Parent or Student - Who "actually" drives the college admissions process?

Applying to College
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My D26 has not been interested in thinking about or considering colleges. I support that in the sense that I’m happy to have her wait until she’s ready to start the search. We have some time until junior year when we’ll begin in earnest.

But… I’m curious to understand for many of you who is actually driving the college admissions process. Are the parents coming up with lists of colleges that their student should consider? Are the students doing the basic bench research to find a bunch of schools that they think might be interesting? Is it both? If there was a transition from parent to student ownership, when did it take place?

I was tempted to put this in the Parent forum, but I thought this might be a better place to get a sense of students who are doing their legwork and coming up with lists of places to consider versus their parents presenting lists of places that might “fit”. If you’re a student, at what age did you being thinking about this in earnest and begin looking around?

FWIW, since we’re early in the process (D26 and all), currently I’m the one doing the starting point research and giving ideas of types of schools, what we’re willing to pay, etc. I’m mostly trying to get a sense of if there are types of schools that she’s interested in and if there are constraints (location, major, etc.) that we should think about. But I’m curious how many students are driving the process and parents are playing, perhaps, a more supporting role.

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In the Thumper family, we talked to our kids about college options. But they were in the drivers seat.

For our musician, really, his instrumental teachers had far more input than we did about his potential options (and they were spot on).

DD wanted to attend college in either the southeast, or CA. I put a query on this forum and got names of colleges that sounded like they might be interesting for her. Sent her the info, and she took it from there.

In both cases, we were able to schedule family vacations to places near where they thought they might want to attend college. We had THEM create the lists of where they wanted to go. We had the dates, and they contacted admissions to set up appointments. We used a BIG desk calendar to write all this on. We thought that was MUCH easier than a computer spread sheet.

Once the kids had an idea of schools, we discussed with them. We had agreed that parents and kid needed to agree on schools for applications. Luckily we all did agree.

We were fortunate not to have financial constraints, but if you do, I would urge you to have that discussion way up front! Any other parent restrictions also need to be conveyed. For example, we wanted our kids to be within a three hour drive from our home…OR within an hour drive of a relative or close family friend. Really, that wasn’t restricting at all!

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Parent here. I built S23’s list and am building D25’s list. They are aware that college is very financially based and due to my employer benefit, it was a bit more complicated. Of course they can add colleges as they wish but they know our max budget and luckily my kids were not willing to go into huge debt to attend college.

Their opinions on schools were valued even if I thought the reason to be trivial (school colors for example). They were shown the bottom line costs after all aid came in and they made the final decision.

With my son’s permission, I oversaw his college only email account and alerted him when he had news or something he had to respond to. On more than one night we sat next to each other while I typed in basic demographic info into some online form. I couldn’t write his essay for him, or do his arts supplement videos for him. I found the college app process fun and quite frankly I had more time and knowledge about the process than he did.

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My daughter built her own list, and she was very clear on her criteria. I tried to encourage some schools “outside the box” where I thought she would do well, but no go. She was pretty set on where she wanted to apply. She managed the process on her own. My only “job” was proofreading :wink:

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Ultimately, the student should be the primary driver. But, left to their own devices many students will wait until it’s too late to get everything done. And there’s a lot to do. I do think it’s the parents responsibility, to make sure they know just how much is involved and how the process can be easier, and rewarding.

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I feel like it started as a team effort and then transitioned to being all on our daughter. She had a couple of schools she heard about from older friends and teachers, and we had some on our list that we thought would be good fits. We also went to some local college presentations when she was a sophomore and created a list of schools to visit. We started out by visiting big, little, public, private, urban and rural schools so she could get a sense of what environment she liked best. After that initial group of college visits, D took over from there, modified and created the final list, made sure it was well balanced, and took care of meeting all the application deadlines.

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My oldest drove the process. She is very good at figuring out what she wants and what to do to get it.

My middle kid was driven by wanting to minimize cost. He let me make suggestions. Some he applied to, others he didn’t.

