Safety. I was relieved that D2 did not get into a highly ranked college that had well-publicized issues with students being bullied and shamed. However, although I might have discouraged her from going there, I wouldn’t have barred her.
Colleges that make kids declare a major on their application and then make it very hard to switch later on. I think that kids should be able to explore several options before settling on a major. Not everyone “knows” what they want to study in college when they fill out those apps while they are still in HS.
I am against the communal bathroom at the end of the hall, but it’s not s deal breaker
COA that is financially out of reach or simply unwise is a deal breaker.
We are having some difference in opinions re: which school is the best fit, even at this late stage of the game.
I don’t really expect our 17 yo to see and understand what we, the parents, see and understand.
This can actually be a very limiting condition if the student is interested in popular majors and schools like popular state flagships and some private schools of similar selectivity, since such schools may not be wealthy enough to afford to maintain reserve capacity in every major to allow undecided students to enter and then freely choose any major. Some majors like nursing are impacted or restricted nearly everywhere.
Also, even when all majors are unrestricted, students still need to be aware that some majors have long prerequisite sequences that require the student to start early in order to graduate on time in the major.
Look again. Those are just the tenured faculty standing there.
I was on my own for college so my parents couldn’t have put restrictions on me if they wanted to (though they didn’t).
I wouldn’t pay for my kid to go to a religious school. This includes the big ones like Notre Dame. They’re free to go, but I refuse to support it with my money.
I also wouldn’t pay for a for profit or otherwise BS school (ie U of Phoenix).
Other than that, it’s their life, they can pick. I made a school decision that would be unpopular with many CC parents and I have zero regrets.
Violence problems near or on campus (U of Chicsgo had a three day seminar on campus safety. Ya think?)
Large commuter population
Huge Greek presence (>40%)
Student body too large (DD not interest in going to school in a “factory”)
Too far away to get to in a day’s drive
Campus in a very poor/run down area
Campus in a major city
Run down facilities (have visited places unchanged since the Nixon administrarion)
If the kid wanted a campus in a major city, and it was relatively safe, why would it be a deal breaker?
I have a low tolerance for irony, so it really bugs me when the architecture school is in the ugliest building on campus; the communication faculty doesn’t understand freedom of the press; the “open-minded” students are proud of not allowing speeches from public figures they disagree with; the football coach is in worse physical shape than I’m in; the school points to its 200-person police force as evidence of how safe it is. If I’m writing the checks, I’d consider vetoing a school for any of these reasons.
Also not fond of co-ed bathrooms or those huge, spread-out campuses where it’s a half-hour hike or a 15-minute bus ride to get to class…what a waste of time.
D is not keen on coed bathrooms but when I asked if she wouldn’t even consider X College where ALL bathrooms are coed but otherwise it seemed like a very good match, she said she’d get over it. She ended up not applying there for other reasons. I think a lot of parents have no idea how commonplace coed bathrooms are. I was shocked when I first learned about it, too.
I had to ask D to drop a college from her list because the FinAid officer was being a jerk about an unusual financial situation we have. You can’t fill out the FAFSA and Profile one way for 6 colleges and a different way for the 7th. I was afraid if we went ahead and added that college to the FAFSA and Profile he might contest the results and screw it up everywhere. Luckily that college was not a frontrunner for D and she was OK with scratching it. All the other FinAid officers, each of whom I contacted individually, were easy to work with.
One of my criteria was the net cost for lowest income students. $15k or higher got that college a grade of D. I think she only applied to one college with that rating. It was one of the first, almost random, colleges we visited junior year, before I knew anything about net cost and CDS’s and D really liked it and I think it is a good fit for her. I let her apply but emphasized that the financial aspect looks bad and she can only go with a good FinAid offer. Meaning maximum graduation debt of $20k, so prospective debt is another possible deal-breaker.
@CDK You make a good point, but the incidence of false accusation is much smaller vs the incidence of sexual assault against women on campus. They just seem to provoke more outrage and news somehow as the double standard against women is still very real
The documentary The Hunting Ground is an eye opening account of sexual assault on campus and how in many cases and at many schools it is systematically covered up. It is a must see for any young woman going off to college.
Deferred, then accepted. If you didn’t like my kid enough to date her the first time around…
For me personally, ugly architecture.
@ucbalumnus - I agree about that when it comes to nursing and a few other “special” majors. But in general it was a deal breaker for us even though it did eliminate some large state schools. I know kids who have had to transfer because they were locked out of majors they wanted and frankly, after a long college process, that is the last thing I would want my kid to have to do.
@labegg - I know several kids who agree with you. They were deferred in the early round (or waitlisted later on) by their super selective “dream” schools. When the acceptances finally came they had moved on and weren’t interested any more.
That strikes me as letting pride get in the way of actual evaluation of the acceptance options on the table.
Colleges that don’t believe in evolution.
I’m not a fan of St. Johns, great books education, but since two of my brother’s kids attended, I’ve been very, very quiet about my reservations.
@MotherOfDragons there were coed bathrooms at Harvard in the 1970s. Not an issue. You do your business behind a partition - you brush your teeth next to a hall mate. No big deal.
What the heck is wrong with downtown Atlanta?
I think a college can get too big for my comfort, but it wasn’t a reason for me to nix my kids’ choices. Harvard has students the undergrads will never see until graduation because they are on their own campuses (Business, Law, Medicine), it’s silly to count them as part of Harvard.
I think it’s that many of you have such strict rule but they don’t seem to apply if the school is Harvard or Columbia. Many people didn’t like Matress Girl or did support her, yet I doubt people would turn down Columbia just based on Title IX or safety of the neighborhood. Yale isn’t in the nicest city in the world. LA? Berkeley can have a lot of crime. People want a small LAC, but suddenly 8000 students at Harvard is fine. CU is in a state that allows pot smoking, but not in public places, not in any government owned buildings, and not by those under 21. How is that any different than alcohol, except that you can drink in the football stadium but can’t smoke anything. Do I think there is pot on campus? I know there is, just like there was before it was legal. Guns can be carried on campus with a concealed weapons permit (no open carry in city of Boulder), but aren’t allowed in campus buildings, so unless you want to just hang out outside, there is not much you can do with one on campus. At Wyoming, they actually store guns for students at the police headquarters because weapons aren’t allow in cars or dorms, but students want them to go hunting during the term. I’d rather there be a policy like that than have students or others just being banned guns on campusand students bringing them anyway.
@romanigypsyeyes I had many opinions until I had children, and now that I do, it has come to pass that they have thoughtful opinions of their own. Controlling what they do with money has really never come up, frankly, and it would be such a last resort, I think. In other words, I can’t imagine not agreeing to the point that I draw the line with finances. You may find that you feel the same once you have children…by the time they are 17 or 18 they have usually have quite a bit to say about their own lives, and since you have raised them it may be that they have a point of view worth considering.
I really have to laugh at concerns over coed bathrooms. I entered Vassar in 1980. All the dorm bathrooms were de facto coed, but it was so long ago it never occurred to us to give them such a label. As I joke with my students today, I knew I was really at college when I realized the couple in the shower next to mine were having sex.
Yeah, OK, it was Vassar. Still. It was the kind of thing you think about for 12 seconds before you remember your bladder is full, and then you get over it.
Know what else? Developing that kind of flexible thinking at an early age will never turn out to be a disadvantage. Never. It can only serve you in a world that is decidedly NOT bimodal.
Do you mean deferred from EA or ED, or waitlisted?
Some EA or ED applicants are really on the borderline, so the college does want to wait until seeing the RD applications before deciding whether they are above or below the borderline.