Current/Future Applicants and Parents: Making a College Application List

ArtsandLetters
Mon, 24 Jun 2013 02:03:32 +0000

Same thing happened with a classmate of my older daughter. She wanted a BFA in Art, her father said she couldn’t make a living at it. She was good at math so he pushed her to take an engineering scholarship at a State University. Two years later, the miserable kid enrolled in my D’s Art college and is all smiles. This process is just so tough and getting tougher all the time.

But I do, also believe, that in some cases - all things can be equal. Even at USC they admitted during campus preview day that for some degrees, the extra money wasn’t always a better investment over a different school offering more aid. Then pointed out that we were “buying the network”. I thought, "No. What I’m buying is the fact that my daughter was beaming about the coursework, her peers she met on Facebook, and she said “I get to do what I love every day now.” That’s why we said yes. But we’ll concede non-essentials will be sacrificed by the family to make it happen. We depleted a lot of resources because the local school district is bad so she asked to attend a private high school. But without that change she would have never qualified for USC. So we braced and did the math and decided life had a plan for her. We’d just follow it through.

But given how many families I know who are already stretched to the point where this is not feasible (hence so many admitted kids dropping out due to finances after making friends on the FB page) my advice:

Start looking at scholarships years early. Apply for as many outside ones as you can. Load up on AP’s if the target college will take the credits, and then study like the wind for 4’s and 5’s. I tell middle school parents “START LOOKING at scholarship requirements now for each college your kid is interested in. Figure out the rules so you have a better chance of shooting for them, versus waiting until 12th grade and finding out it’s too late to make performance corrections.”