[quote=“EconPop, post:38, topic:2084126”]
I love this…
His friends have been great about it all. Initially, everyone wondered “why so many?” and joked with him about the number. Then as acceptances started coming in, they were happy for him. Some of the higher-stats kids are happy for him, but jealous that they self-limited their options.
One very close friend is full pay and high stats. He applied to the two state flagships and did not get in. He got into a couple of in state safeties, and one OOS safety. He’s happy attending the OOS safety, but he now realizes that with his stats and his family’s finances, he had so many more options. He’s happy for my son, but he jokes, “You know you shouldn’t have gotten in School X, right?”
His friend at a private school is loving Son’s application adventures. Another friend who just signed at his personal dream school, hoots and hollers with each bit of good news from Son.
No one is negatively jealous or angry. At least, none that have spoken to him. I’m sure someone is bitter about Son’s process, but Son would only laugh at their misplaced frustration if presented with it.
There is one kid who has dreams beyond his stats, who doesn’t have anyone like me to help him along. This kid is very driven, has decent very good stats, but dreams of schools he will not get into, like MIT and other top 50 destinations. It’s not that he dreams of those schools, but he is 100% certain that no “lesser” school is good enough for him. He’s going to be absolutely crushed if he’s forced to settle for a safety ranked #200 because he didn’t choose his safeties wisely. I could see him having a “Why Son and not me?” issue like the parent in that BYU thread.
But everyone knows my son put forth a lot of effort in this. And everyone knows he’s getting a lot of Denials along the way. He had a group IG when he opened one of his extremely high-reach decisions. A Denial. They laugh with him on those, and cheer with him when the news is good.
While you are getting the acceptances at places like VT (congrats), are you getting the financial aid you need, either through merit or need based aid?
Sometimes yes, sometimes no.
This was another reason for the extremely wide net. Aside from the guaranteed full-need schools (some of which Son applied to, but Son doesn’t have the stats to assure admission) there is no way to predict which schools would offer enough aid. None of these schools will promise aid before a student has actually been admitted. So we apply and if admitted, we check out the aid.
One pleasant surprise was UNM. Son is strongly considering a westward university experience if the various factors align. One school that appealed to him was the University of New Mexico, and he loves everything about Albuquerque that he’s read. I did my research and knew that while OOS FinAid was not explicitly a “thing” at UNM, I read between the lines and figured it was a distinct possiblity. We expected he’d be accepted and maybe receive a little FinAid. What we did not expect was that they waived OOS tuition and gave him enough aid that it will actually be cheaper than his in-state options.
One school delivered a FinAid package that was good, but not good enough. I planned to ask for more later, but put it on the back burner. Before I got around to them, the school sent a revised FinAid offer that brought the COA closer to what I need it to be.
I love what I know of Duquesne, and I love the feel of Pittsburgh. I think it would be a great option for Son. I think it got lost in the early mix where he said “no” to some schools, but too much later revised his opinion.
You’re right that the $28K COA would have still been too much for us. Who knows, maybe Son would have gotten lucky and received a more helpful offer? I wish he’d realized he wanted Duquesne earlier.
Why the vagueness? It would be more helpful if you named the schools, admissions decisions, and net price. (Isn’t that the purpose of your thread?)
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To paraphrase Hamilton (to my son’s chagrin): “You miss every shot you don’t take.”
No one can accurately predict these things. Congratulations on the wonderful outcome!!!
@EconPop First, congrats on how things are going.
Reading this thread, one thing immediately came to mind: Did you qualify for application fee waivers? If not, how much did you end up spending on application fees?
Most every app fee was waived.
However, I went into this process assuming and prepared to pay for every single Application Fee. I had such faith in the process (with my son as the subject and myself as the sherpa) that I have no doubt it will produce a great option. So, if it costs me $1000 in application fees to generate $100K-$250K in savings in college expenses, that’s a bet I’m willing to make.
But please realize we didn’t just pick a couple of dozen colleges at random and and paste the same application across the board. This took a lot of work and is not necessarily for every family.
Not necessarily.
One thing I try to keep stressing in this thread is the unpredictability of the entire process. Just because UNM gave my son a great deal doesn’t mean UNM will give another student the same offer. Just because Hofstra gave my son a ridiculously poor FinAid offer does not indicate Hofstra might not provide another student with a great FinAid offer.
