Total outsider needs advice about the whole college process

Parents Forum
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<p>Hey all! </p>

<p>I was wondering if some of you would have time to give some kind of "American College -how things work 101" for me. I am an European mother of three and our family has quite recently located to US at least for few years. Our oldest son is now 13 and recently told me that some of his classmates already talk about colleges. We come from the country with rather different kind of system for the upper education. In our country students are chosen right away for the masters programs of the specific major. Admissions are either through entrance exams or with your relevant to intended major final exam's results from high school (national exams) or combination of those. The whole concept of "the college experience" is totally foreign. You just go to study the major you want to the University you could get into or which is in the convenient town for you - if you can get in.</p>

<p>To be honest we hope we will be sending our children back home for the University, after all, tuitions are free and government gives aid for living expenses. Kids can survive without any aid from parents with summer and part-time jobs or taking cheap loans and even if parents give aid it is usually something like 2000-3000 Euro per year or less. Universities are of course not as well-known as top US or British ones but for example my alma mater is ranked around Penn State and University of California, Davis in the world rankings.</p>

<p>Still it may be that our children, after living here few years, would really like to do as their friends and go to college at US. Only things I really know about US system are that colleges are expensive and admission process is complicated and takes to consideration lots of things I don't even know about. Lets face it, my own university admission process contained three hour test with maths and physics problems. No one was interested about my hobbies or character or leadership. I do know, after I have talked with my neighbour who has 16 year old daughter, that GPA, SAT, lots of right kind of hobbies and that leadership are important.</p>

<p>Our oldest son is not the kind of kid who would jump through the hoops just because someone says so or there is an external reward. He is passionate with things he is passionate with, but it would be very difficult to get him to put a lot of effort to the things he doesn't find important for example just to get great grades. Transforming from the school system that emphasis end results (if you learned the things you should, no one really cared how or if you did your homework) to the US system where homework, effort et cetera are important and there, to be honest, kids have to do a lot of busy work has been difficult for him. Of course also having to study with foreign language is challenging for him but he is doing OK, gets mostly B+'s and, if he interested about the subject, A's. </p>

<p>Sorry about rambling. What I really would like to know is, what should I know and do so that we don't take away a possibility for going to college in the US from our children?</p>

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<p>I guess the most important thing you can start doing right now is saving money - and lots of it - if you want your kids to have more choices when the time comes. Will you be US citizens or permanent residents (green card)? If not, your kids will be considered international students, which further limits finaid options.</p>

<p>There is absolutely no need to make the kid do something he is not interested in. On the contrary, it is much better to let him find activities he likes and help him pursue them in depth.</p>

<p>Only the very top schools in the US will require ECs, leadership, and top grades/scores btw. There are plenty of schools that accept students purely by the numbers, and plenty that accept pretty much anyone who applies. ((Paying for it is a different story …)</p>

<p>If I was in your situation, I would encourage the kids to do well in school, follow their passion in ECs, and keep in mind that they have the option to go to college in their home country for free, which may turn out the only viable option, unless the school of their choice here turns out to be affordable.</p>

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<p>One really good way for you to start is by reading everything at [EducationUSA</a> | Study Abroad, Student Visa, University Fairs, College Applications and Study in the U.S. / America](<a href=“http://www.educationusa.state.gov/]EducationUSA”>http://www.educationusa.state.gov/) This will give you a good overview of the process. If you want more country-specific advice, you can contact the counselors at the advising center in your home country.</p>

<p>The next thing to do, is to make an appointment with someone in the guidance office of the high school your children are likely to attend here. Talk with them about their experience with international students like your children. If no one in the school district has experience with international students, ask them to help you find someone in another school district who does - maybe the counselor has a friend or former colleague who can advise you.</p>

<p>If your children do not have Permanent Resident (green-card) status, it is most likely that they will be considered international applicants when they apply to colleges in the US. This means that it will be much much harder for them to receive financial aid. In some states, students who have lived in that state for a certain number of years and have graduated from high school in that state are considered in-state residents for tuition and fees at the public colleges and universities. However, not all states have that kind of policy, and sometimes the policy is different for community colleges and for universities. You need to find out whether your children could qualify for in-state status. If not, they would have to pay international student rates even to attend a local public institution.</p>

<p>You need to think carefully about how much money is likely to be available to pay for their university level studies. And you need to be honest with your children (and yourself) about this figure. It may turn out that a US degree is simply out of the question because of finances, and that is OK. Lots of international parents in my area send their children home for their university degrees for just this reason.</p>

<p>A little further along, your children will need to think about their professional goals. For example, Medical school in the US is a post-graduate program. It is very difficult to get into Med School (and even more so for international students), and it is ridiculously expensive. For most international students it makes a lot more sense to go home for a medical education because they are admitted directly to that program. If they want to return to the US for specialist training, they can do that later.</p>

