@tacocat333 & @eandesmom : I’ve been thinking the same thing. But again, my kid doesn’t care a whit about rankings or tiers etc. and she has been accepted to the very respectable school of her choice, so… this is undeniably MY issue!
She asked whether she should buy me some knitting needles for Christmas (“Mom, what are you going to do now that you don’t have my college stuff to obsess over?”) . Sad but true! I’ll have to find a new hobby. LOL 
@smakl70 - Here is the list of schools that my D applied for - Purdue, Northern Illinois, Carthage, Butler, Loyola and Robert Morris. She’s been accepted to all of the schools and has merit scholarships to all but Purdue (although that looks to come later in the process). While she likes Purdue, the OOS tuition is a bit daunting for her (and myself). Right now, Northern Illinois is where she is leaning towards, with Butler being the backup.
My impression of Carthage is that it has a real good reputation in the North Illinois / South Wisconsin area, but not very well known outside of that area - and it is a very nice campus.
@sirpher1 my son considered Butler (loved it when he attended a soccer camp there in middle school) but it fell off the list for some reason? He wasn’t interested in anything as large as Purdue or NIU and doesn’t want an urban environment. Sounds like your daughter has a good list. Is she going to participate in the scholarship interview process? Good luck with the decisions.
Just as a curiosity - how long is your school’s AP psych course? Up until about 4 years ago, it was a fall semester course only and they ran a review in April. Middle son dropped it in the first quarter because he hated the neuroscience stuff so I never learned how the review would have worked. Now, it’s a full year. Techson took it last year and loved it.
Thanks for all the replies about APs - I realized I hadn’t told @eandesmom anything about that so I’ll PM you. What about Honors courses? They do boost the GPA in some cases and I assume colleges see them as adding rigor to the courseload? But when you all are telling eandesmom how many APs your child has taken, I assume you are not also including Honors classes?
@techmom99 my D is taking AP Psych now and it’s a year long course. She loves it. In fact she’s really liking all her courses so much this year. The only AP that is a semester long that I’m aware of at our school is AP Gov’t and AP Econ (considered two different courses). D just finished AP Gov (also loved) but signed up for regular Econ rather than AP so that is next semester.
Techson’s AP Gov’t class is a one year class at our school. AP Econ is two separate courses, Micro and Macro. He is taking regular eco also. Middle son took the AP Ecos and told me that Techson couldn’t do one of them because of the math (Techson is dyscalculic) and in our school, you have to take both.
In terms of honors, he took bio and chem as honors and is currently in auto tech honors.
Folks are including honors separately if they want to. E1 will have 6 AP’s and 3 honors classes. I do think colleges look at rigor, including honors. I am not sure if we even have any semester long AP’s, maybe the Econ ones. Our HS doesn’t offer many honors classes. Lots of AP though however realistically he couldn’t have taken much more without giving up music (could have done 1 more AP and 1 honors but for our joint sanity I am very glad he did not. Lol! This is why I am so grateful we do not rank or weight.
New to this thread…my kid is a junior just starting the search with an unweighted GPA of 2.8 but a weighted GPA of 3.8. (Mostly honors/AP classes but got B’s and C’s in them in 9th/10th grades, mostly A’s this year…)
Just got SATs back scored in the 92%ile…did extremely well. Wondering how this grades vs. test scores disparity will affect kiddo’s prospects.
I read through the acceptance chart a few pages back…can someone tell me what NPC merit is?
My D’s school is the old fashioned way so the classes are throughout the year. This is good for AP classes but not so good when you missed a year and need different options. When she came back to school she wanted to take Psych at the college but without a car and with a late start, there was no guarantee she would get in. She wanted AP Physics but they did not offer it (which I am kind of glad about). She then thought she should take AP Bio but they did not offer that so she is not taking science this year. She ended up taking AP English Lit and APUSH both of which she has the potential to do great in but has been very erratic this year. She also had to take AP Psych online, which I know she does not like but it is what it is. After missing a year of math, she took Pre-Calc Honors which she is maintaining a high B in and continued with her Spanish, which is Spanish III Honors and she maintains an A in that.
