Parents of the HS Class of 2017 (Part 1)

Parents of HS Class of 20xx
9601

@RightCoaster oh I think you have a nice bubble, it’s just not most peoples :slight_smile:

@saillakeerie I agree and do think kids can understand it. S17’s precalc teacher had them do a full college budgeting exercise over winter break. They had to pick a real school with real costs,use their own financials to figure out how to pay for school. If the kids were lucky enough to have parents that could be full pay, they had to create a scenario where that wasn’t the case. It was very eye opening to S and really forced him to consider how much skin he had in the game. I think it is important for kids to have some. Maybe not much, but some.

@mommdc yes, if you can. In some cases though, desired programs may not be available at a lower price. I also wouldn’t compare Pitt to say a low/non ranked directional that didn’t offer a particular engineering discipline or have a pharmacy school but might be all someone could afford or get the right kind of merit from. I care far less about name and rank than I do about program fit and paying for the right education for the desired field versus just any degree. That doesn’t mean it has to be the “top” in that area but that it should at least provide most of what the kid wants if not all. I do care about graduating on time statistics though! lol.

@nw2this I think that is reasonable. Our approach is similar, if S chooses a non financial safety but one that is doable with loans on his end (based on the federal max at most) and summer work, he can make that choice. If I feel it is worth a small extra stretch on our end, based on the total options, we may do that.

9602

@RightCoaster I agree completely with your post 9600. That is why ds is at Bama. :slight_smile: It is also why I dont agree with the whole high stat kids can’t find safeties comment. That is only a valid pov if you believe that top kids shouldn’t consider schools below the top 50. Having top kids who have attend(ed) avg publics and still excel, I don’t buy it. Wonderful if they get accepted to and you can pay for them to attend a top school, but their life isn’t over if they have to attend a lower ranked school.

9603

My mom doesn’t understand why D1 has to go to school in Maryland (even though H and I lived there for years and she visited regularly.) She complains that she never gets to talk with her, and that she wishes she could see her “just one more time…” Now that D2 is looking at schools in Maryland and Alabama – we live in Illinois – the phone calls and complaints have changed to include “Now I won’t have any grandchildren I can come visit!”

Gee thanks, Mom. I knew you weren’t coming to see me.

9604

The difficulty faced by high stat kids searching for higher ranked schools (acedamic safeties) is the same for high achiving kids searching for high merit schools (financial safeties). If there is no automatic Merit scholarship, the high achiving kids will have a hard time identify the financial safeties. There is no autoamtic stat admission and that is when the Tufts symdrome caught these kids as they might be considered as over qualitied to these schools and be turned down or waitlisted. If their stat is more in line with these schools, their chance of admission is higher. That is all.

9605

My issue isn’t with money with my parents, since they are actually the reason I not so stressed about money. Thank you bank of grandpa. I have to tread carefully because I don’t want to annoy them.

But mom (and other relatives of that generation) don’t seem to understand why S17 doesn’t just apply to Stanford (or other top 20 school) as a reach. When I try and explain she say’s I’m being too negative, I need to lighten up. And that I’m trying to stress out my son. What’s wrong with trying something. Trust me Stanford is what I’d categorize as an impossible reach for him.

What I’m trying to do is lessen the stress for him, by finding schools that would be a good match for him to consider. His world is so full of the top 20 schools it can be hard to believe there are so many other options. My mom doesn’t really understand how much college admissions have changed in the last 25 years. She keeps going on that my father got into X top rated engineering school but just being recommended by someone. And how S17 should look good because he is involved in activities like band, and colleges like kids who are involved. She really has NO clue how different things have gotten. SIGH.

9606

I’ve resigned that I can never keep up with all the posts.

Regarding language needs, after college I was in the Peace Corps, great opportunity to perfect a language and learn a culture. After your two years of service, grad schools are eager to offer you scholarships and then many government jobs await you. Just something to consider that I’ve seen many people do.

I might live in a similar bubble to @RightCoaster !! Although I won’t have the financial means to do this, my parents gave me a decent amount of money guaranteed for four years to pay for college. I graduated early, and below budget, and was able to keep that money. A real gift!

The schools we are looking at don’t really offer merit aid, only financial aid. That’s what we are chasing. Our safety (academic and financial) is our state flagship and I’m really promoting that so that should that be the only choice, it’s a choice that works. The other schools on the list aren’t necessarily reaches or safeties, just crapshoots.

I try very hard not to mention college with my parents. It always goes in the direction of, “Why not Stanford??” and given the impossibly low admission rates and the simple fact that I know my D17 would not get in, it tends to end poorly.

9607

@RightCoaster I have been in a similar bubble till I heard that Tufts has a syndrome and it spreads. :)) I think I should just listen to DH and talk D17 into ED to her best possible and free myself from over analyzing everything!

9608

@curiositycat333 … All these sweet grandparents think their GKs are special little snowflakes! Of course they can ALL get into Stanford!!

