<p>I am curious to learn how you are helping your child this way.</p>
<p>Do I encourage my D to attend the school that best fits her nature or encourage her to attend the school that will stretch her beyond her comfort zone?</p>
<p>In my opinion: encourage her to attend the school that best fits her nature and to seek opportunities to stretch herself beyond her comfort zone while she’s there.</p>
<p>I don’t think people can do their best in an environment in which they are uncomfortable. And it’s not necessary to be in such an environment to stretch yourself. At any college, there are experiences offered that give students the opportunity to stretch themselves. It may be a difficult course. It may be a research project, a new extracurricular activity, an on-campus job, or study abroad. It may even be living with a roommate with whom you are not compatible, finding off-campus housing and coping with the complexities of dealing with a landlord and utility companies, or handling a medical or personal problem on your own while away from home. </p>
<p>I think your daughter will be better able to stretch herself by meeting challenges like these if she’s in an environment where she basically “fits.”</p>
<p>While I gave advice to my kids on the colleges that they applied to, I left the final decisions in their hands. I felt it was important for them to have full control over those decisions. That way, they couldn’t blame me if they didn’t like where they went. They also could fully appreciate the confidence, wisdom and lessons they’d learn in making such an important selection. Since the places where they applied had been carefully chosen, there were benefits they could get from attending any of the colleges that admitted them.</p>
<p>When it comes to your question, I think that going to any college will result in a student’s stretching beyond their comfort zone. There are learning and growing opportunities in any college experience.</p>
<p>Most of the colleges on my D’s application list are places where she is on the leading edge of applicants’ test scores and grades–top 25% or better compared to their accepted students. This was for two reasons:</p>
<p>1) Better chance at merit scholarships.
2) Better chance that she’ll be able to strike a healthy balance between academic work and fun.</p>
<p>More importantly, all the schools felt like a good personality fit for her. She’s such a shy kid that I think it’s essential for her to feel confident it’s her kind of place, full of the sort of people she wants to know better and the kind of student organizations & opportunities that she can get excited about.</p>
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<p>Both of my kids chose colleges where they were among the better qualified students and deliberately avoided even applying to colleges that would have been high reaches for them. At the time, I wondered whether they were making good decisions.</p>
<p>I no longer wonder. The more qualified students at a college are the ones who get the better opportunities – for such things as teaching assistantships and undergraduate research. They are also the ones able to maintain GPAs high enough so that they can qualify for interesting internships and get admitted to graduate schools that they like.</p>
<p>I would not advise anyone to go to a college for which he or she is grossly overqualified. But being in the top quarter can be a very good experience.</p>
<p>I’m with NSM. I gave my opinions with drawbacks and advantages of each choice, but the final decison was theirs.</p>
<p>as usual, totally agree with Marian and others…older daughter was given final decision rights and chose the school with the comfort level; did not want to go outside it…younger daughter will be given the same rights and, if history tends to repeat itself, will probably also make her final decision where she doesn’t have to go outside her comfort level…this is a personality thing; not necessarily an academic one (although I do agree with the above posters regarding academic comfort)</p>
<p>I left the decision up to the kid, but I did make him apply to at least one less techie school (Harvard), because I thought he had better than average chances to get in, and I thought his perception of it was not entirely accurate. He went to the accepted students weekend there and had a good time, but still chose the more techie atmosphere, for plenty of good reasons. Since he’s the sort of kid who would probably not take advantage of Harvard’s breadth of offering both in and out of the classroom, I was fine with his decision.</p>
<p>OK, now to complicate it a bit. D so far is accepted to a wonderful quirky highly regarded LA school that appears to be an extension of her northeastern boarding school experience … just more so. 30% eventually end up in academia. School number two in the running is a large state school with smaller residential colleges and the one she was accepted into has the focus she is interested in (International/anthropology/global) but still the “small” residential college is more then twice the size of the LA.</p>
<p>Large state school is 1/2 the cost of small LA school. $100,000 difference at the end of four years … assuming only 4 years!</p>
<p>Does $$ concerns change the decision from nature to nurture?</p>
<p>Is that a $100,000 difference <em>after</em> financial aid? Or are you still waiting on the financial aid info?</p>
<p>This isn’t really a nature-or-nurture question, though, is it? The question is really, “What’s the best fit school that is within our family’s financial means?”</p>
<p>If the finances are important for you, it’s not a nature/nature decision, but a financial one that you need to explain to your D. Otherwise, leave the decision up to your D.</p>
<p>The choice is always among the colleges that 1) have accepted the student, and 2) are financially feasible for the family.</p>
<p>With those two essentials taken care of, then the student’s preferences and feelings about fit come into play.</p>
<p>If good choices were made months ago about which colleges to apply to, all of them should be reasonably good “fits,” but some may be better fits than others.</p>
<p>It seems to be my D’s “nature” to seek environments that stretch her beyond her comfort zone. So I don’t know how to answer OP’s question. I guess I would answer “yes”.</p>
<p>Ah vicariousparent … it is also my Ds nature to stretch herself … at some point she may want to rest and take advantage of the huge gains she has made so far to prepare for the next step … deferral is also a possibility. </p>
<p>$100,000 without FA … we are both working so not likely to get much … </p>
<p>Thank you all … CC has been extremely helpful through the last few months.</p>
<p>Yes it is really a theoretical question</p>
<p>As a pushy parent in general, I pushed my kids out of their comfort zones as often as possible.</p>
<p>I want my kids to go to places where they will be happy, challenged and successful. With the first, that will mean finding a place where the kids are as smart as he is but will provide accommodations his disabilities and has relatively few serious distribution and other requirements. In that sense, I would not push him past his comfort zone, but in other senses, I don’t think he’d have a big problem with stretching. With the second, it should probably stretch beyond her comfort zone but not too much and have a supportive rather than cutthroat social/academic environment.</p>
<p>I can say with some certainty that I would’ve been more comfortable at a smaller liberal arts college, and I most likely would’ve had a less rocky adjustment period. That wasn’t an option for me (strangely, I was accepted at Dartmouth but waitlisted at Amherst, Williams, Middlebury, and Swarthmore), so I went to the school that gave me the most aid and kept my fingers crossed.</p>
<p>To say that it’s pushed me outside my comfort zone would be an understatement. It’s something I didn’t necessarily appreciate at the time, but in hindsight I really value how much it’s forced me to grow up. I’m far more assertive and outspoken than I used to be, I’m comfortable in a wider range of social situations, I’ve been challenged intellectually beyond anything I could’ve imagined, and I’ve been able to take advantage of some truly amazing opportunities in fields I’d never previously considered (more on that [here](<a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/1062160089-post4601.html"]here[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/1062160089-post4601.html)</a>).</p>
<p>I’m certain some of those things can be found at almost any college, and I suspect some are simply part of growing up. All I can say is that while there were times freshman year (and even sophomore fall) when I cursed myself for turning down those waitlists, if I were to go back now, I doubt I would do anything differently.</p>
<p>Actually, there are so many things I’d do differently. Just not the choosing-where-to-go part.</p>