I don’t mean to “Preach”… but “sharing” can also be interpreted as someone sharing their past experiences (pre class of 2019) to help give us,the Class of 2019, insight from those who’ve already gone through this process. I, for one, am very thankful for that insight.
I don’t think it’s just been a matter of “old” and “new” posters. A couple who have been on here since at least last year’s cycle fuel fires by making digging, disrespectful comments when most are really trying to be helpful. Can’t they remember how tense this time was without added tensions? Regardless, I just hope it stops and that this can get back to being a positive place.
Anyway, yes, I can’t believe that, next week, we will likely (hopefully) know all of the decisions! Except wait lists, of course… I hadn’t really thought about those before–I think I blissfully hoped the answers would just be yes, lol–and how they’d affect the waiting, the waiting, the waiting! And, of course, the wait for financial aid packages–and the fact that my husband is a new business owner as of last year, so it’s taken a lot longer to get everything together to file taxes, so our wait for the definite aid offer is longer. I was also hoping to have final offers before visiting, but that’s not going to be the case. We have received estimates from a couple private schools, but no public ones.
I had not really thought about this until it happened to D, but now that we are “in the thick of it,” waitlists are very challenging to manage when you have large merit scholarships. D has many large merit scholarship offers that expire on May 1. I know some schools will possibly extend those offers past their stated commitment date of May 1, but nothing is a given. It is a lot of pressure on an 18-year-old to consider that she may ultimately get an offer from a waitlist that she would gladly accept, but, since the merit scholarship commitment date for that school has passed, the school may no longer be affordable. Ouch.
I recommended to D that she basically put all of her waitlist offers out of mind and proceed assuming that the offers in hand are the offers that she will get. It gets worse each week as some schools that really want her keep adding to her scholarship stack. One of her first substantial lessons in some of the complexities of adult life.
I cannot tell you how much support I’ve gotten from the MT forum here on CC. Like an insane amount of support. There would be some days I’d log on and I’d have 7, 8, 9 + private messages from different posters with positive thoughts, ideas, suggestions, etc.
Are there snarky posters - or posts? Yes. I’m sure I’ve been snarky somewhere a time or two.
But for the life of me I cannot see how this thread (or any of these threads - save for the sunflower on in the Theatre forum) is unusually harsh. Maybe I just skip over those posts. Maybe my skin is too thick. Or maybe I’M the snarky poster!
And FWIW, I totally get why someone would want a Class of XX only thread. Totally. But August 2014 KaMaMom is completely opposite of March 2015 KaMaMom. Having gone through it (and being in the thick of it right now) I can say that I would’ve never kept my sanity most of the time without the experienced parents who stuck around to pay it forward.
@EmsDad, we’re running into that, too! It’s one of the reasons I’d hoped not to deal with waitlists. Plus, then, at the waitlist school, will D get scholarships as good as the rest of her schools? I obviously don’t know yet. Ugh! So close to being done, yet so far away!
My plan is to call “Unnecessary Roughness” from now on if I see snarky comments on CC MT, and hope others do the same. Sunlight is the best disinfectant. 
Fingers crossed for everyone awaiting decisions, and as has been said we all look forward to welcoming you to the “other side”!
I’m appreciative of all the help on CC, new and old posters alike. I just try to ignore the snarky posts. Ha!
On another note, it is getting tense in the household. Still waiting on CMU (today?).
Plus trying to figure out how to pay for some of these schools. I think I am taking @monkey13 's advice. It never hurts to ask!!
I know its been said, but I wanted to say how much I appreciate all of the support from both “old” and “new” people on this thread.This process has been so much harder than I ever thought.!!
@myloves- the school where D came off the waitlist (Boston) was her lowest FA package (merit/talent only- FASA seems to think we should be able to pay for just about anything). No idea if that was a function of the waitlist or the school.
^^^ Yes, I am not sure what logarithms FAFSA uses to decide what my family can pay with two in college next year but – “They crazy man!”
MomCares, I love your idea of using “unnecessary roughness,” and I’m going to steal that for other areas of my life, too! 