<p>If you will be here long enough for your children to graduate from high school, and you want them to be able to do their university studies in your home country, you need to find out whether they can be admitted to those universities with a US high school diploma. Will they need to take a re-validation exam when they go home? How will they demonstrate that they are ready for university level studies in the language used at that university? Will things be expedited if they complete an International Baccalaureate (IB) program at their US high school? Someone in the Education Department of your country’s consulate in the US should be able to help you find this information.</p>

<p>You wrote that in your country “You just go to study the major you want to the University you could get into or which is in the convenient town for you - if you can get in.” For many, many, many students here in the US that is how things work as well. Not everyone pushes themselves (or their children) to take the classes, earn the grades or exam scores, or participate in the extra curricular activities that will get them into certain colleges/universities. If your child is not interested in doing that, it is OK. He has his own interests and his own temperament. Right now he should be focusing on activities that interest him, mastering the English language skills needed to do well in his school, and taking classes that allow him to stretch himself a bit. He is going to turn out just fine.</p>

<p>Wishing you and your family all the best in your time here!</p>

4

<p>

Although there is such possibility, it is very difficult of a foreign medical graduate to be accepted into a residency program in the US (of course, some specialties are more difficult than others).</p>

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<p>Thank you for your input. We are here with temporary visas (L-visas.) Getting green card may be possible for us later (we are well educated people with ‘special skills’ and good careers and we even come from underrepresented immigration country) but of course you can never be sure. Anyway we are certainly planning moving back home sooner or later.</p>

<p>High school our son will attend is offering full IB diploma program and we have been planning to put him to that. One can apply to a university in our native country with only US high school diploma but having IB diploma helps in two different ways. It will give him a possibility to take part to the applicant pool there you get points both according your diploma grades and entrance exam grades. It is usually much easier to gain acceptance this way because admission with only entrance exam is always much more competitive. All the bright slackers whose Abitur diploma is bad but who have found their motivation are there and raising the bar higher.</p>

<p>IB diploma is also very close representative to our native country’s high school final exams (Abitur exams) and we think it will prepare him well for entrance exams and studying in our native universities. One of the big differences between our native schools and US schools are exams. For example I spent about 20 years at school (from first grade to my PhD) and in the whole time I had one totally multiple choice exam and maybe ten more with the part with multiple choice questions that made up maybe 1/3 of the exam. All the other exams required essay answers. IB program will probably prep our son better to that kind of studying. Does being in the IB program make it much harder to get into the college here?</p>

<p>Language requirements will not be a problem if our son goes back home for the university. He will have to pass an exam in our native language but it is not too hard and we are anyway home schooling him in those subjects that he would be studying back home and which are not covered here and which he will need if we after all will end up back home before he has finished high school (our native language, second native language, religion, parts of history and geography.) His middle school doesn’t offer his second foreign language back home (German, his first one was English so that is covered) but he will be able to start it again in high school and right now getting his English up to the bar is enough work for him.</p>

<p>He will also have to fulfil military service at some point. If he goes university back home, best time would be right after high school. If he wants to go college here and it will be possible, he probably needs to postpone his service after college. Of course everything will also depend about what he wants to do as he grows up. Right now his career goal is to be a NHL player and while we have told him that possibilities of that coming true tend to be rather slim we haven’t yet pushed him to think anything more probable. There will be time for that later.</p>

<p>Other than money, question about where he should be schooled comes down to there he hopes to live and work. If he wants to stay US it certainly will be easier if he will continue his schooling here. If he wants to go back home, starting university is a good time. It is possible to get to the certain masters programs in our native country with BA degree from US college so that is also a possibility. There are also certain professions where it would be a very wise move to study (for free) at our native county and come back here to live and have much higher salaries (physiotherapist, one of whose occupations our son has contemplated besides hockey player, comes to mind.) Not a very patriotic thing to do, though.</p>

<p>As I said we kind of hope he will want to go back home for his further schooling but after he has lived here his teen years it may well be that our native country will seem very small, far away, boring and cold to him.</p>

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<p>Without a green card, your children will be considered int’l applicants. Some states will let such students pay in-state rates if the students went to high school in their state (not all states do this).</p>

<p>Of course, if your children have very high stats (GPA and test scores) they might also find some schools that will give them generous merit scholarships.</p>

<p>You are wise to be considering whether your children will want to go to school in the states. If they will have been here 6+ years by then, they may feel pretty “Americanized” and want to go to the schools that they are hearing their classmates talk about.</p>

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<p>First of all relax, your son is 13. HE does not need to start thinking about college. YOU might want to get educated some more. Saving money is good advice. </p>

<p>There are some very good books by Michelle Hernandez, a former admissions person at Dartmouth. I particularly like “The Middle School Years” and “A is for Admission”. These books will help you get educated about the US system a little bit. I particularly liked her tips in “The Middle School Years” on things you can do to create a positive environment for learning in your home. I think the most important thing is to create a nurturing positive environment and not to get too focused on particular schools. Unlike most European schools, the system here is not completely objective, and there is a certain element of luck. </p>

<p>An IB program sounds great if you need the credentials in Europe.</p>

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<p>“Does being in the IB program make it much harder to get into the college here?”</p>

<p>No. The IB is well-recognized in the US. At some colleges, students can receive advanced placement and/or credit for first year courses based on their IB exam scores.</p>

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<p>I want to echo ClassicRockerDad, most 13 year olds are not thinking about college - even ones that will end up at some of the top colleges in the US. At this point the important thing for kids to be doing is to be taking classes that are appropriately challenging (the IB program should take care of that) and get involved in various extra curricular activities, because American colleges, unlike their German counterparts, care about such things when deciding who to admit. Personally I think the first year or two students should try a bunch of activities and then they should reduce them in the last few years to the ones that they really want to devote time to. Not every activity has to be something the school offers. My older son for example did Science Olympiad and Academic Team at school, but spent the bulk of his spare time messing around with computers - including a lot of paid freelance work. My younger son did Science Olympiad, the literary magazine and orchestra at school, and made origami earrings and did some work for our neighborhood association outside of school.</p>

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<p>Rituna,
You have come to the right place, and you have a lot of time. Just look around here on CC for a while. After a short time, you will know far more than do most parents of college applicants. I did not know about his site and did all my research independently. It worked out, but it would have been so much simpler/easier if I had learned from the others here before our son sent out his applications!</p>

<p>The IB program is well understood and well respected in the states, so no problem there.</p>

<p>For a 13 year old I would suggest that you look, learn, and ask so that later you can assist in constructing a 4-year plan for high school that you can use for reference. Reality can cause some changes (course availability, scheduling conflicts), but understanding university recommendations, the prerequisites, the student’s interests (music? art? robotics?) can help you lay out the options and a possible path.</p>

<p>But I also recommend that you allow the 13 year old to involve himself in his academic/social environment and not involve him too much in your self-education. 5-9 years from now is half a lifetime away to a 13 year old.</p>

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<p>Hi Rituna - First of all, you have outstanding skills in written English! I’m especially impressed since you arrived in the U.S. only recently.</p>

<p>As a European browsing College Confidential, you’ll soon run into debates about the value of liberal arts colleges (LACs on this website) as opposed to larger universities. LACs are often not familiar concepts to non-Americans, though they’re perhaps the essence of U.S higher education. If you are unfamiliar with them, that may be a good starting point on which to browse some of the CC discussions and post questions.</p>

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<p>Thank you again. </p>

<p>I agree that for my son it is much too early to contemplate college or things like that. That is why I think he was so taken aback when he heard some of his classmates talk about matter. But I also do think it is not too early for me and my husband to gather information and make sure that we know what we need to know not to close any doors from our kids. I think my next step is to contact our son’s probable future high school’s guidance counsellor and inquire if it would be possible to have an appointment to discuss these matters and other matters we need to know about how school system works here.</p>

<p>I have googled few universities and their tuitions and if I have understood correctly costs of BA degree are quite different in different schools and at the moment can go up to much over 200 000$. That is of course a lot of money but we are in the fortunate situation there we have been able to save money for our kids through apartment investing so that everyone of them would at least have an apartment at our home country (and piece of land, for summer cottage or just to have something permanent where to plant their roots since we are basically modern nomads. It is our choice but still we think that our responsibility is to give our kids not only wings to fly but also the roots to stand on.) These apartments are meant to be places they are able to live while studying and later, or if they want to choose student housing while studying, to give them extra income from renting the apartments out. But if they choose to study at the States they can also be sold and used to finance college which they should nicely do. Still it is a lot of money and we have to carefully think if it is worth it. Yes, there are many superb educational institutions in the US. But there are also perfectly adequate schools back at our home country. In fact, while researching the rankings, I was surprised how well they did considering we are talking about a country with smaller total population than for example Atlanta metropolitan area has.</p>

<p>But of course my son may surprise us all and really end up to be that NHL player (or just a little more realistically score an athletic scholarship to some school.) ;e</p>

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<p>Rituna, You are wise to be educating yourselves so that you are aware of the implications of various choices along the way. Options are good.</p>

<p>If you have specific questions, this is a good place to come. Our high school counselors had limited frames of reference; your situation may be much better. </p>

<p>I always suggest that interested parents starting out visit the websites of some universities and colleges to see what course sequences are recommended. To start, I checked our best state university (we are fortunate that it is internationally recognized) an elite university, an excellent Liberal Arts College and a prestigious technical university. This gave me a frame of reference and something to discuss with our son when he was making course selections.</p>

<p>Do let us know how your son does in the NHL draft! :)</p>