My youngest drove me crazy. He picked one, I picked one. He received a very nice offer from the one I picked, but refused to visit. Ended up at his first choice, though.

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This is exactly what I’m expecting, to be honest. I suspect that I’ll be the one that “manages” the process and get input, etc. The final decision will, of course, be hers, but there’s an element here that I “know what I’m doing” and she doesn’t. I have an idea of the questions she should think about, etc.

This has very much NOT been what I’ve gotten so far. It may change, but as of right now, my daughter is not driving this process. She’s more than happy to take backseat role and take advice from me.

This seems right to me. My daughter would procrastinate until it’s too late because she probably doesn’t want to think about it at all. And the reality is that I kind of enjoy this type of research, so here I am on CC while my daughter does whatever a high school sophomore does! :slight_smile:

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“Driving” varies from kid to kid. I show up as needed. Our school sets a good pace, having them work on personal narratives in the winter of Junior year. This is also when they start meeting with college counselors about every other week to get them thinking where/what type of schools make sense. Then they are sent away for summer and told to come back with a working draft of a personal statement.

Having said that, I think its best to use this coming summer to focus on testing and check that off your list early fall.

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Our experience as well.

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Kid #1 was interested in the process, but was very willing for me to be the co-pilot. I asked a lot of questions on her behalf here on CC. She loved seeing new places and was more than happy to go on lots of college tours, which I was more than happy to take her on. She agonized endlessly about making a decision.

Kid #2 had very little interest at all until junior year, when suddenly friends began to talk about college. He let me make an initial list. I handed him a Fiske guide and let him take it from there. He was cooperative and was resigned to his fate😆. We visited a few colleges and he didn’t agonize over a final decision at all.

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Our feederish HS is very well organized, with lots of events and reminders and so on to keep the kids on track.

In terms of generating a list, they use Kickstart and SCOIR. Kickstart is supposed to be a sort of working list, and it automatically categorizes colleges as likely, target, reach, or unlikely. It also suggests if they think you need more or less of anything, and explains your early options based on your current list order. Kickstart is really supposed to be used primarily by the kid.

SCOIR initially is more of an investigation tool with basic information about the colleges and also scattergrams using actual data from past applicants from our high school. With SCOIR, parents actually get a separate account, and it can be used to “suggest” colleges to the kid. The counselors can also suggest colleges. The kid can then move suggested colleges to Not Interested, or upgrade them to Following. Eventually, if they make the final cut, the kid is supposed to move them to Applying, which signals to Counseling they have to send the relevant materials. And then the kids move them to Applied when they actually apply, and then when they get outcomes they also report those (and that presumably becomes data for later years).

Phew. OK, so that system really puts the kids at least formally in charge in that only they are supposed to be playing with lists on Kickstart or moving colleges off Suggested on SCOIR. Informally, S24 was definitely interested in getting our input in addition to talking with his counselors, and his peers (we had a lot of conversations about how his friends were NOT his actual college counselors).

In our case, I think his counselor and I were pretty well aligned in terms of what we thought were good ideas for him to consider–I certainly thought all her idea were at least interesting. But over time he made it clear he had certain boundaries which of course we respected and did not keep suggesting schools outside those boundaries.

I think maybe my biggest role was in scheduling visits. I tried to at least get a good sampling and also do any he specifically requested, But he ended up applying to some we didn’t visit, and I suspect we could have kept finding more possibilities with more visits. But we all agreed you have to accept enough is enough at a certain point.

During visits he definitely learned more about different things he liked or didn’t like, and it informed my additional suggestions and visit priorities, along with whether he upgraded or downgraded colleges on his working lists. We always talked after visits and he would ask my impressions, but probably to his annoyance while I might talk about a few things briefly, I would mostly turn it back on him.

OK, then at the very end, I thought he had a certain working list and was going to make some final cuts from it to get it to the originally-discussed length. But after getting deferred from his REA and talking to friends, he not only made fewer cuts than expected but actually added some colleges, which ended up with a longer list than I had expected.