She has an interesting essay with her experience in Croatia and she works and is scheduling more talks with high schools and middle schools about studying abroad so hopefully this will help her. We just went over some applications and we submitted payment for Barnard (since they only have ED and not EA) and UNCG (safety that is about 1/2 hour away and she just realized offers Russian and International Studies) but we missed the option for merit aid from UNCG because she made her discovery late and threw it in there late. She now has to finish her apps for the two in state schools which she is reluctant about even though UNC-CH offers exactly what she wants and her AP English Lit teacher majored in the same thing. We are waiting to hear from Beloit and College of Wooster. She did get accepted to Kalamazoo with decent merit.
@eandesmom That list is amazing! Thanks and congrats to everyone on their acceptances. Should be interesting to read this when our kids are in college.
@STF4717: NPC merit is the merit award predicted by the Net Price Calculator on a college website.
@STF4717 -welcome to the threat. My D, now a senior, is a little similar to yours - she took tough classes and got mostly Bs, so she had a gap between unweighted (3.3) and weighted (3.9, just a hair short of 4). She landed in about the 90th percentile on the ACT. In my opinion, as long as your kid can get her UW up over 3.0, she should be fine and the solid test score and challenging curriculum will be of benefit. With a strong essay, my D has done well in the college search, getting into her first choice school, as well as about half a dozen others with merit aid. It’s definitely important to pull up over 3.0 by the end of junior year though, especially if your child wants to apply Early Action anywhere.
@eanesmom. As a parent with a 2018 and 2019 HS kids in this GPA range, I cannot thank you enough for your work in putting together the outcomes list.
Thanks so much, @eandesmom for putting all the acceptances together–it’s an impressive list, and I expect to make good use of it for D19!
Just fired off an email to the GC letting her know what’s going on with American–D17 will go see her first thing on January 3 to go over the talking points she and I developed for when she calls admissions to probe on the merit aid. I showed D17 the costs based on 4 scenarios–with merit and student loans (really the only plan that will work), with merit but no loans, with loans but no merit (the current and frankly most likely scenario), and no merit/no loans (not really sure why I did that, but it does show what the full gap is). Next week will be very interesting. It’s disappointing to me that American has such a poor NPC–all of the other schools that D17 has been admitted to were dead-on accurate (in a couple of cases they were actually a little conservative with predicted aid). Not really knowing what to expect going into this, I was pleasantly surprised to see the NPCs reflect actual COA–with the exception of American. Doesn’t seem like it’s in the self-interest of the school to misrepresent itself like that. D17 has come to terms with the likelihood that we’re not going to be able to swing it–she’s disappointed, but not devastated–she is my pragmatic one. Here’s hoping that we get some unexpected good news next week.
Congrats to everyone with recent acceptances and/or scholarships! And welcome to the lurkers who have outed themselves, lol.
@STF4717 welcome! A strong junior year will definitely help with options as does the stronger weighted. There are a few “lopsided” kids here gpa/test scores and there really are some good options though the scattergrams can be hard to figure out! I would agree on the 3.0 advice if that is possible. If not for junior year but appears so by mid senior then RD may be a better route.
@Longhaul I also have a S19 so it’s purely self serving. LOL! It will be very handy for him especially for areas I’ve no clue about. I will say it’s quite rewarding though, it’s such an encouraging list and I think CC can be very (initially) discouraging to the mid or lower stats kid.
@klinska that is super frustrating. A small silver lining is that your D being able to have this conversation at all with admissions is such a great learning opportunity for her on so many levels. The art of negotiation, accepting bad news with grace, strategizing next steps, how to handle unexpected news, all of it. I am happy to hear she isn’t devastated, if she is being pragmatic about it…someone helped her have that perspective so kudos to you! Do you think American will off FA and that’s why no merit? I can’t recall if they sent the full financial offer yet or not. I have heard they often front load but I’ve no clue if that is merit or FA. I suspect for our one school that came in lower on the NPC that they will offer some of the difference as FA but we’ve not seen the offer yet. That school asked for IDOC w2’s which annoyed me to no end but I did upload them yesterday lol. Thanks to their crazy high COA and 2 kids in school we do qualify for a small amount…at some schools for 3 out of S17’s 4 years. Then again they could be like Ithaca who just offered a subsidized loan and work study. I don’t count either of those as FA!
