@joecollege44 FWIW, in my neck of the wood, the students prefer BU (and the equivalent NYU), BC, and Lehigh way over UMich. And I didn’t even know Umich was such a big deal until I read the Umich forum on CC. At the risk of making some Umich fans upset, UMich just isn’t a thing in our area for some reason. When my kiddo got accepted to UMich, instead of congrats, we got “but why?”, or they just moved on and focused on the other schools she applied. I personally know a few hundred HS kids from our school and from next town schools (kid play soccer and I hosted HS gradation invited the entire senior class of 2019). There maybe less than 5 that applied to UMich as a safety or just in case, all got accepted and but none went.
Note that I am not making the decision on which are more prestigious. I am just saying that in my area, if you got into Lehigh or BU/BC, people will give you unsolicited approval. Not so much for UMich. And I also know of 2 kids with 1520’s SAT, 4.0 unweighted GPA and tons of APs got wait listed from Lehigh. My kiddo would have been happy going to UMich (over BU) had she not been accepted to UCLA/Cal. Even now people are still questioning why she picked Cal over CMU and JHU. No one from her school applied to the UCs. Just not a thing to do here lol.
I would reassure her that her schools are fine. If she reaches, there’s not a great chance she’ll get in anyway, so no reason to spend the time and effort to apply to schools she isn’t all that interested in just for the prestige.
Dave is known for giving questionable advice and pushing his insurance products onto his viewers so he can live in a $5 million mansion in TN. I would be very careful with following his advice about anything related to paying for college.
@nhatrang no idea where you live, but Michigan is a safety for no one. Especially not for anyone who lives outside of Michigan. If they all got into Michigan, assuming it was a safety, they were misguided and must have also been exceptional students.
^^ I know that’s what everyone on CC said. I heard so often that I became the defender of UMich isn’t a safety for anyone IRL and, and frankly no one cared. I guess it’s more like “just in case” than “safe” because, as i said, if they got in the chance for them to go is very small anyway. People don’t know what they don’t know. In addition, the 5 kids that applied/accepted to UMich got accepted to Duke, Princeton, Cornell (2 of them) and Tufts. So even though one should never take anything for granted, I don’t see it’s so far fetched for those kids to consider UMich a safety to be honest. They could be wrong (they weren’t), but it was a reasonable assumptions for those kids.
we personally didn’t think it was a safety school for my kiddo - she was very excited to get accepted in wave 1 after the initial deferral of EA. And for a while it was the top choice from the ones she were admitted thus far.
The problem with making assumptions about a school with a low overall acceptance rate being a safety is when students don’t have a true safety on their list and then get shut out everywhere.
I started posting on CC because this happened to one of my D’s best friends. He way overshot and is at a local regional school that the guidance counselor made him apply to at the last minute. He was distraught for quite some time.
And for the record, my kid and her HS val were both wait listed at Michigan for engineering. Both visited, had HAIL interviews, and my D corresponded with a prof for quite some time so IMO, demonstrated sufficient interest. The Val had a UW 4.0, 36 ACT, NMF, and tons of great ECs. He took a full ride offer at another state flagship. Neither accepted their spot on the WL so we don’t know if either would have come off.
The thing is, people make assumption about their “safeties” ALL the time, even schools that have lower acceptance rate at UM. People make assumption and sometimes they are right, sometimes they are wrong. But none got as much grief and challenge as with UM. I think that says more about UM’s fans, than UM.
Anyway, back to the OP’s topic - good luck with your kiddo’s school choices. It was a an emotional roller coaster for me last year. Hope you are having a better experience.
Pressure is at an all time high on college/university campus…mental health should not be ignored. We expect perfection from our kids today and then compound it with high debt after graduation, why we do this to our kids is beyond me …if you want to call it “setting”…maybe it is okay.
I believe if you could go back in time and ask any parent of a kid that attempted self harm due to the amount of pressure that they feel at a certain university/college the parent would say “it didn’t really matter” or “If I had to do it again”…settling could be just be what the Doctor ordered.
And perhaps we could all use a little bit more of that prescription?
What I struggle with in this whole piece is the notion of “settling”: that a school with a lower acceptance rate / more famous name is de facto better, both in general and for a particular student.
At the level of school in play here, I don’t believe that is true. There will be smart, motivated students at every school on the OP’s daughter’s list. There will be engaged, motivating, highly qualified professors. There will be more opportunities for internships, study abroad, research and fun than she will ever be able to take advantage of. There will be students who go from there to the very top grad schools and employers.
I think that seeing it as “settling” to not go to the school that is that is the most academically selective one you can get into isn’t that different from judging somebody by other superficial aspects of a person- what car they drive, what brands they wear. It makes it about the bumper sticker. The idea that your work has been ‘wasted’ if it doesn’t get you a famous name college is pernicious.
OP, your original question was ‘would you reassure her that her favorite schools are good enough choices or would you encourage her to reach a bit?’. Subsequent posts have emphasized that she is driving the conversation, not you. So, I would say- push back on the idea of ‘settling’ or ‘reaching’ in the first place. Encourage her to trust herself: she likes those schools. They are good schools. You can afford them. You are proud of her and how she is handling this process. She can trust herself.*
*and if, in the fullness of time and more information, the original decision no longer seems to work, she can trust herself to course-correct as needed.
You can see Lehigh acceptance rate by score at https://www1.lehigh.edu/admissions/admission-statistics . Among 1500-1600 SAT applicants, the acceptance rate was slightly under 50%. The majority of applicants in this 1500+ SAT range were rejected. I expect the bulk of these rejections related to missing a critical non-stat criteria Lehigh is looking for, which can include demonstrated interest. For example, in the article at https://www.inquirer.com/philly/education/20130331_Lehigh_and_the_Fall_Freshman_Class.html , a Lehigh admission reps mention rejecting an applicant partially because he didn’t login to the admissions portal, suggesting low interest as quoted below:
“But one thing that really got the team: He never opened his portal. The portal is the online site where students check on the status of their application and receive updates. The staff sees it as a major indicator of how serious a student is about Lehigh.”
@Nhatrang Interesting. Are you living in NY, PA, CT, or NJ? I know Lehigh is extremely popular in those states. I live in DC and UMich and BC are more popular than Lehigh, but a kid applying to Mich would rarely apply to BC. Interesting to see these regional variations!
I believe @Nhatrang lives NJ. My kid at UMich lives with 3 roommates, 2 of whom are from NJ. I think somewhere not that far from Ashbury Park, which I only know because their parents mentioned attending a Springsteen concert a long time ago at a dinner back in September. ?
@1stTimeThruMom I live in NJ and I do not speak for NJ obviously. Hundreds of kids from NJ go to UM every year. I was just talking about the bubble of my town. Lehigh is incredibly popular in our HS (We live 1 hour from it). Most kids love BC but hard to get in from NJ. UNC is also popular but it’s incredibly hard to get in. A few kids got into Cornell and UM but rejected by UNC last year. Same pattern every year it seems, it would be a lucky year if we have 1 kid got accepted to UNC, but we have kids to the ivies almost every year. Villanova Is another very popular school for us. 12 kids applied, 10 accepted and 7 attended. Mot sure why I have these numbers in my head but I do lol . I talked to pretty much every kid in HS19 class. DH and I also tutor Math and chemistry for a ton of kids (for free) from the HS, and I get to talk to them a lot.
My kids do not fit in the mold of the kids in the town, though. The schools they like are UCs, UM, PSU, JHU, CMU. My S23 wants to go to CMU for CS, ha! Good luck with that!
@bester1 having spent a career in finance I am always skeptical of popular “money experts”, I am also skeptical of the onslaught approach of posting a pile of links as arguments to back you up (just post the actual argument?), but honestly, when this is extended to including links to British tabloids that deal far more in hype and scare tactics than facts, it is simply unlikely to be helpful in aiding the OP making an informed decision. I find it hard to take anyone posting links to the daily mail seriously.
Right LOL? If only these people KNEW what the DM is, it is like those ragesyou have in supermarket checkout lanes in the USA, with some really genius web people.
@joecollege44 I don’t know if the yield game was the reason for her waitlist. And @data10 I had read that same article so when my daughter was applying to Lehigh I made sure she knew that reading the emails and going to the portal were important for that school. So I don’t think that was the reason either.
But in the end it doesn’t really matter why she was waitlisted. She is now at UMd in their Honors College with merit money. (saving us $140k overall for her undergrad degree compared to the COA at Lehigh). Like the OP I do believe my daughter was thinking about prestige of the schools to which she applied. There was some thinking on her part that she had earned a spot at a “better” school based upon her stats and hard work in high school. I also think that she believed that other students in her high school would expect her to end up at one of those “better” schools based upon her stats so she felt pressure to live up to those expectations (whether true or made up in her own head). Not saying that is a reasonable or desired point of view but it definitely was part of how she was viewing her acceptances or lack thereof.
So she wasn’t a happy camper the summer before she matriculated. But she is the epitome of a happy camper now and is the poster child for the “I didn’t get into the schools I wanted so ‘settled’ for this other school that now I realize I love and is perfect for me”. The challenging part is that she is only able to see this in hindsight. I’m not sure there is anything I could have said or done during the application process to counter any pressure she was imposing on herself to get accepted to “better” schools.
Best of luck to OP and his daughter. I have every reason to believe things will turn out just fine for her.
Excellent post, @adlgel . My D is now a senior at a school she loves. She waitlisted at it, and though she really liked it, it wasn’t her top choice. It’s the best place for her, no question. And most her high school friends who ended up at places that were not their top choices are happy too.
Once kids are out of high school, they just don’t care what college anyone is at. It doesn’t matter. It’s something we parents mostly need to get over.
@SJ2727 …I appreciate your perspective. Nobody is forced to read the links or agree. It is just another perspective. If you don’t believe unnecessary stress is taking hold on college campuses or if you believe college debt is imaginary…that is fine by me. Just offering a different perspective and things to consider. I personally, believe these are issues that are real , current and serious.
Not personal, just an alternative perspective. All is good…don’t stress.