Looking back after my first experience as a parent of a HS student going through the college process and thinking about starting “over again” soon with my HS Sophomore, I am interested in hearing everyone’s bests and worsts of the process and also things you learned that you would have been told sooner in the process.
Here are some topics, feel free to add more:
Best Tours: Brandeis,Colgate, Elon
Worst Tours: Muhlenberg, Skidmore
Best Info Sessions: Muhlenberg (by far), Tufts
Worst Info Sessions: Ursinus, Brandeis, Colgate
Best Advice received: Start testing process early in Junior Year and finish with it before AP Testing and Finals in May.
Worst Advice received: Can’t think of anything that was really bad
What I wish we had known before the end of the process: Just how much $ is offered in Merit scholarships for your “Safeties” – We were shocked by the amounts being offered our D – had no idea this was a possibility.
(1) Your child will do better on either the SAT or the ACT; so take both, and whichever one your child does better on, re-take to improve that score.
(2) Make sure that your child doesn’t find just one school to fall in love with; find several to fall in love with, because chances are your child won’t be accepted at all of them.
(3) Visit colleges while they are in session, with students on campus; that’s really the only way to get a good “feel” for the school.
Two kids, classes of 2011 and 2015, music and art major respectively
Best tours: Drexel, Sheridan, RIT, Berklee College of Music, Belmont, NYU, SCAD, Cornell, Ithaca
Worst tours: RISD, Temple, James Madison
Best info sessions: Belmont, Drexel, NYU, RISD
Worst info sessions: RIT, Temple (Boyer)
Best advice: Get serious with your student during junior year about: using Naviance to search for colleges; registering on time for SAT and ACT and setting aside study time for them, tutoring if necessary, and retaking if necessary; start working on an essay; and using the summer wisely for college visits and summer prep programs.
Worst advice: Don’t major in art or music, you won’t find a job.
What I wish I had known: How much difference it makes to apply Early Decision if you have a strong preference for one school. Didn’t do it with my first and he didn’t get in to his top choice; did it with my second and she is in. Also forces kids to think earlier in the process and get visits in, tests done, and application filed.
My kids are out of college, but I’m amusing thinking back how often best tour was followed by worst info session:
Best tour: Bard, Tufts, Caltech (we all wanted to go here after the tour even my non-science kid)
Worst info: Bard (unbelievablly bad!), Tufts, Caltech
Worst tour: Stanford (but it really wasn’t bad)
Best info: Brandeis, Vassar
Best accepted student event: U of Chicago, Carnegie Mellon
Worst accepted student event: WPI
First kid visited 4 before acceptances and different 4 afterwards - applied to 8
(didn’t get into any of the colleges he visited though he applied to three of them!)
Second kid visited 9 before acceptances, visited 4 afterwards (3 repeats one he hadn’t seen yet) - applied to 7
Best advice (from HS guidance counselor) … 1) As parents you should set the parameters of where you are willing to send your child to college and do not visit schools that fall outside of those parameters. Ex. if you want your child within driving range, don’t look at a college a plane flight away. 2) Be honest about where your statistics put your and look at colleges in the right academic range 3) Don’t fall in love with any one college.
I looked at schools with two kids:
Best tours: Lafayette, Union, UScranton, Fordham
Worst tours: Fairfield, Lehigh, LaSalle
Best Food: Richmond - it is not close. Outstanding food.
Worst Food: Messiah
Best Admins to deal with: Messiah, Alabama (what nice people at both schools)
Worst school to apply to as a homeschooler: Richmond - it is not close. What a terrible experience.
As another posted said, we set guidelines on which schools my daughter could look it. For us, it was ones where she had a at least a fair chance of winning a large scholarship. Well, and had a decent academic reputation and was not a commuter school.
Sit down- now. Today. Regardless of how old your kid is. Spread out all your tax returns, bills, IRA statements, two years worth of home repair and car repair receipts. Make one big ugly spreadsheet which shows you how much money you can realistically pay out of your current earnings for college.
Don’t be one of those parents who can’t manage to save 5K per year for college when your kid is in the 8th grade, but magically think you can scrape together 30K per year once little junior enrolls at your alma mater.
Get a grip on your finances right now. If you have a few years left, you can do a course correction- figure out where to trim, what to cut, how to get hold of the beast called “daily living”. But if you can’t- and if you are going into the college process with minimal savings, don’t delude yourself that you’re going to magically become one of those people who can feed a family of four for $80/month.
There are people like that, but if you haven’t been one of those people, you won’t become one of those people just because you have tuition bills coming in. Every April kids post here that their parents assumed they’d be able to afford any college that admitted their kid- until they did the math and found out that they couldn’t.
Don’t wait until April of senior year. That’s too late. Do it today no matter how old your kid is.