S17 has a scholarship app due at midnight TONIGHT. I recently asked how the essay was coming–he was playing a computer game… He said, he was “taking a break” but had it “about halfway done.” Ummm ok, could you finish it please? This is for a $4k/year scholarship that he should have a pretty good shot at, which may make MSU financially feasible, and will make all tuition costs covered at Albany (plus some of the dorm/meal plan costs–he already has some merit $ at both MSU and Albany). I’m glad I didnt tell him the deadline is 11:59 pm PST tonight or he’d push it further–This kid will be the death of me!
@MSU88CHEng UGH! I feel your pain, I can tell with the few S is going to do, it will be down to the wire. 4k is not chump change. S is having some mixed feelings about most of his scholarship apps as if he did get them, they will require more than just gpa to keep.
Pretty sure we dropped a school off the list after really crunching numbers and looking at visit plans and another is on the bubble. We will need to decide if he wants to try to leverage offers or not.
And again, this ‘due at midnight’ doesn’t end with the college applications. My daughter came home from school on a Wednesday and I assumed all her finals were done. Nope, had one due by midnight on Friday. She started going to the movies with her uncles, Christmas shopping, working out, relaxing. I was going crazy. Relax, mom, I’ll do it. She did send it in by noon on Friday. When I mentioned this to a professor friend of mine, friend said my daughter was probably one of the first to hand in the paper, that all of them try to submit them at about 11:30 pm.
I’m home from our holiday trip. Not really much new to report. My S17 still has two apps to finish. But he has been working on the AP Physics homework and his online Heath class. I’m not going to stress about it…Seems he thinks both are due Jan15th… I looked it up OSU (Oregon) isn’t due till Feb 1st but I’m not going to update him on the information. Just get the things done!!
Thanks @eandesmom for putting up all the information on the acceptances. Great job. I’m impressed by how many acceptances the kids have already. My nephew is also a S17 and in the middle of college apps, but while he finished all his apps by mid-Nov he doesn’t expect to hear from any of them till at least Feb. And he only missed EA deadlines by about a week. I don’t understand why he didn’t even get one in before then. Although it might have to do with football season.
I do know many kids who have ended up at both Santa Clara and Chapman that were very happy. Heard nothing but good about Santa Clara. Even though we are not at all religious, I wouldn’t have a problem seeing my kids there. Mine didn’t apply since it’s too urban for him. My older D looked at two Jesuit schools. I have no problems with my kids being required to take religious studies classes as long as they can choose and pick. I know a lot less about SDU and don’t know if it’s a lot more religious.
Interesting. I ran the NPC for UVM the other day for kicks, to see if any of the loan offered showed as subsidized (it did not). But in doing so I noticed they’d updated their NPC to show 17-18 tution. So today I ran it for Ursinus. We have not received an FA offer yet though allegedly it was coming “shortly” as of early Dec. They also requested IDOC w’2’s. Their merit offer was under what the NPC showed however their NPC did not break out merit versus FA. Big difference, over 6k. I re-ran it tonight and now the difference is up to almost 10k! So I will be VERY interested to see what this FA package looks like.
I’ve been planning late feb/early march visits and at the moment the school is very much on the bubble as to whether to keep in play.
I did email them to inquire as to when we might expect to see it.
On that note, it appears we have dropped a school. Kind of sad to have an application, an acceptance with merit and to never have visited but that is the way it goes. While some of his schools may be leveragable with the offers…I don’t expect that this is one of them.
Scholarship essay done and app submitted by 9:45 pm EST. 
Now we wait again. I think S15 found out about this particular scholarship in April…
And @twoinanddone I hear you about the procrastination continuing–remember I’m one of the founding members of struggling sons of calculus. Plus, when S15 came home from college on Wed of finals week, done with finals (although there’s a story there about almost missing his Psych final…), he had reviews of 5 Psych journal articles due at midnight that night. I think he submitted them at 11:05 pm–I guess he was early… 8-|