<ol>
<li> 9 are done. 3 due 12/1, one more in Dec and the last two due 1/1. Two more scholarship apps due in January as well. Only one rolling admission school where he has been admitted with a nice renewable merit scholarship and has already applied for more and is invited to apply for more since I am an alum. That is definitely his safety though has an excellent program for what he wants. It is a big state U (OOS for us), and I am not sure that is the right place for him but we will see. We are slow and steady and I feel like if we can get through these 3 due 12/1 we are in a much better place. We should hear decisions from 3 more in December and then a couple trickle in here and there with the final 8!!! without decisions until April 1. Such a long time to wait!!!</li>
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<p>@Bigbossman1 here checking in…</p>
<p>Congratulations to all with good news! I follow the thread regularly, but do not post very often.</p>
<p>All applications have been done here for quite some time.</p>
<p>4 Service Academies (with visits, interviews, fitness and medical testing and nomination packets/interviews)- Waiting to hear from all 4, but two sent Letters of Encouragement.</p>
<p>2 Publics -2 acceptances (each with 50% merit aid) </p>
<p>7 Privates- 3 acceptances (each with 16-17K/year renewable merit awards) waiting on 4 EA verdicts in December.</p>
<p>Having to go through the SA process helped D complete all of the applications by late August.</p>
<p>My daughter has 8 schools, she’s applied to 5.5 (similar to @W2BeHome, we have an audition supplement for one school that has to be completed, one is not a common app school so she has the application filled out and they’ve received her transcript and scores but she needs to submit an essay, and one is in Canada so we’re not even worrying about that one until Christmas since they’re on a different schedule). </p>
<p>@planner03 MIT, which is at the top of the list, if ED doesn’t pan out will be a scramble to make the deadline. </p>
<p>Noteworthy: although most colleges say an interview is basically irrelevant for the admissions decision, not so for MIT. </p>
<p>Their site pointedly says that 10 percent of applicants with interviews get admitted, but only 1 percent of those without interviews. </p>
<p>In contrast to that, a number of Ivys don’t allow applicants to ask for an interview. They say they will contact applicants if they can match an alumni interviewer’s schedule and location. And they add don’t worry if you don’t get offered one. </p>
<p>Not the thread for me to be reading after pressing D to finish applications this morning. She’s applied to 4 schools, one ED school. Of the three others, two should give her merit $$$ and one is an unknown, but all are safe from admission perspective, or so we think. You never know. She will visit one of the three in December for the first time. She does not ‘love’ the other two safe schools. There remain 8 more schools on the list, one or two will fall off due to supplements, I suspect. Of the others, most are match schools, with a great deal of geographic diversity (literally both coasts) and she’s not set on any one. This is such a process, especially since she’s taken so many SAT/ACT tests trying to improve the scores - she has, but each time is 30-40 points. A demonstration of persistence if nothing else. There are two other reach schools - both with complicated writing supplements. </p>
<p>3 for my S. One, ED that is complete except for the live audition in December. The other 2 are due December 1–started but needs to finish over the Thanksgiving long weekend.</p>
<p>12 here , 5 done, rest is dragging its feat 
One of them is ED, so, as one wise parent earlier mentioned, I am nagging to get essays done and everything else done so, if ED does not happen, we are not running blind at 11th hour! I am told not to nag and “it will get done”. We shall see! </p>
<p>Just found this interesting site <a href=“https://collegeabacus.org/[/url]”>https://collegeabacus.org/</a></p>
<p>It’s a kind of meta-NPC. You specify up to three colleges at a time, enter your financials and it produces–by entering the data in the selected college’s NPCs–a comparison of finaid. </p>
<p>Of course, in the intereresf of transparency (not!) a number of colleges are blocking collegeabacus from accessing their sites. </p>
<p>[Comparing</a> college costs the easy way](<a href=“Comparing College Costs the Easy Way - The New York Times”>Comparing College Costs the Easy Way - The New York Times)</p>
<p>@latichever Yes, I saw that info about the importance of the MIT interview. S has already done the interview even though the application hasn’t been submitted. </p>
<p>^^then there are schools like Chicago which require you to submit application before you can schedule an interview. Fortunately, the interview scheduling deadline is January 9, after the January 1 submission date. </p>
<p>@latichever: I believe you can set up the MIT interview even if app not completed yet. I wrote 5 LOR for MIT and 4 of those students interviewed so far. I agree with you about IVY’s. Usually the applicants are contacted by admissions. I would say each year about half get contacted to meet with a local alumni (usually coffee bar or hotel lobby). Only one IVY applicant I teach has been contacted to meet so far (in the city near the alumni’s place of business). Another called for interview and was told they would contact him if alumni interested.</p>
