Step 1: Join a “Parents of HS Class of 20xx” group here.
Step 2: Start listening to the “Your College Bound Kid” podcast. They have podcast episodes 2x/week (on Mon & Thurs). Plus a ton of information & resources on their website.
Step 3: Go to College Essay Guy’s website and check out some of his Youtube videos.
Step 4: Buy a copy of “College Essay Essentials: Write Essays That Stand Out And Get You In,” by Ethan Sawyer (he’s the college essay guy). Our high school uses this book with seniors.
Step 5: Consider also buying “College Admission Essentials: A Step-by-Step Guide to Showing Colleges Who You Are and What Matters To You.” same author as above. our high school uses this book, too. Both were super helpful.
Step 6: Figure out what your family can afford to pay per year.
Step 7: Figure out what colleges will expect you to pay per year. This can be different than #6 above. Use colleges’ Net Price Calculators on their websites. you’ll get different answers depending on which college it is.
Step 8: Come back here with questions and whenever you need morale support.
I feel some anxiety about other things, but I don’t feel anxiety about my kid’s college application process. Here is what helps me:
I’m not the driver here. I’m just the passenger, and it’s my child’s responsibility to research, apply for, and matriculate at a college. When my kid started high school, my spouse and I told him how much we were willing to pay for his college. Doing the work and making the choices about applications is ultimately up to him.
The Kid has some safety schools that he will definitely get into, which are not too expensive, and we think he will be happy there. There are hundreds of great colleges in the U.S., and he doesn’t have to go to a school with a single-digit acceptance rate.
My child spends time on extracurriculars that bring him joy. He doesn’t pick extracurriculars based on what he thinks colleges want to see.
I think a student should apply early decision only if they have a clear #1 choice that is definitely affordable. If there is no clear top choice, then the student should keep their options open.
One small piece of advice that I’ve seen here that we tried to follow was “love your safeties”. It’s hard, but we actually went and looked at several schools that were pretty likely for our D26 that would ordinarily be somewhat hard to get excited about. She didn’t like one at all, the other was just “ok”, but the third one hit the mark as a place she could see herself. Having that school and another that had rolling admissions took a LOT of pressure off. She had one acceptance in late September and the other a couple of months later. It made her (and me!) not worry about the essays, lists, etc. quite as much.
You tell your kid (and yourself) “No matter the outcome of this crazy process, I want you to know that I think you are amazing, and I love you, and I know wherever you end up is the next right place for you.”
Apply to a school that is a certainty - there are plenty out there - you hit a certain GPA or ACT and minimum academic level and you’re in - Iowa schools, Arizona schools and many more.
You remove the anxiety - and the rest is icing on the cake.
Ok, I have to agree with freddiesteady. I have anxiety - that’s my fundamental nature. I research and research and research the heck out of things - which is why the list that sbinaz provided was awesome! Bookmarking it for my younger kid.
Funnily enough we took a bunch of course with CEG but I didn’t know about the books. Additionally the universities make the process so opaque.
And it does not help that unfortunately it DOES matter where your last educational experience is from - I have experienced it myself. I am a woman of color and not originally from this country, though I have been here for 27 years now, so most of my adult life. But still being from Johns Hopkins Univ (my grad school) matters - it opens doors that would be otherwise closed to me. And yes, what you do in those opened doors is going to actually decide your life but the opened door is step 1. And to pretend otherwise is not realistic imo.
I do agree that your undergrad does not matter as much except for maybe getting internships etc which may dictate getting to into grad level programs especially for my kid who hopes to go to law school. So yes, I am obsessively trying my best to help her make the right decision which may have repercussions down the line.
Law schools don’t care about internships. Really they don’t. They care about gpa, LSAT scores, and a handful of intangibles– kid grew up in foster care, had a parent who was incarcerated, spent time during their childhood in housing court helping to translate for a parent who didn’t understand an illegal eviction notice? That kind of thing.
I fully respect your POV– and of course JHU is an outstanding institution. But the stuff that gives parents anxiety– parsing the difference between Vanderbilt and Emory (which one is REALLY the more prestigious?) or figuring out if an “International Affairs” is going to be rigorous enough if an affordable college does not have the desired PPE major– really, these differences on the margin aren’t as important as they seem to be when your kid is in HS.
One of my kids was on the “change a major every couple of weeks” plan in college. It gave me a lot of anxiety until we had a sit down– reiterated that we had budgeted for 8 semesters and no more. Kid understood. And then my anxiety went away. Physics? Geology? Russian Lit? Not my problem. And kid found the right major, graduated on time (magna cum laude) and got a great job with a BA in what folks consider to be an unemployable humanities field. I had a repeat of the anxiety when the kid won a summer fellowship and asked the new employer for an extended start date- I think they agreed on October instead of July– but at that point the kid was more or less off the family payroll, so it was all good.