Mine is just not happy… It’s wrong if the GKs don’t work, but then wrong when they work. It’s wrong to go to an expensive school but then it’s wrong to claim a full tuition scholarship at US. :::::: shrug! ::;;;; clearly they will never be happy!

9609

@whataboutcollege I’d recommend ED if you can afford it. If your daughter really loves the school, it will be her best chance to get in. If she doesn’t get in ED , then it wasn’t meant to be, and you just need a back up plan of some sort with a solid #2. Fortunately for me, son seems on board on with this plan and isn’t hung up on just one school. His top choice is not the hardest school to get into ( but very competitive because it’s small). But I will be so happy if son gets in to school ED and we can just relax about all of this stuff over the winter.

9610

@RightCoaster We are fortunate enough to have decent income and started saving for college when kids were born. It is at a resonable size and we can swing the rest from future income. And I had always thought we are going to pay anyways. I only learnt merit scholarship recently from our neighor kid (great kid) who turn down an ivy and went to merit school. D17 wants to save us some cost and also apply to merit schools. But she really likes the school that doesn’t have the merit. It had the perfect program/major/coverage and the location. According to Naviance our HS has a 50% acceptance rate to the school in the ED category (RD is a mere 5%). I think I am just going to take it easy and take your advise of finding that solid #2 and persuade her to do ED :-*

9611

@whataboutcollege we are in similar boat. My son is applying to 2 safety schools that he likes which may give him some $$. May. Not guaranteed. His top 2 choices he will get virtually nothing… He may get a really small scholarship from being a DECA participant, that’s it. Top school has better acceptance rate at ED level, and according to Naviance he is right on the bubble. So he would probably stand a better chance of getting in if he ED there. His second school he likes is also tough to get into,and he’s not 100% sold on it anyway.

So, we can ED top choice, and EA the others. If he gets deferred/rejected ED then he will have a back up plan of the EA schools that he should get into based on Naviance results and other info. I think he’d love his top choice, but I also think he’d be just as happy at his less expensive safety schools too.

Warning: You have to watch out for ED stats though, they can be deceptive. A lot of schools that recruit kids for sports require ED. So you can have a lot of kids applying ED to the school that are almost all shoe ins at admission time, versus your daughter who is not a recruited athlete.

9612

Here is an article about prompt #1

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ishan-puri/how-to-answer-the-common-_b_10663454.html?utm_hp_ref=education&ir=Education

9613

From where I sit, the challenge for high stats kids seems to be finding matches more than safeties. Everything that is a match is a reach. This is not at all meant as a comparison to anyone else’s experience, just a statement about a challenge/frustration that we’ve run into.

A related challenge is that most potential safeties we’ve identified seem to have impacted programs/majors which make them not that safe at all (and hard to predict since admissions stats are not nearly as easy to find for specific programs as for a university as a whole).

And add me to the list of people whose mom is convinced her grandkid has a great shot at Stanford. Sigh. I think it helped when my parents were here around graduation season and learned of several class of 16 superstar students who were rejected / wait listed at multiple top schools (including Stanford in several cases). I was able to point out how these students are similar to (and in some areas stronger than) DS. Haven’t heard as much about HYPSM since then.

9614

@nw2this Very good article. I think D is choosing prompt #1 :)>-

9615

@carachel2 Ha!! I remember that first conversation with my mother when I took my son on his first college tours. It was a 4 day tour of 5 schools and my mother called every few hours for an update to tell me they were all too far away and she didn’t think he should go to school so far away from home. I thought she’d be the death of me through this process. I told her she needed to ask him all of her questions about the schools BUT she could not try to influence him or persuade him. I told my son that he would have to deal with his sweet grandmother and I almost felt guilty about dropping it on him but he’s handled her a lot better than I could have. Now she tells me about all of the conversations they have when they go out to lunch together and she has accepted that he wants to go out of state and the different schools he’s considering. He has a few schools on his list that she thought for sure were not worthy of her grandson but apparently she knows how to research schools pretty good herself now and she and my father have been keeping up on all of the recent trends in college acceptances, ranking, tuition, etc. They stressed me out on the 4th of July when my son mentioned he was going to apply to 6 - 8 schools and they backed him up on that. NO! Life is about options, we need to have some options.

RE: Stressed parents: I, personally, am one of the parents that is stressed and I feel justified in being stressed. :slight_smile: My son has worked hard, he has excellent stats, great kid and he deserves to go to a good college. Sound familiar?? When did the college process become so complicated?

@262mom That’s right, the “matches”, which are actually very strong matches are what I consider “reach” because they are selective/ highly selective schools. He and the college counselor have what they refer to as 3 safeties (one of which is a “100% sure thing”). I asked the question on this thread about a month ago and someone said anything with an admission rate above 60% was a safety. WHAT??? We have NOTHING on the list that is above 31%. I managed to pull myself off the ledge. 100% of the kids go to 4 year schools, there are 2 college counselors and this isn’t their first rodeo. At least this is what I keep telling myself. I’ll be much calmer in 6 - 9 months when there is an acceptance letter in the mailbox, inbox, or however it arrives these days.

