After discovering CC a few months ago, I’ve been reading rather obsessively and occasionally posting a snarky comment here and there. I haven’t contributed much actual knowledge or insight to the board. What I have found most helpful is reading posts about kid’s/families experiences, often tracing back a couple of years, where we get to learn the ‘end’ of the story. So, in the hopes of helping someone else one day, here I will begin to document our journey. If you are reading this in mid-2020 and are just starting out, good luck!
Background: Youngest kid is s20; older kids went to state schools, are launched and are doing fine. Neither were particularly good students so the acceptance to those schools were met with whoops and hollers. Current s20 ruined our plans for another pretty easy college-search-acceptance thing, as he turned out to be a good student. 4.0UW/4.6W; 1510 SAT (790 Math); two varsity sports and pretty accomplished musician (goes to a very diverse high school which is ALL about the music program). Will have 7 APs when done (all of the lab sciences; Calc BC, CS) Has gotten 5’s on AP tests so far. Took Math and Chem SAT subject tests last week - won’t have scores until July. He’s done none of the other ECs (impossible to do with his sports team demands). His two sports teams were top ten in the state - very competitive and time consuming. (has received some outreach from D3 schools for one of his sports; he’s not interested). Summer/vacation job=construction (works for a house flipper for past 3 years). Tutors young kids in math about 5 hours a week during the summer (which is more about their getting to hang with one of the HS athletes for a while every week). Desired major: chemical engineering.
Kid personality: Quiet rule-follower. He is very resilient (has never complained about a single thing about school - seems to be able to weather storms with bad teachers, bad classes, bad (jerk) coaches, etc.). He has this intense sense of fairness - anything he sees as unfair is a real turn-off for him. We have visited a few schools already (Michigan, UCLA, USC, UCSB, and UCSD). These visits helped form his process of deciding about colleges (see below). His “loving” a school has everything to do with the chem eng dept, and pretty much nothing else. [and he spent a whole year job shadowing, etc., to get to chem engineering, so while the ‘chem’ part of engineering might not stick, pretty confident the ‘engineering’ part will]. Schools off the list: USC, UCSB and UCSD. Schools still on list: UCLA and Michigan.
Kid desires in college: He is ALL ABOUT the facilities, curriculum and accomplishments of the professors in the chem engineering dept. He’s read the recent pubs of all of the chem engineering professors for any school on his list. He did this both to judge the overall flavor of the dept. but also to know how many of them are prolific researchers. All that being said, our state flagship, which is a safety for him, is his #1. Reasons being the dept. is aligned with what he wants to see in a chem eng dept., it is the closest of his potential schools (2 hours drive), his brother went there and so we already own all of the t-shirts, it is reasonably ranked for Chem Eng, his best friend is likely to go there, it meets his strong desire for racial diversity, and you can’t beat its price tag. He knows the school’s personality well having been to 15 million football games there.
That being said…he is not immune to the prestige factor. So, his plan is this: apply early to flagship and get that in the can as early as possible. Spend the summer identifying/visiting schools which satisfy the prestige factor for him to solidify his list. He has created his current list based on the chemical engineering departments (and sometimes there is only a single professor there who makes the cut, but there has to be something else awesome about the school in order to overcome that problem). If he is in love with one of the non-flagship schools AND our EFC shows something less than full-pay, he might go ED for that school (if it has one). If that happens, we’ll have to have the 'you really want to go here full-pay?" conversation early on (see below, I don’t think he could bring himself to ask his parents to pay $70K a year for his college). We are ok with that.
So now let’s talk about $. We have been uber-nerdy 401K people our whole careers (maxing out, always) and we are knocking on the door of retirement age. Husband works full time but I technically work part-time (but in reality, I ‘work’ full time because half of my time is devoted to an important community project which I am pro bono on. I can switch back to full time pay - I’m a consultant - if need be, making us comfortably ‘full-pay’ if that is what is needed). So the calculators for the private schools (and one of the publics, curiously) have us getting around -$20K at all of the schools he is targeting right now based on current income and assets.
Current list: and, YES, I know, these are all reach for him and pretty much anyone else. But that is the idea. He loves his safety school but likes the chem engineering depts. for these schools, too, so they are getting a good look:
Michigan
UCLA
UVA
Georgia Tech
University of Rochester
Cornell
Notre Dame
He is fully aware that the chances are quite strong that he gets one acceptance and 7 rejections. I have begged him to get another safety, but no luck. If he does not get into our flagship, he will be the one outlier from his high school in 5 years, by .6 GPS points and 75 SAT points, to not get accepted. HIGHLY unlikely. He has at least agreed to do that app first so he can do a great job on it. Small victory. All arguments to apply to one or two more safeties have been futile because he insists he would go to a CC and transfer to the flagship before he would go to any of those other schools. He says it isn’t a safety if he wouldn’t go there. He has researched DOZENS of chem eng depts. to death.
So while he is Mr. Rational when judging a college (I think caring about the professors and curriculum and not the quality of the dorm rooms is pretty smart), he does occasionally make offhand comments like “It would be so great if I could go to ______ (fill in blank with any of the schools above).” And that is all about the cache, I assume. But I really doubt that if faced with a full-pay Prestige College and the state flagship he would insist for the full-pay option. Again, he has been fully briefed on the vagaries of financial aid and merit aid and all that. We can’t really tell if he knows he has a great thing in his back pocket and is giving these other schools a try for the heck of it, OR, that deep down he REALLY wants to not go to the state flagship but, being a pretty self-less and easy-to-please kid, would never ask his parents to spend $200K more for something just because he likes it better. It would be really out of character for him to think that way. He is a really old and caring soul in many ways and has never asked for a single thing from us, really. In one way I’d be thrilled for him to get acceptance to one of those schools (I am secretly rooting for that outcome, to be honest), but deciding between a full pay option and the state flagship would be agony for him. The ideal outcome would be he gets into one (expecting more than that is unrealistic) where he does get at least some financial/merit aid. Time will tell.
So, pending visits: Cornell and U of R. July will bring Georgia Tech, UVA and Notre Dame. My husband and I are fighting over who has to take him to Notre Dame (5 hour cornfield drive) and Georgia Tech (what, 99 degrees in the shade in July?). Will report back.