Well, I thought calling it a redux was more diplomatic than calling it the KevinfromOC light thread 
Youāre right that R&B can be very high on some campuses. Iāve seen it as high as $15K-$19K.
We havenāt really separated R&B from the Cost of Attendance from our calculations. I want him to be on campus for at least the first year (and likely longer) so it makes sense for us to keep R&B as part of our equation.
Sorry, I canāt be much help on that.
Good thread. It would be helpful if you list the actual schools your son has applied to, because there a lot of parents who have stats like your son. You have already mentioned a couple that I thought of.
Of those you listed, I think Gonzaga and USD are possibilities. I think the others might be tough, especially Wake Forest, which I suspect is a high reach for your son.
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No diplomacy needed. Iām not trying to pass my son off as a high stats student, and Iām not trying to hide that our family is not upper-middle class.
If you feel comfortable saying āKevinfromOC Lightā thatās great. Iāll even roll with the ādumb and poor version of the KevinfromOC threadā.
There is no shame here. Iām proud of my kidsā accomplishments and my status. Stuff diplomacy and speak openly. 
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WFU is indeed a reach. We opted away from USD because it didnāt appear the aid would be there. I pushed hard for Gonzaga early, but he didnāt like it so I didnāt bother strongly encouraging him to apply. Now that the app deadline has passed, surprise surprise, he loves it. Kids.
Iām mention more schools by name as I go on.
Of course itās your thread, but as a user, itās going to be hard to have context for the threads without having to read each post individually, and to make suggestions without knowing where youāve applied. Did he apply to all the schools in post #11? Is he URM? I ask because you mentioned HBCUās.
You said:
āHowever, if you have suggestions for schools we should have applied to, I really want to hear them ā it may help others in the same situation.ā
Has he applied to Salisbury, Martha Washington, James Madison? Duquesne, Drake, Creighton, or Auburn? If you can give us some guidance, we wonāt be redundant or waste your time.
@EconPop , ETA, you can google colleges that have late application deadlines. Thereās a good list on prep scholar, but I canāt link it.
@EconPop, you have started a great thread and also wanted to congratulate you on the amount of early legwork done to give your son the most options.
Has your son applied to any small outside scholarships that help defray any costs? I also like to ask students/parents questions around if doing ROTC is an option, or working as a RA after freshman year is an option. I even met a student who became an low level employee at a top 25 school while going part time to a state directional school who was able to eventually transfer to the top 25 school and go tuition free while continuing to work.
I hope your son knows how lucky he is to have you guiding him through the process and you know that I am rooting for a great overall outcome.
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@Lindagaf , thanks for joining in. Youāre right that context would help other users. Iāll soon list more of the schools.
Also, I should clarify that my earlier statement that you quoted where I requested recommendations. Iām not requesting recos for my son specifically. I honestly think weāre done with the application part of this process and will choose from the schools to which heās already applied. I was asking for recos that might help other families in a similar situation.
If those recos duplicate my list, thatās a good thing. Our recos support one another. If the recos are not my list, it will add to the mix.
Thanks for the kind words.
We really missed the boat on a lot of outside scholarship opportunities. We applied to a few, but not as many as I had originally anticipated. Once I looked into them, I realized some required a lot of work for very small payouts; and others had significant payouts that required average application effort but offered lottery-like odds because of the number of applicants. We didnāt apply to many overall.
ROTC is a great option, but not likely for my son.
However, the RA idea is something that I could see him doing. Heās not a stranger to leadership roles, so I think he could slide easily into an RA role.
Thatās a great story about the student/employee. Very inspirational. Hopefully, my son wonāt work beyond any sanctioned Work Study assignments and possible RA work.
While it may be true that there are āa lot of parents who have stats like your sonā it isnāt at all clear from the above if he is an URM. Given that would likely have a very meaningful effect on his outcomes (and any recommendations that others might offer), I think it would be helpful for others for you to be more explicit on that point.
Son is URM, not 1st Gen. I wasnāt sure that status actually mattered much.
Iām not certain if being URM helps any. It sure doesnāt seem like it from a public university standing. Maybe from some of the private university settings, but I havenāt seen enough from our personal results to be convinced.
The CDS of most schools list race as either not considered or as an afterthought. I canāt think of a single school that mentioned race as Important or Very Important. And Iāve looked at a lot of CDS reports over the past 9 months.
We have a similar child that we are going through the experience with right now. Slightly different (homeschooled, attempting a performing arts major), but very average test stats and pell eligible. She has a more niche major that sheās had to account for, so her list was approached differently.
We decided not to target any top schools (for academics or her major), save one top 100 school- which deferred her EA. We are expecting a rejection from them sometime in the next couple of weeks. We have found that by going lower (much lower) down any ranking system- and not pretending she cares as much about academic rigor as sheās āsupposedā to, she has a list of schools that came in with acceptances and scholarships that left us with room and board or less.
Sheās had a fair number of rejections but theyāve all been major based (audition only major with two separate acceptances- one academic and one to the major) and not yet once for academics. Sometimes it can feel on here that there is no other average kids just scraping by, so I definitely appreciate your thread.
Our search was greatly complicated by the fact that we donāt have the possibility of a local school and commuting since we are a military family and will be relocating this summer- but as of right now itās all in turmoil and we donāt even know where.