9616

@paveyourpath Why don’t you find a school or 2 in the 60% selectivity bucket so you will feel better? I’m certain you can find at least one school that has something your child is interested in, offers stuff he might enjoy, in a place a he might like.
We’ve got 2 schools with 25-30 admit rate on the list, 1 with a 45% admit rate( might come off list) and 2 with a 65% admit rate that he likes. I’d have my son apply to something more selective just for the heck of it, but he can’t find something he likes and doesn’t want to waste his time. Ok then!

9617

@rightcoaster If only it were that simple. I’ve done the college search using the selectivity filter as 50 - 75% admitted. The search returns four schools. They are all in suburban/ rural locations in the midwest. They are not easy to travel to and one of the very few restrictions I have to place on my son’s college list is that the school can’t be too far from a hospital and should be fairly easy to travel to (for the same reason I want the school near a hospital - medical reasons).

9618

Oops…

9619

I was gone for a day and a half and had to reach back over 25 pages! This group is moving fast! Thank you all who responded to my ACT Writing score concern. DS17 gets back from JSA in two weeks, so we will figure out our strategy then. I am leaning toward @2muchquan 's advice and letting it be. However, I am not sure what my somewhat of a perfectionist son will say. I really wanted him to be done with all the testing and so did he. It won’t kill him to sit for the ACT again, but after not being in school for two months, I’m not sure how that would affect his other scores! He did get a 5 on AP Lang (or is it Lit?). Our problem is that he is a natural STEM kid who wants to go into humanities. It is a little crazy, but politics is his passion. His reading score is a little low, mostly because he is the kind of kid that if he reads a little bit slower he can retain the information for almost forever, but the fast pace of the ACT reading section does him in. So, a lower Reading score and a low writing score may kick him out of those reach for everyone schools.

My DH and I are moving states next year, which leads DS without a real safety. That is a bit frightening for us, as he has no “in state state school”. So we are going with a few schools that we believe he can be accepted into, and we hope he gets enough merit aid to make them affordable. We know this is not the best plan, but we don’t have a state school anymore! Our split so far is 5 reaches and 4 matches ( two of which are kinda safeties).

I don’t think we are stressed about the whole process. This is kid 3 for us and he’s going to school somewhere and it will all be ok. We know this to be true!

In response to the parents who were concerned about their child not being able to keep the GPA required to keep the merit aid - Fit is very important. It is no fun to be a smart kid at the bottom on the class. Some kids handle this with grace, but I am mindful of not putting my kids in places where they tested and tested to get “in”, but then don’t thrive because they are struggling to keep up. Colleges, especially private colleges, select from kids within a certain academic window. If your child is “just barely” within that window, have them think about how they will handle that scenario.

Thank you @carachel2, @4beardolls, @jmek15, @2muchquan , @flatKansas, @STEM2017, @MSHopeful, @srk2017 , @picklesarenice , @Mommertons , @acdchai , and anyone else who I missed for your responses. You made me feel a little better about it all.

9620

AS the topic recently seems to be where to apply (of course many including us envy Stanford & MIT – we are trying to get a sense of where our top 10% of the class from OUR HIGH SCHOOL tend to get accepted over the years - working with Naviance and our GC. to look at college acceptances of students with similar stats(GPA/Std. tests) through junior year. Not to say anything is safe or is not to be considered – but we are examining the recent reality of our school’s students in the bracket where our DS is — asking where do students from our school typically get in - that’s where I think we should make a strong effort if they are matches at least. And yes - also are there many high stat students are getting rejected that otherwise look like matches. It is sobering but I do see signs of hope too - are you all looking at this info and meeting with your guidance depts to get meaningful guidance based upon history of other students at your school (sorry no help for our great home schoolers - you all are just way awesome!) - where to concentrate. We were told, for example (this was discussed thread - the # of posts is astounding) - e.g. Tufts “should be"a match - based on external numbers” BUT many students from our H.S. typically apply and few get in. So – in reality it is a stretch - but show interest & take the application seriously - it is not out of the question at all. Out school profile will be available in September so we’ll have a sense of where DS is in the mix - think so much depends of our school & students’ track records. But as we see from extraordinary students not getting in - there are the softer things to consider that affect outcomes, ECs,- interviews, recommendations (we’ll never see hem) etc.

I do also think the Common Data Sets deserve real studying against our Binders of Destiny, spreadsheets and the like. There are a few pieces of advice I have gotten that I will try to pass on – can’t send attachments but will see if there are any links on the interwebs.

I do love hearing all your kids’ summer stories & experiences. Living vicariously. I am sooo happy we are all in this together - so many different experiences and ways of thinking about college -earnest, humorous, passionate, stepping back, totally relaxed to very stressed and of course many of us are focused on the money, the special circumstances of what our students or we find critically important to their experience. It is quite interesting and I am grateful to be a part of this group! :wink: