<p>Good advice so far. I would just add that an early step is to determine if you will be full pay, if she is eligible for need-based financial aid, or if you are looking for merit money. If you fall into the category of many, which is that the Expected Family Contribution is higher than your family is actually able or willing to pay, you would have a different set of schools than if you can afford any and all schools. Some schools have stopped giving much, if any, merit aid so if you need that it probably makes no sense to visit and get your d interested. You have to go to the college’s web site and click to financial aid to find out if there are merit scholarships. </p>
<p>University of Rochester in upstate NY is a very good, often overlooked university which is medium sized and academically very good.</p>
<p>Junior year I picked a variety of colleges for my kids to look at that I thought fit in with their interests. They were in no way a definitive list and if my kids had asked to see other colleges I would have taken them there. For older son I started with a CA trip because a number of strong comp sci/math/science colleges were out there and honestly I wanted to take the trip. Sort of backfired since he hates traveling, but he did convince me that he was very open to any type of college (Both Berkeley and Cal Tech were “fine”). So after that he just chose colleges by academics and saved the visiting for later.</p>
<p>For younger child I picked two colleges that we could visit that were a couple of hours from our house. They were both on the small side of what he thought he wanted - one was in a small city and he liked it, the other was in the woods and he just hated it. He convinced me that rural was not the way to go for him! Next trip was timed for our spring break and both colleges we visited then were located in the close in Boston suburbs. He liked that location best, he ended up applying to one of the two. The third trip which we made early in September of senior year, he visited three colleges in DC. By this point he’d figured out IR as a probable major and we knew DC well because family lived there. He hated the one with no campus (GW) but liked the other two. The visits helped crystalize for him what he cared about. Since he did care about location and the vibe of the other students, visits were useful. In the end the culling went like this: No rural colleges, no LACs unless they are relatively big and urban, no big Greek life, don’t need a big sports scene, strong IR a plus, serious academics, residential neighborhoods in or near big cities preferred. He liked schools both with and without cores. He has wide interests and liked the idea of being forced to take courses that would interest him anyway. As it happens he’s ended up with a lot of distribution requirements and has to be very careful he doesn’t mess up with fulfilling them all since he’s spending the entire junior year abroad.</p>
<p>It’s not easy for a hs student to pick potential majors. Honestly I wish there were more resources to help with that - it’s so key to the college selection process. Yes, there are surveys that can help the process… but a lot rides upon the initial choice (especially for specialized majors such as Engineering). </p>
<p>For DS, it was hard getting him to choose potential majors. So we started a good humored game about “what do you not want to study”. Pottery and Creative Dance quickly went on the list. It took a long time more before he listed English. Then History. For a very long time all STEM majors were on hist radar. Eventually he targeted Engineering and is at an Engineering-only college.</p>
<p>What I’ve heard from OP is “D is ADHD; going to need loans as hubby fairly confident we won’t get financial aid; will have 3 kids total to put through college eventually (assuming this is 1st child)”. </p>
<p>Assuming the above are your key concerns, I’d suggest:
—Key on colleges with good student services, assuming your D will make use of them to ease her transition into college given her ADHD.
—If no financial aid expected, and 2 more kids to go to college after her, definitely stick with a public and in-state college to keep costs down. You don’t want to go into debt (ie, your mention of loans being needed) for any child and hurt your retirement possibilities, especially given that this is child 1 of 3…and that you say her interest is liberal arts oriented which stereotypically doesn’t lead to big $ occupations.
—Go for merit aid, as she has a good GPA…and hopefully can get good ACT / SAT results
—A number of in-state universities offer great merit based awards to get high achieving kids to attend; you should check that out too. We’re in Ohio and they have several, one being Ohio Univ…I’ve pasted their “award chart” at the bottom of this post strictly as an example. No doubt several of your PA universities have this too. </p>
<p>Also, a couple of sites we used heavily this year for our now Senior S (besides mostly lurking on CC) were Fastweb.com and Parchment.com. Both helped with the college search, and Parchment gives you calculated % chance of your child getting in to each college of choice.</p>
<p>Snoopy - My daughter is at Messiah College near Harrisburg. She also has ADD and wanted a smaller school with smaller classes. She wanted a college where the kids all didn’t go home on the weekend and she was not interested in Greek things. Her professors know her by name. She studied abroad (England) and it cost almost exactly what we spend for a semester at Messiah. Seriously, about $100 difference. Although, we gave her much more spending money because we wanted her to be able to travel. She has been very happy at Messiah, once she adjusted during the fall of freshman year. It is a Christian college, though, and is pretty strict about some things. Just a thought…might be too rural for your student.</p>
<p>Just FYI, if you dig in on Parchment.com to the detail behind the graphs, they are in some cases making recommendations with pathetically small amounts of data. Not the most reliable, I think.</p>
<p>Definitely start with potential schools near home of varying sizes. Then take advantage of spring college fairs and pick up pamphlets for unknowns in areas where student would seriously consider living for 4years. Over future breaks venture a little further from home. Save distant travel schools for visits once accepted. This has worked magically for DS.</p>
<p>I agree that on Parchment that they may have limited data collected on some schools compared to others. It was helpful to us though because we were looking at ivy league and some large public schools. I believe their “chances” calc uses 25/75 percentile SAT and ACT as well as accepted GPA ranges from each college’s attending student profiles as part of their secret calculation too though.</p>
<p>The “% chance” results they share at minimum for us let us know which schools were safeties versus stretch versus out of reach though.</p>
<p>S got into his 1st choice stretch in ED round though, so we’re quite happy!</p>
<p>Suggestion… if possible, try to find the safety and visit it first. If you are lucky D will fall in love with it, which would be a good situation. If the kids love their ‘reach’ school its harder to convince them to love a safety too- which they just have to be able to do if all else fails…</p>
<p>Oops, I missed the ADHD part. There is a section in CC that talks about ADHD and might give suggestions of schools with good support systems in place:</p>
<p>Small colleges in the mid-Atlantic for a B+/1950/top 25% student:</p>
<p>SUNY Geneseo (Public)
St. Mary’s College of MD (Public)
Goucher
St.Lawrence
Union
Hobart
Ithaca
Juniata
Muhlenberg
Allegheny
Gettysburg
Dickinson
Skidmore</p>
<p>To add to that list, you could look at SUNY New Paltz, it isn’t particularly small, but class size is small, its a liberal arts school with a lot of education, music, humanities majors. The campus itself is very liberal and hippy- like. It’s located in a cute little town about an hour and a half up from NYC, there are also several malls within 30 minutes of the college, its also right off of I-87. </p>
<p>I would start with schools that are nearby or schools that can be done in 1 day. The first school i visited was the college of saint rose- I chose to visit because it was a college that looked nice on paper. </p>
<p>What I found that helped me, was starting with the college brochures I was getting in the mail ( if you havent started getting them, be prepared to have your mailbox stuffed with open house letters, books, etc. ) I would look up THOSE schools and visit the ones that are close by. </p>
<p>As others have suggested be sure you do
Public-Private
Suburban-Urban-Rural
Big-Medium-Small
Etc.</p>
<p>Thanks everyone so much for the advice. I agree that my daughter needs to take the lead in this process. I am still pouring over everyone’s advice and comments and really appreciate you taking the time to help.</p>