<p>A few of the smaller, competitive LACS have arranged to come to D’s school to conduct interviews with “selected” students. My neighbor upset bc her S was not among the selected, even though it is his ED school.</p>
<p>Yes, I was noting that Chicago was an exception in requiring a submitted app before you can schedule an interview. </p>
<p>The lac where my son is applying ED doesn’t have interviews, but they will schedule a meeting with an admission officer to talk about the school. But they say that that doesn’t become part of the admissions folder. </p>
<p>D has 7 schools on her list, but since one of them is UC Santa Cruz, she will technically be applying to about 13 schools since all you have to do to apply to more than one UC is check a few boxes. I highly doubt she’ll end up at any UC at all, actually – but if she is rejected from her top choice schools and is accepted to Cal or UCLA, I think it might be an interesting question whether she would prefer a big UC close to home or a small LAC like Bryn Mawr far away. </p>
<p>1 app each for D2 and S…this college stuff is easy!! 8-} Of course, I’m still trying to get D2 to fill out and send in a couple of “fall-back” apps just in case something weird happens with either UKy’s scholarship package for NMFs or the NM process in general. We’ll see if/when that ever gets done.</p>
<p>@kansaskid1 (aka BigBossMan)…welcome back for your periodic check-in!! Glad to hear all the apps are going well. Service academy slots are hard to come by and a royal PITA to meet/complete all the requirements. More power to you and @shellz and anyone else with kids trying for those slots. ^:)^ </p>
<p>@eerboco Wow, I would be upset too! I can’t believe that a college would come to a school and exclude any applicant, especially an ED applicant, from an interview!</p>
<p>U Chicago will let you do an on campus interview any time after spring of Junior year, and obviously without an application. But I’ve been told that the interview there doesn’t count for much.</p>
<p>My son put in one ED and two EA. He will put in a RD tomorrow probably due to scholarship deadlines. </p>
<p>He said that he’d wait on the two EA for the RD school he is submitting to if he doesn’t get into his ED. He is the type of kid that wants this over with, the college application process that is, ASAP and has a top choice.</p>
<p>I kind of can’t get kids who have more than 5 schools that they are applying to all at once. I applied to three schools, and one was an automatic in. One of my son’s EA schools is essentially an automatic in, based on SAT scores, and he should qualify for merit aid at the RD school.</p>
<p>If your kid meets the merit aid criteria, would they really reject him or her? </p>
<p>And if everything hits the fan, he can apply to two schools rolling admissions, up to March 1st.</p>
<p>“I kind of can’t get kids who have more than 5 schools that they are applying to all at once.”</p>
<p>@rhando, maybe you are in a different place than some of us here, and if so, good for you - truly. But for me, many/most of my D’s “match” schools aren’t affordable unless a lot of merit is offered. Many of those schools have earlier deadlines for scholarship consideration, so our kids can’t afford to just put in 4-5 apps and hope for the best. They have to get their apps in now. The same is true for safety schools with applications and essays required for admission into the honors programs. So that’s why some of us have kids who have more than 5 schools they are applying to all at once.</p>
<p>Two apps in for The Spawn, one admit on rolling decision to the State U (in state tuition which is really a financial safety also). If she doesn’t send in another app, she’s all set & ThreesDad is thrilled to be writing the tuition checks to Big State U & Spawn is fine with attending BSU… Will this occur - nope… She has about 8-10 more apps that are all CA which is what her EA school uses (we’ll hear on that one about 12/15). </p>
<p>@rhandco - re: applying to more than 5 schools:</p>
<p>For us it’s about the selectivity for d’s chosen major of voice performance. We have to spread a wide net because it’s likely she’ll get turned away at some schools during the pre-screen process, then at others during the audition process. For us, there is no “safety”, “match”, “reach” game. Another level of uncertainty is the financial side. At many of the schools, music students don’t qualify for the normal merit scholarships, but instead compete for talent or talent/merit scholarships. I think there’s only one school on her list where she already knows her merit scholarship guaranteed amount. I wish this process were more predictable for her, because I’m not really good with this kind of uncertainty. I’m the kind of person who thrives on information. We did include state schools on her list that are manageable without a lot of scholarship money. With D’13, it was a completely different story. She was one and done with an ED app. We knew the guaranteed scholarship amount before she applied because it was based on SAT scores/GPA. It was a lot easier to do the math in that case.</p>