I feel as though my calling things out has, however, elicited a great deal of help from people. They’ve really chipped in with all kinds of useful information, as though to make up for things. I think it’s worked out really well actually. Maybe they would have done that anyway.
Also, there a few people who stepped up and posted, and probably a lot more lurkers, who appreciate that we are talking about a place in college for kids who don’t fit the super-achiever mold and haven’t had a good school or access to APs or foreign languages, not to mention don’t have money.
Also, are you suggesting I skim some of the papers I have to read. For shame!
Thats fine, OP, it sounds like you are in a field where results really do not matter much and there will be no serious consequences from rewarding based on effort rather than result. As you know, science and engineering courses, which you once mentioned as your son being interested in are generally not that way, hence the comparison to his peers will likely be more important.
In sciences, it will still be based on primarily on standards rather than competition. If everyone meets the standard, which of course doesn’t happen, then they get the corresponding grade.
I don’t mean this absolutely of course. Of course standards rise as performance rises.
However, equating hard grading and competition with successful attainment is kind of the root of the problem in peoples’ thinking. Like I said to the other one, it’s not that simple and that’s not how it works in college, not exactly.
OP, as a prof, I’m sure what I say is nothing new to you, but I’m mentioning for other readers who may be seeking the same advice. Make sure the school has a good, easily accessible academic success center (different from ADA office) with a good writing center and successful career center. For kids in this situation, IMO the best thing parents can do senior year is work with them on self-advocacy. This situation is more common than most realize. Unfortunately, IME the biggest stumbling block freshman year is usually the reluctance to get help. I hope he finds the perfect fit.
Again, I think you might get a lot out of reading the Parents of the HS Class of 2022- 3.0-3.4 and Parents of the HS Class of 2021 3.0-3.4 threads. Your son could get merit at the LACs mentioned in these threads and they would offer him support. I think it is just what you are looking for. It also doesn’t have all the chaff that permeates the rest of CC.
Not trying to digress the thread but you brought it up.
Aren’t your students from “a lousy California public school” in such dire straits because educators have just advanced them without ensuring they know the subject matter? I agree with you that “they deserve an education” such that awarding merit grades seems to fall short of educating I would have thought.
A metaphor might work here. If you design really good gym equipment that hits the right muscles in the right way, and tell the students how many reps to do and they do it, they will advance in muscle development because of the advanced nature of your gym equipment.
The students at UC Davis from lousy high schools with poor gym equipment (much of which is mandated) are however full of eagerness to learn and will work very hard at anything, especially if they don’t think they are drowning and about to fail but instead are having the privilege of their life to better themselves (academically). I hear things (on review sites and books) can be different in some places where the students feel entitled to their college education. That’s not the general tenor at UC Davis nor was it the case at the mostly rich kid (at the time) Bard College where I also taught.
My methods would not necessarily work as well at places where kids weren’t really into being a student.
Also I mentioned a while back that I learned most of these methods at Bard’s summer institute of writing and thinking, which was started by Peter Elbow disciples.
This isn’t off topic really, since this philosophy of education is on the rise in America generally and is some part of every LAC and hopefully a big part of certain ones that we will find.
Yeah it was a bit of shock moving out here. I admit I was kind of a d when I first got here and I think I might have said something to a 500 person lecture hall like “suck it up, you’re in college now.”
Just be careful not to define useful to mean “things I want to hear”.
Yeah, I get that you didn’t want to hear about, say, apprenticeships. But honestly, it’s worth a mention (and thus useful) in a situation like the one you outlined.
Now, I recognize that you don’t see that as viable, and that’s cool—so for people to continue to bring it up at this point would certainly not be useful. But there’s lots of useful information and suggestions to be had out there, and some of it will not be comfortable.
Hello! The right place for your boy and the right financial solution are out there. I just found this thread and saw that my S21’s path was referenced in it.
Net is that while not the same background, seems like we were looking for similar things. You’ll find in it reviews of school visits, admission results including merit, and impressions of level of support at various schools. A number of the schools in your thread already are mentioned here.
Good luck and happy to answer any questions if you have them!
I think you are going to find it very hard to find an LAC for under 22K. I may have misread or misremembered from earlier, but I think you said your DC would not crack a 1000 on the SAT. That is going to make it very hard to get good merit.
Our EFC was also $14K. My DC who was a top student and did well (1400) on the SAT and a little better on the ACT, had 2 schools come in under $19K (not including loans). The rest were in the $22-25K range (I swear the schools just get it down to in-state public tuition )
We visited a lot of LACs in PA, MD, and VA.
And some of the easier to get into schools are not necessarily “easy”. For example, we have a top HS student friend (from good school system) at Juniata - they are working hard! Loving it but working hard.
Your DC better be mentally prepared to read and write…a lot!
Ouch that’s hard to hear. I’m hoping the NPC calculators which told a different story for us for several colleges are accurate. So far, parents have reported here that those same colleges came in UNDER their NPC, but that could be due to different stats than we have.
We’ll be applying test optional and many schools seem very sincere about their policy, plus we have ok-good ECs and assuming a great essay (it’s getting there I think). That and a similar EFC to yours makes me think the applications are roughly equivalent (to the extent this can be compared on a forum and ignoring the fundamental nature of holistic admissions) and the fact that all your results would be unaffordable for us gives me considerable pause. This whole search could all be for nothing.
Still, since I’m the one taking the hit for my kids in this search I guess it’s worth a shot.
I hear you though.
On the kid working hard to stay afloat at Juniata, this is typical. With what people believe is a rigorous college prep high school, the truth is that they work the kids in the wrong way and are rigorous in the wrong way, and the kind of spontaneous and autonomous creative intelligence has been beaten out of the kid in high school and needs to be reawakened. A good example is look at the content of the AP Lang test. Full of an unusable number of literary analysis tools and, if the course is really geared for the test, a lifeless class of rote learning that looks nothing like what CTCL does. I’m saying that in general, not specific to that student.
It’s not just the kids who went to highschool-lite who have an adjustment to make.
Private high schools probably do better because they are more free of mandated content determined by bureaucrats, not intellectuals, in their classes.
If I had a dollar for every time I heard “my straight A, AP kid is failing: comp, calc 3, physics 2, chem 2…; it’s the prof’s , department’s, college’s fault” over the last year, I’d be going out for a nice family dinner this evening You’re further ahead than many parents, at least you recognize the issue.
Look at Beloit. Good for the sciences, lots of merit aid for a kid with his stats. Also, check out Whittier College in Orange County, which has a great reputation for turning unprepared students into top notch college students - their brightest kids are in the Physics Department, which is highly supported, pro-student success, and has a 3-2 Engineering partnership with USC. IF he is applying to any UCs whatsoever (which if you’re at Davis, you may not want, knowing that most of his contact will be with Graduate Student TAs, and less with professors, or course my assumptions may be totally off), don’t discount UC Riverside - more than any other UC, they are super dedicated to putting in safety nets to ensure success for students who are more on-paper eligible than they are 100% ready. For example, their top-notch math department does not weed undergraduates out after sophomore year like many - their is a summer bridge program between sophomore and junior year that previews, in depth, the concepts for the junior year weed-out math classes to make sure that students from high schools that didn’t prepare them sufficiently can make it through the gauntlet of those initial upper division math classes that juniors get hit with. I believe (not sure, do check) that UC Riverside Computer Science does something similar, spreading early courses that are typically weed-outs at other universities over the course of two quarters/semesters rather than the typical one quarter/semester, allowing students to dig deeply into the concepts, and thoroughly internalize them in order to build upon them later, resulting in fewer students switching to a different major or dropping out entirely. UCR is a top notch R1 school with a heart.
I did my graduate work at UCSD, TAing my way through - at least then, mostly upper division students had more professor contact once they were in smaller, major-specific upper division classes. When my kid and I toured UCR (and if he weren’t interested in engineering, I would have been counseling him to look at small. liberal arts colleges rather than huge state schools precisely because professors, sans grad students, focus on their undergrads more by default), I was pleasantly surprised by the difference in feel - it felt more inclusive there than UCSD, it felt like the goal was to keep kids in, and that they had strategically designed structures to further that goal - not necessarily that there was more professor contact, but that they had isolated reasons why kids washed out of certain departments, and put into place systems and structures to help. I don’t know what specific departments your son is interested in, but I wonder to what extent departments other than math are doing similar things to ensure ongoing access for all their undergrads.
So I obviously wasn’t clear. This kid was well prepared, has always been a hard worker, and continues to do this at Juniata. He is doing very well academically and thriving - much more than just “staying afloat”. He did not go to “high school lite”; he took a rigorous course load including 10 APs (with 4s or 5s on all of them).
My point was that the schools mentioned here are necessarily “easy”, especially for a kid who is “ill equipped” and has “written less than one short 5 paragraph essay per year”. He is going to have to work and work hard.
You may give out easy As but these schools do not. And do you want them to? I don’t. I want these kids to learn.
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You’re further ahead than many parents, at least you recognize the issue.