Need assistance with college selection...

shawbridge
Sun, 27 Apr 2008 15:53:13 +0000

I’m not an expert yet and will likely never be but we’re starting our work on this also, though we won’t be looking at engineering schools and probably not much in the Midwest for our son. But, there are a few questions:

Do you think he would fit in bettter at a big school or a small one? There are good Midwestern state schools (e.g., Michigan and Illinois) but they are huge. I don’t know Ohio State’s quality, just its size. Would the social anxiety be lessened at a smaller school? If small is what is important, I have known several kids who went to Kenyon (to pick a school in Ohio) and were very happy with their educations. At the extreme, Hampshire College has no requirements or curricula but I have met some very well-directed, well-trained graduates of Hampshire (they are Birkenstocky kind of folk who are now professors – the one I still track is at Penn).

If engineering/science is a strong interest, there’s also RPI and Harvey Mudd, which I think are on the small side. Carnegie-Mellon is a terrific school as is Rice.

I would spend time speculating about the kinds of support your son will need in a non-home environment, researching the schools to see if they are good, bad or indifferent with those kinds of support. Start on the web, then during the visit, meet the head of the DSS or equivalent of SpEd office to get a feel for what they do. See if your son is comfortable with them. Clark in Worcester, MA is a very good science/engineering school that does very well with kids with LDs. They were the first school in the US to have an office of Disability Services.