The stats at UNC Wilmington have been creeping up, so that may have been a reach, but I would have expected an admission to UNC Charlotte. That he was denied gives me pause about his application as a whole, but I think you stated he was admitted to affordable schools, so there is a happy ending to this saga.
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I understand your pause about his application because of the UNCC decision. It made us think as well because we expected him to be accepted there. However, this process has taught me that sometimes there is no way to predict outcome.
For instance, he was denied at UNCW and UNCC, but yesterday he was accepted EA at Virginia Tech. Go figure.
This is one of the reasons we applied to so many schools. His stats place him in a nebulous space. Heās not guaranteed to be accepted at many of the schools heād most prefer to attend, but heās not guaranteed to be denied either.
I want to add that no student is guaranteed to be admitted (or denied) most schools. Reading the VA Tech threads yesterday was a clear reminder of that. Many high stats (4.0+ and 1350+) students were denied or deferred. And not just in the more difficult majors of Engineering and CS. High stats students were denied and deferred across the spectrum of majors.
This is a scene Iāve seen repeated in countless CC threads.
So, while some denials and deferrals my son receives gives us pause, I also know admissions is not a science. Admissions is an art, often an unpredictable art.
I donāt doubt my sonās application any more than I would doubt the application of a high stats student who was deferred from a top 20 school. The line goes, āqualified, good applicants are refused because it becomes a numbers game.ā If that line is good enough for high stats students at top 20 schools, it can apply equally to my son and his situation.
āI understand your pause about his application because of the UNCC decision. It made us think as well because we expected him to be accepted there. However, this process has taught me that sometimes there is no way to predict outcomeā.
@EconPop - I could not agree with you more. There is NO way to predict outcome despite the fact that many believe that they can. Never would have thought that the Ivy that DS09 entered on the common app at the last minute at the request of a teacher, would have accepted him and was affordable for him to attend. There were others in his magnet school with higher GPAās, higher SAT scores and were not acceptedā¦
It certainly is unpredictable, which I think adds immeasurably to the stress of the whole process. Sometimes a rejection to a supposed safety can be a signal that there was a glaring error or red flag in the application, which seemed unlikely given your level of involvement, but glad to hear there wasnt such an issue.
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Thanks, @milgymfam . We both have very different processes from the majority here on CC. Not to mention your situation, while similar to mine in many respects, is very different in other aspects. And neither is easily found in CC forums.
Iām glad to hear you focused your search on non-100 targets.
Modifying our rankings expectations has been very helpful for us. While the shift was initiated because of average stats, I have found that the quality (the true quality) of the schools doesnāt necessarily go down as the rankings decrease.
Schools may be separated by 120 spots on the USNWR list, but appear very similar when compared side-by-side. The graduation rates may be similar. Ditto for student income outcomes, and admitted students test scores, and student happiness on campus, and many others.
We came to realize that Colleges are very much like everything else in life. The unknown movie might be as good or better than the blockbuster everyone is talking about. The mom-and-pop restaurant might have better food and better prices than the national chain superstar seen on television all the time. Vacationing at a small hotel along the lake might be more fun than spending $4K at Disneyland.
And maybe, just maybe, attending school #215 will deliver the same experience/result as attending school #88. And it was eye-opening to realize different judges handed out sometimes vastly different rankings. If a school can be ranked #30 on one list but #60 on another, and #115 on a third how precise should we assume any ranking is?
I began to use the rankings as guides, not a fixed map.
@EconPop - this has been really interesting! And Iām cheering you and your son along with each āinstallmentā of this journey. One question- what (if any) discussions does your kid have with his classmates on this, and does it impact his perception on the process? There was a really mind-boggling thread that just got closed down where a parent was angrily reacting to their kid not getting into their dream school, while their daughterās classmate got in with āonlyā a 3.0. Is your son choosing to keep things private from his classmates, or he is comfortable sharing with them?
POST 4
LIBERAL ARTS COLLEGES
I want to focus a little more on the LACs.
In a hunt like ours, I now feel there are three main components:
- In-State Publics are by far the best option for regular stats kids in financially-restricted families. If a student has slightly higher stats and/or the family has fewer financial restrictions, this can be widened to include some OOS Publics that either provide in-state tuition to OOS applicants, or who provide significant merit aid for good students who donāt have rock star stats.
- Private universities that either explicitly or covertly provide full-need (or near full-need) aid to accepted students.
- LACs that fit the description of #2.
It may seem like 2 and 3 are the same, but I think many families greatly ignore LACs. I know we did in the beginning. I didnāt overlook LACs as much as I did not look at the at all. The affordable regular-stats options were limited to a pool of in-state publics that were not one of the two flagships. However, as our search progressed out of infancy stage, we became aware of the LAC options.
Kenyon, Macalester, Holy Cross were they type of LAC high reaches that seemed interesting to Son and I. More reasonable not as high reach options included Occidental, Furman, and Rhodes. Natural stats matches were schools like Allegheny, Wooster, Knox, Southwestern, Saint Maryās, Earlham. Some we discovered later in the process than we would have liked.
We didnāt apply to all the matches or low-to-regular reaches. We studied them and his preferences dictated which made the list. Aside from some being too small for my son, most every one of the schools we looked at (most in the top 100 LAC lists and/or in the CTCL list) was an acceptable choice academically and fit. He didnāt have a rigid requirement for, say, STEM or arts or politics or Greek. He is flexible on most things. And the good news for families on a budget is many of these schools will give aid, though admittedly, some far more and more often than others.