Phew again. I guess long story short, he very much made all the decisions. I made suggestions, helped organize his process in terms of visits, talked about things as invited, and so on. But all that was really just in support of him learning what he liked and which colleges made sense given those preferences.

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I think that the parents need to set the budget (assuming that the parents are going to be ones who will pay it).

Otherwise the student mostly drives the process, with the parents helping as much as we can.

And I agree that this does vary a bit from child to child.

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In theory, I’d say the parent needs to set the financial parameters and any other line in the sand issues and the kid should do the rest.

I love exploring colleges and doing research so I was thinking this was going to be fun and that they would want my input. Both kids had fully funded 529s that would cover grad school if they kept undergrad reasonable.

This was our reality:
D22- knew exactly the major she was interested in as she had been in a “pathway” program that led to an assoc. level certification in that field. She was reluctant to look at any schools during her Junior year or even talk about it, but she was pretty adamant she was just going to go to a certain local (non-flagship) state school that had a great program for what she was studying so she really didn’t need to look anywhere else or worry too much about it. As she went to our local public school with horrible college counseling, her GC didn’t push her to explore anything beyond that.
I really wanted her to look at at least 2 other schools just for comparison and, after obsessively researching, presented her with a long list but she refused to even visit some of the local schools on that list. She finally agreed to tour the school she was interested in sometime in Sept of her Senior year. She liked it and was comfortable there, they won my husband and me over with the quality of their program in her major, it was very affordable, and she was a guaranteed admit so basically we were done except for the application process.

I didn’t push her to get an application in as they have rolling admissions and I know kids that have been accepted in June. She surprised me and did everything on her own in mid-October and the only reason I even knew she was ready to send in the application was because she had to ask me about something.

She is currently a junior and so much more engaged in college than she was in high school. I still wish she was somewhere else just due to the social aspect but she is happy and the school is the right choice for someone in her field who wants to work in this geographic area after graduation.

S23 went to a private school with great college counseling. He took a required class first semester of Junior year where they identified what type of school they were looking for and learned how to research schools and majors. Kids made their initial list, parents made their list and CC made their list of reaches, matches and likelies. All of our lists were very far apart. DS was looking a big state U’s, I was looking at small and supportive schools and I think CC just went through Naviance and pulled up a list from there. Ultimately, I should have trusted LizardBoy from the start as the schools he picked really were great matches for him. The funny thing is he ended up at a school that both the CC and I had put on his list (twice) and he crossed off (twice). Later in the process, after a switch in intended major, he “found” the school on his own and put it in his top 3. After a visit, it quickly moved to the top spot.

He was very motivated and we didn’t need to push him in anyway to get things done. In fact, both CC and I had to tell him to slow down. He had everything ready to go over the summer and filled out the Common App as soon as it opened.

He also is in the perfect place for him both socially and to optimize his major. He is definitely living his best life.

So, while I’d love to say I played a bigger part in the process and my kids valued my opinions, they both wanted nothing to do with all the information I was ready to supply them with. I think S23 did benefit from working with his college counselor and it was easier to work with someone that wasn’t mom. You know, completely ignore mom when she tells you the same thing you are now telling me like it’s the greatest thing you’ve ever heard because you heard it from the CC. But, I’ll take it as the results were excellent.

I will tell you that MANY kids aren’t ready to even start thinking about college until junior year, and for some, it’s not until 2nd semester of junior year. So if you feel like you are going to need to drive some of the process now because she isn’t doing any of it, give it a while longer. It’s better to wait a bit and have her drive it than push it too early and have to take over the process. It will be hard to shift the responsibility back to her after you’ve taken control and that might not work out well for either of you.

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Great comment - thanks for this. In theory, I’m happy to wait, but it’s always a little tricky when you know that you’ll have to plan trips to see places and that it’s going to get crazy fast. But those will all have to wait until your kid is good and ready! :crazy_face:

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With twins and an employer tuition exchange benefit we were a team early on in the process in terms of developing an initial list based in interests, then visited as much as possible, and then they were in charge of applications and further communication as seniors.