This thread is more about the process. The hope. The effort.
I would never want to insinuate to anyone that I feel confident they can receive significant FinAid from School X because that school provided significant FinAid to my son. Or that another student should avoid UNC-W because UNC-W denied my son. We don’t know what the decisions are going to be.
My Son’s exact stats and a complete list of every university he applied to and every decision doesn’t help anyone. It just provides false numbers for some people to fixate on. I don’t want anyone calling School Y and complaining that they “know a student with these stats who received this offer, and why can’t I get it.” That is what I hope to avoid.
I guess my purpose is to show what we did and the general results we got. I told my son going in not to become fixated on any one school. Instead, choose a type. Not a specific example. That helped him realize what was really important to him. Now he realizes he can be happy at any one of dozens of options across the country. He’s not going to cry and disintegrate because one option told him no.
Plan. Hope. Work. Don’t accept the negative thoughts of others. Listen, but don’t accept without your own careful consideration.
EconPop, great thread, info & encouragement. You could make a career out of this!
The thoughtful approach you and your son have taken to admissions would work wonders in the outside scholarship arena. Consider Taco Bell Foundation’s Live Mas Scholarship.
While I appreciate the general tone, I am not sure how sharing that your son with average stats/high need got into a random assortment of colleges you don’t name will be of any assistance to others. Yes, some admissions and some denials surprised you. That is almost universally true in the process. As is the universal acceptance at schools ranked 250+, and denial at T30. The process isnt entirely random and those are predictable results for nearly all. The Users on CC are often trying to glean more nuances within the schools in the 30-150 range of all sorts of schools.
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@EconPop
Our D22 will likely be in a similar situation as your child. It would be really helpful for you to provide a list of the schools applied to, results, and net costs. I understand everyone is different, but most of the advice on CC is anecdotal and still very useful.
Hey @EconPop, I have a question for you. During those times that it was hard to get your kid to work on “The Process”, how did you go about getting him back on track? Or was he self-motivated?
I am one poster who believes that what you are sharing is very helpful, and that you are an example of how an involved parent can help create positive overall college admissions outcomes. What you have shared and your example would change lives in places like where I was raised because of your overall thought process (your timelines, strategy, and work ethic needed).
Forgive me, but I’m confused, so I hope you don’t mind if I did some digging. I promise I’m not a stalker.
So far, the most useful info I’ve got from this is that…
1.) you’ve cast a very wide net, which will hopefully reap benefits.
2.) your son has a great list of safety, match, and reach schools. (Or at least, I hope he has a true safety.)
3.) because you were both on the ball, your son got a lot of app fee waivers, which undoubtedly saved money.
4.) you and your son seem to be viewing this all very realistically.
Son is URM, has average stats. UW GPA something like 3.3, SAT something like 1220. Four AP and ten Honors classes. Team captain. (I knew there had to be a little more to his stats?.)
I am guessing OP’s son has sent out roughly 20+ applications. He has applied to:
UNM—ACCEPTED
Virginia Tech—ACCEPTED
Hofstra—ACCEPTED
Allegheny—ACCEPTED
UNCC—DENIED
UNCW—DENIED
Duke—DENIED
Ivies (Unknown number)
UNCCH
U of Dayton
ECU
Howard
Other LACs, some of which may be listed in post #39
Unknown number of other safeties?
You’ve provided rough stats which are helpful. I can’t imagine many people here will fixate on what you’ve said and tell a college they read about a student on CC who got x, y, and z. (Even if they did, the college wouldn’t listen.) We are all anonymous and most people here want to give advice or get advice. Specifics help others.
What you’ve currently written is good for moral support. Some schools you’ve named, others you haven’t, which is why it’s a little confusing. It’s hard to glean the important details.
Which other colleges denied? Which colleges accepted with enough aid? How many have been applied to in order to (hopefully) ensure enough FA?How many instate publics or OOS publics? How many privates? How many LACs, and have they been generous with aid so far? Does he have affordable choices yet? If so, was he given FA or scholarships, or both? How many app fee waivers was he given, and to which schools? It would be helpful to other parents to understand roughly how many apps they may need to fill out to ensure affordable choices.