If you can swing 20K per year, that’s great. If that happens to five with what several colleges say your EFC is, that’s even better. But if virtually every college in America considers you a full freight payer and you can free up 12 grand a year, you owe it to your kid to deliver that message early and often.
Best advice: Use the NPC and don’t apply to any schools that you won’t be able to afford. Why put your kid (and you) through the misery of not being able to go to a school because the COA / FA gap is too big?
If a school is not affordable, it isn’t an option, no matter how great the program or how likely the kid is to be accepted.
Let’s see. I’m actually working on a 5 page document with all the dos and donts my friend requested but us personally…put max into retirement accounts from the beginning as everything is game. Don’t buy a house and have assets in non retirement accounts when completing FAFSA, start visiting colleges sophomore year and rule some out then. Take and retake ACTs, SATs. If you have the stats applying EA is a no brainer. Get deadlines and other requirements directly from college websites not third party sites. Open every single piece of college mail! Son got big scholarship offers inside thin envelopes with one piece of paper! Everything gets kept in a bin. Throw nothing away. Stay organized with a spreadsheet of deadlines and where you can check off tasks, insert dates, etc. realize you will get mountains of mail if you check that block on the PSAT. Getting a cut off score for your state for PSAT was huge. Opened many doors with National Merit.
Worst part of the process for me was touring these schools and seeing how over the top all of the amenities are now. When I went to school it was no where near as nice as it is now (and I graduated in 1996).
Best part: Knowing your kid is admitted and will be heading away to college.
Worst part: Knowing your kid is admitted and will be heading away to college.
There are plenty of small tidbits of advice to add, but here are a couple of related ones:
Create three or more specific new emails. One for parent and TWO or more for applicant with shared passwords. Use two of them for everything that will be important in the process, but use the third for everything that might lead to mailbox clutter. That last step is not essential but it might help to keep the junk out or organized. Keep the email simple and make sure to write down all passwords. For the official ones, use easy to remember emails and make sure the kid does not create a juvenile sounding one.
Do NOT enter any of the high school data on the standardized test applications -- if possible -- and keep the high school OUT of standardized tests. Note that the PSAT system might make this difficult.
I think that’s only necessary for high schools that think it’s fun to put your scores on the transcript negating score choice. For us high score early on meant the school took a lot more seriously our requests for acceleration. If your 7th grader has SAT scores better than most of the seniors, or you’ve got a kid with the highest PSAT score in the school - your GC is likely to be helpful when you want some accommodations.
Helpful advice, from the NMSF board: don’t regard the PSAT as merely a dress rehearsal for the SAT, if you’re looking for money. If you prep for the PSAT, you might do better on the SAT anyway, but also you are automatically entered for the NMF scholarships, and if you are chasing scholarship money, or are hoping for a full ride, NMF is a good way to start. I have three kids, and I honestly think they are all about as bright, in their own pointy ways, but one didn’t prep for PSAT, made NMF anyway (and in MA!); one didn’t prep, and made only commended (but with prep for the SAT, got near-perfect scores); one prepped for the PSAT, made NMF, and only had to take the SAT once. The point is that prep (and I just mean reading through the book and taking a practice test or two, getting familiar with the reasoning behind the kind of question you’re asked, understanding the basic strategy involved, not classes and tutoring) really helps, and many people are told not to worry about the PSAT but to take the test cold, just to see how you do. If you are looking for scholarships, that’s not a good plan.
My advice? Don’t tour the dream school first. Tour a couple others first, more matchy, so your kid isn’t swept away by the awesomeness of Dream School, and therefore can’t appreciate the more homely virtues of Match School (let alone safety). I liken this to house hunting: you know your price range. Is it a good idea to look at the top/almost out of your range houses first, and then the mid-range houses? No, you’ll end up bidding on a house out of your range, and being discontented with the mid-range, even though you’d have liked them otherwise.
Best info session: Pomona. I wanted to go to school there, the adcom guy really conveyed the value and importance of liberal arts and their approach.
Simply stated, the obligation of the high schools should be confined to released ONLY grades obtained at the school. This means that they have NO business in obtaining or releasing the scores from standardized testing agencies such as the SAT or PSAT. The scores are the student’s and NOT the domain of the high school. This is different from the grades obtained at the high school.
Despite being based on good intentions, a number of schools are going beyond good intentions and refuse to limit the entry and are actively sharing the scores they obtained through a FAULTY administration at the College Board.
My recommendation has always been to ACTIVELY seek to quash this type by information sharing by:
Notifying your GC that the student categorically wants this information to be deleted from the transcripts
Notifying The College Board that the student prohibits them to release information to the high school
Remove all mention of the high school in the application for SAT testing, or PSAT when available.
The above is best done AFTER trying for an amicable resolution at the GC level.