That said, my niece was almost entirely in charge and in the housing application indicated a single room would be acceptable, simply not understanding the financial ramifications, which were in the thousands of dollars range. This ultimately got corrected but not til early in the semester, and I have taken that as a lesson learned from my sibling.

Ultimately it seems prudent to provide enough guidance and oversight to maximize opportunities (academic, social, and financial) while allowing students to grow and be as independent as possible.

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For our D23, our only child, we all had our roles. She wanted to be a filmmaker, so her college search was very focused from the start. She looked at the top film school lists in the trades and then supplemented with other, more sure things. I had bought her the Fiske book, which helped to broaden the list.

Her guidance counselor also contributed greatly to the process. At her public high school, counselors meet three times with familes, the fall and spring of junior year and September of senior year. The counselor helped supplement the list and kept everyone on track. The best advice the counselor gave us was to apply to schools where the student is a top fish in a small pond. What she meant was that with my D’s 95% GPA, she had a chance to get into NYU, USC or BU, but she wasn’t going to get the scholarships. But by applying to schools where her grades were closer to the top, she’d get more merit aid, and she did. She received $25-$35k annual scholarships at schools like Syracuse, UCONN, Ithaca, Drexel and Fordham. The only schools she didn’t receive large merit were large public universities like Florida State and Penn State.

We visited about 12 colleges beginning in the winter of junior year, and if she didn’t like a school for whatever reason, it was off the list. She liked just about everywhere except Rutgers, which she said she didnt feel it! She had wanted to go to UCLA since she attended a gymnastics camp there in second grade, but after participating in a remote session, she decided their film school wasn’t a good fit and never applied.

Since film school applications require a lot of supplemental essays and portfolios, she needed our help. I did a lot of the inputting of the data into the applications as well as all of the financial forms, she wrote the essays and supplemental questions, and my husband would review them. If she didn’t have our help, she woud have had to cut back on her applications considerably, which would have been fine for her and me. My spouse, on the other hand, became consumed with applying to film schools like USC and NYU so there was a bit of family tension.

D had a lot of good choices in the end. The choice was hers, within our financial paramaters.

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Yep to all of that. My S24 was late to really wanting to do visits, quickly learned he did not like doing too many in one visit, and also gave me few windows to work with because of commitments to other things like his fall sport (which starts practicing in the summer).

So I did my best but as noted above we did not see all the schools he ended up including, and who knows what might have happened if we saw more schools than that.

Personally, I just had to accept the notion that it was not a reasonable goal to know he had ended up with the One True List. Instead he just needed to get to This Is A Solid List! And there might have been many different versions of that which would have emerged from a somewhat different process, but as long as it was ONE of the solid lists possible for him, good enough.

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We are lucky enough to live in New England where we could drive about an hour and visit any type of school there is (large in a city, small in a city, large rural, small rural, huge state flagship, small LAC, engineering-focused, pre-professional, etc). Early in the process for S23 (the one that was very interested in seeing anything and everything), I did have him visit schools when he was able to (very limited time to work with as he was in boarding school and had a heavy sports schedule) even though they weren’t on his list to get an idea of what type of school he’d be interested in. These early visits really gave him insight into what was out there and what questions he wanted to ask on his later visits. Perhaps she would be amenable to that if you have any options nearby. I think he was more agreeable to the schools I picked to see because he knew there was no pressure to put them on his list. At first, he thought it was stupid to visit schools he wasn’t going to apply to, but after the first visit, he definitely understood the assignment. It helps if you tie it in with a fun activity. Or at least a good meal.

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I feel like it was the same as picking baby names. Everyone everywhere had opinions, everyone was building a list in their heads. I am an organizer so I told my son, husband (myself) to compile a list of what they were thinking. We had some additional scholarship considerations because of tuition benefits through my job at some schools- so we put together a massive list of everyone’s thoughts. Then my son paired it down- but as he did we explained why my husband or I might have put schools on the list- tuition cost, scholarship potential, location, etc.

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