visits aren’t quite the same as when school is in session (although at the larger universities I think they actually have real summer sessions so it would be close…). I’m accepting the fact that there will be schools that my D will apply to without visiting, due to time and cost constraints and the fact that the current list (which is long and needs to be thinned of course) has schools all over the country. Definitely can’t be done in a week.</p>
<p>D also had her initial meeting with college counseling recently. She felt it went well and left with the task of putting together her own list of possible colleges to apply to. Believe they talked about how best to go about that process. I haven’t had a chance to really get all of what transpired from her, but I think Naviance and Fiske is probably where she is headed first. </p>
<p>I am feeling a bit behind on the whole visiting thing. We did 4 last summer but the Christmas ones had to be cancelled. D is definitely a little stressed, so we are getting her away to some place sunny over spring break. So maybe we can fit one visit in, before or after the trip. Feels like the whole process has just come on so quickly!</p>
<p>We are fortunate living in the Garden State in that we can visit a wide variety of types of schools within driving distance…small rural to large urban. I think I reported that over the summer we visited two schools (Connecticut College and Penn…where my wife and I went to school) that seemed to be two fairly disparate points on the spectrum in terms of size/location/etc. But daughter liked both, so that didn’t really help to narrow focus at all.</p>
<p>GMT, I can see a trip to Chicago and SoCal in our summer plans…but it will have to be worked in around 7D1’s work sched. (though I guess I should be happy she was offered a great research opportunity this far out). Perhaps we WILL see you there. I will wear a red carnation.</p>
<p>ChoatieKid is already a long flight away, so we can only hope he’ll end up closer to home for college. His passions defined his college list long ago. Until recently, Choate limited applications to ten: three reaches, three matches, three safeties, and your state flagship. They loosened this rule a bit two years ago, but don’t like to see kids applying to more than ten. Surprisingly, CC told CK that none of his eight choices are big stretches, and she threw a reach in there. I don’t think there will be any big surprises next year. After his summer programs, he will have visited all of his choices at least once.</p>
<p>D2 is thinking of applying to Caltech and/or Reed, (and we too are in the Garden State–enjoying our lovely weather, SevenDad?). I really can’t see travelling out, as our summer is very full already and I don’t get a lot of time off during summer. I’m thinking she can do on campus info sessions when the reps come, and if she gets in, we’ll vist. Unless she’s thinking of ED for one of them, in which case we’ll figure things out. Overall our inclination is to keep things within driving distance unless there’s something really special worth going farther for. </p>
<p>@Sudsie: My business partners and I closed the office due to the ice storm. It’s starting to melt now, but not very pretty out. And they say Sunday is going to be a few feet of the white stuff? Oh dear.</p>
<p>@ChoatieMom: I wish my daughter was as focused as your son at this point in the game. I think 7-9 schools on the final apply to list sounds reasonable. Depending on geo, we will try to get 7D2 to all of the schools on that final list. I would love it if she applied to one ED/EA…that way she could go into 2015 knowing she had at least one admit in hand.</p>
<p>Anyone else get a “magazine” sent to them recently featuring a range of private colleges? Sort of a “pay for play” version of USN&WR? I thought it was interesting that alongside small Christian colleges, institutions like Harvard, Cornell, and Princeton had listings.</p>
<p>My D got a magazine like that this week. I think it was called “Colleges and Universities” of something similarly vague like that. It had quite the range of schools, from some we never heard of to some Ivies. </p>
<p>Somehow we missed getting that one. I wonder if it’s because D2 checked “Jewish” for religion…D1 checked no religion and boy did we get mailings for Christian colleges–I think we got a mailing from Messiah College weekly.</p>
<p>@SevenDad, I am at work as we speak and unfortunately am scheduled to work Sunday as well…oh dear is right!</p>
<p>We got that magazine too. I think my D checked a religion and it seems to have invited every religiously affiliated college in the country to contact her. I guess they aren’t too discriminating about which religion!</p>
<p>Visits are a challenge for us. We’re on the west coast and the offerings are few and far between outside of the UCs. We are planning a trip to the Claremonts, USC, UCLA, and Berkeley at various times but hitting a lot of the east coast colleges will be a challenge. There will certainly be schools on D’s list that she hasn’t visited. She will probably have to content herself with talking to the regional reps when they visit her high school’s campus next year. </p>