I advise a ton of people informally through my work, and it is really hard to find colleges for average students that will award enough FA and/or scholarships. There are a lot of donut hole families and a lot of average students. This kind of advice is definitely important.
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Thank you.
There is most certainly a disconnect between how high-stats full-pay families approach the college search process and how average/low-stats FinAid families approach the college search process. Confusion from each about the other is expected.
High Stats Full Pay (HSFP) families are in almost complete control of the process. Choose 6 schools, all are affordable, get accepted to 4, choose one. Or, to save a little money, apply to one of the state flagships (Alabama, Arizona, etc) that will offer a near-full ride for high stats students to attend the Honors College.
I wish we could do that.
The entire process is a bit random for families similar to mine.
There are the almost-guaranteed safeties regarding both stats and cost, the lower rung of in-state publics, 5 or 8 or 11 options depending on the size of the state. None very appealing, but most will get the basics done. Sort of like eating oatmeal. This is the only time most families like this get a choice. Do we choose Banana Oatmeal State University or Pumpkin Oatmeal State College. This is the guaranteed option.
Then there are the financial safeties that are stats reaches. Another 3 or 5 in-state publics that will be affordable, but none are guaranteed acceptances for stats. So, if an Avg Stats FinAid (ASFA) family follows the usual script, they apply to 1 or 2 or the in-state public reaches and 1 or 2 of the in-state public safeties. That script ends with denials from the flagships, and enrollment at Plain Oatmeal State University. That might be a fine school, but there is no family control over this situation. There is no choosing for true fit, for weather, for class size, and often not even for major.
I’m not complaining that anything is unfair or that this scenario was forced on ASFA families by some uncaring system. I’m simply outlining how the process works. And I’m declaring that it is unacceptable for me and my family. And other families have decided they don’t want to accept it either.
There is another process that can work, but it looks a lot different than how HSFP families operate.
What seems like a “random assortment of colleges” to you is actually a small number of options culled from a carefully crafted larger list of universities that accepted my child from an even larger researched list of universities to which he applied.
There is a good bit of “random” in this process, because unlike HSFP families, there is a lot more about the process over which we have no control. We don’t know which schools are going to accept my student. We don’t know which of those will offer enough money to make it financially possible.
I know the idea of doing all this and not having a concrete small set of options seems “random”. But despite what I/we don’t control, I have now given my son control over his future. He can choose from in-state publics or OOS publics, from LACs to large research unis, from 30 minutes away to 2000 miles away, to many more options that appeal to him and will give him a great education – all affordable and with more to come in the following weeks.
It’s a different process. It is a process that is incredibly unnecessary for HSFP families. But it will deliver to my children the same sort of options those families enjoy.
My apologies to you and others if this long-winded post failed to explain the topic to you in a way that makes sense to you.
Dig away, but it’s not about the sort of details you’re looking for. It’s not about how many colleges said NO. It’s not about how many said YES but didn’t offer adequate FinAid. It is about those that said YES and offered adequate FinAid. Not the “success rate” but the ones that will work for us. If we apply to 20 and get 5 suitable options, that is an amazing success story. If the ratio is 50:5, it remains just as equally amazing and equally successful.
I hope post #56 helps.
My kids and I have an understanding about these type of things. I’ll allow them to drag their feet about something and I offer friendly reminders. When I think they’ve procrastinated long enough, I’ll strongly suggest they get busy. And they get busy. They understand the difference in how I remind them.
It helps that he knows this is all in his best interest. He can be as lazy as any teenage boy. But I can remind him that his failure to get it done will result in him attending a university that doesn’t appeal to him. Then I have to push a little less hard.
@EconPop - No apology needed. I am willing to ride out this thread for as long as it takes for you to get YOUR purpose accomplished. The fact that it may not be moving fast enough or that some are not getting the information that they deem necessary for their purposes is unfortunate, you have been extremely accommodating and most diplomatic in your responses to comments and questions (more so than I would have been). Go forth with YOUR journey, you have put into words what many of us are dealing with but have not been able to verbalize appropriately in a post. I appreciate you taking the time and the energy to share with us. It’s like anything else you read on the internet, people have the option of “Eating the meat and leaving the bones”. I feel everything that you are sharing. Thank you.
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