I’m also in the FAFSA land of “huh” because I’m not sure how they expect me to live, eat or drive on their numbers. Who knew having only the one child I could afford would bite me in the backside? (I kid, but seriously!)
We ran into the same thing last year - one kid gets you NO breaks from government. Our “expected family contribution” was significantly larger than my take home salary - I guess they figure I work for my own amusement…
I have been told by another CC member that kids who come off Wait Lists do not usually get as much talent $ as kids who received initial offers so if accepting an offer from a WL school is dependent $ offer, keep in mind the award will probably be less generous than what a “first round pick” was offered. I don’t know this to be 100% accurate, but it does seem somewhat logical an assumption.
@Addicted2MT, re: #3413, that could be true at many colleges.
I will share, however, how it worked at CMU. At CMU, they have a short “Priority WaitList.” When put on this wait list, you are notified of your FA package upfront at that point, even though you may never be accepted. The reason for this, I assume, is that the way their Priority Waitlist works is that if you are offered a spot off that list and into the class, you are given just 48 hours to commit. This all happens after May 1, if it happens at all. So, they tell you the FA package ahead of time so you will be well prepared to make a decision quickly should you get off the Priority Waitlist. So, in my D’s year, when she was put on this list, we got the FA package and I thought it was pretty good. But I realize not every college operates the same!
I promised myself that (as hard, as it is) I will not add any more comments to the discussion that followed my original post, but I find it is being either misunderstood, or misinterpreted. Let me reiterate: I find overwhelming majority of the members that ‘stuck’ around very generous, and their advice invaluable, and I hope you guys are around when the time comes for my daughter to enter the craziness of the admission process. I do not wish at all to ‘oust’ the experienced CCers, the board would be useless without them. I’m not sure how having one thread, out of 4000, limited to a current class experiences undermines the tremendous value that other members bring to this board. I don’t see it as ‘instead’, but rather as ‘in addition’ to threads where all generations of MT can share, ask for, and provide advice and support. This is TRULY my ‘last’- last 
post on this topic.
Oh, having more than one doesn’t help much at all with FASFA, either! We have 4 children. It’s a good thing my D has scholarship offers, but some schools may still be off her list based on finances. Fortunately, my D was cognizant of this a long time ago, and, since she’s frugal, she is already talking realistically about which ones may be most doable and attractive to her financially as well as artistically. It’s still a bummer, of course.
I guess the problem I see with a thread that ONLY the current year was allowed to post in is that if something were said that was wrong, or a point was made where support/advice from someone who has been through that scenario could be really valuable, it would be a shame for that corrected info/support not to be given. When it was our year, I never would have wanted a “2017 only” thread for that reason… but maybe that’s just me.
If you’ve ever been to a meeting or a club, and there is one member who dominates the conversation to the point where you sometimes don’t know what the discussion is about, because there is so much verbal clutter, that is what Alpha is referring to, I am sure. Some members try to take that on, in a vain attempt to declutter. But for a variety of reasons, it doesnt work. It doesnt declutter. It just causes more clutter. That is what is very off-putting. Because Alpha has observed the problem, she is asking that we have a thread without that. Not replacing anything we currently have, just adding a thread. Unfortunately, that is never ever going to fly, as much as a many of us would like it to fly.
So there you have it. It has nothing to do with “old vs new” members. It has to do with clutter.
@myloves…re: post #3416:
Is your MT your first child to go to college? Where multiple children CAN help in this area is if/when they are in college at the SAME TIME! The financial “need” appears (and is!!) greater. My girls are two years apart in age but entered college just one year apart (younger D went to college after her junior year of HS). Younger D likes to remind us that she “saved” us money by graduating HS a year early because it meant she overlapped in college with her sister every year but one and so our FA package increased a lot for D1 when D2 entered college a year later, and I imagine it helped with D2’s package too. Something to know going forward if this is your oldest and you will have kids in college at the same time (you may know this already and I wasn’t sure and so thought I would pass it along).