I wish we had Naviance. What a help that would be! I understand our high school is starting with Naviance this year, so we may have a little bit of data when my S20 is ready to think about colleges. Although, I really do think that 95% of the data will be community colleges and in-state publics. So maybe not so helpful for our particular case. Time will tell, I guess.
@carachel2 Funny that you bring up parents. Today S and I had lunch with my parents and talk came around to the college search. My mom loves to suggest outlandishly expensive colleges with low acceptance rates. What cracks me up is when I was going to college, my parents gave me a choice of in-state flagship or pay my own way. Now that they aren’t footing the bill they think I should indulge their special snowflake and pay 65K a year for college. I keep telling them that if they want to pay for it, they are welcome to gift him the money. I just have to remind myself to smile and nod, smile and nod.
Requirements for graduate programs: Technically you don’t need an undergrad degree everywhere to enter a graduate program. (Some universities require it as a matter of policy.) But the cases where you have people entering grad school without a baccalaureate degree are generally cases where bizarre things happen like a physics professor going on vacation and finding a kid in semi-rural India who read through Einstein’s general theory, worked through the math, and then started to intuit string theory. Basically, though, it just doesn’t happen.
College prices over history: College prices definitely were a thing back in the day. When I went to college back in the 80s my (we called ourselves middle-class, but probably weren’t) parents definitely overextended themselves to send me to college. I lost my partial scholarship after my freshman year, but even if I hadn’t, I don’t think they could have afforded to send me back to the private school I went to for my sophomore year. So no, while I do think that college prices are worse for people than they used to be, it certainly isn’t as new as many people tend to think.
Grandparents: We’ve been fortunate with the grandparents—they’ve kept out of it. Of course, we have a week-long family reunion coming up in two weeks, and we’ll see if it continues…
Safety schools: According to some measures, all of the schools, save perhaps two, are academic safeties for her. (They’re not all financial safeties.) No problem—she’s happy with her list, and has no desire to chase prestige, though there are some prestigious schools on her list, and she very loudly and vociferously finds the idea of smart people (defined by stats) only being happy if they’re surrounded with similarly smart people to be ridiculous. For my part, I will say that it helps ramp down my stress level.
Phew! Caught up! Good stuff indeed.
My 2 cents with the whole Safety thing is that a Safety should be “a sure thing” from 1) admittance 2) willingness to attend and 3) financial standpoints, yes? If so, why do we need more than one?
Everything else…doesn’t matter. Reach away! Match if you got 'em. Stretch like a SOB! I just make sure #2 and #3 are true for any other school, and I don’t give a rat’s patooty about #1. #3 is usually tied to competitive merit for the other schools in the list (meaning few ranking in top 50).
Also, regarding stress level, ours is low-medium I guess. We can’t quite pay our EFC, but I wouldn’t want to if I could. We are playing it conservatively so $ is left for grad school or whatever emergency rears its ugly head.
I’m confident each and every one of your kids will do great! They obviously have parents who care. I’ve even heard of some people who did well after being denied entry to the big party school, and never graduated college. True story!
So, a piece of string walks into a bar. Bartender says: I’m sorry, we do not serve string here. The string walks out dejectedly. Outside the bar the string throws itself down and writhes and wiggles and twists around on the ground for several moments. Finally, he picks himself up and marches back into the bar. The bartender says: Hey, aren’t you that piece of string I asked to leave? The string says: Nope. I’m a frayed knot!
I would like D to have 2 safeties. If she gets shut out of all of her reaches, I would still like her to have a final choice to make in the spring.
Wow, I am exhausted. I was gone for a day, and it took so long to catch up. With each passing week, the number of posts increases.
Thanks for the help on Bama stuff. I now see that all but SAT scores are there. Called College Board today. Asked that it be sent a week ago. They said it could be a couple of more weeks before they send…Bama is one of our financial safeties. Not sure if S will agree to go, but I would feel good knowing we have it. Kelly Business at IU will be another safety. Qualifies at direct admit. Not financial, but doable if needed. Should get 10-15k of merit there. S would be ok going there. Once we have those in hand(sept. I hope), it will feel better. Then he can attack his dreams and see if they meet our EFC…
@MotherOfDragons, thanks for your perspective…
I don’t have parents to tell me what they think…wish I did, miss that. Careful when y’all complain.
enjoy the weekend everyone…
Because they all still might offer different things. So, looking at my daughter’s clear safeties, one offers better neuroscience curricula, another offers a better conflict studies curriculum, another is one of the very few schools I’ve ever seen that has the whole core curriculum idea figured out well, another has an amazing location…
There is no perfect school, safety or non-safety. Ultimately, my daughter will need to make a choice from among those that have offered her admission—but why restrict that choice unnecessarily at the outset?
(Not to mention that the safeties might be safeties, but their honors colleges aren’t necessarily.)
My mom was the worst last year with my D16. Telling me D would get into every school and I would repeatedly tell her things are quite different from 30 years ago. When the time came for decisions and things didnt go as she thought they would, she started to do her own research on her handy iPad and then she would tell me that things are so different today…really mom? Luckily this year for D17 she has backed off.
Ok, ya’ll are right. Nice to have a coupla safeties if possible.
@dfbdfb if your D17 does not get into Honors at one of her Safeties, would she be happy to attend? I guess some may have honors in the major, instead, that may be another way to go. Otherwise, I don’t have them on my Safety list.
She’d still be happy to attend without honors, but honors is nice to have, particularly at schools that give honors students priority registration.
@Mom2aphysicsgeek and @collegecue- I’m sure you’ve done your homework as to places with good Russian programs and likely (not lottery) merit, but a couple of possibilities come to mind…have you looked at Univ. of Maryland? They have a School of Language, Literatures and Culture with a what looks like a good assortment of higher level Russian classes, and I believe that high stats kids either get charged in-state rates and/or there is some merit, but don’t hold me to that.
If religion doesn’t negatively (or does positively) figure into your choices, Notre Dame and even further afield, Brigham Young have strong Russian programs and merit opportunities.
@RightCoaster wrote
I’m still trying to catch up 
I did finish my homework though. Well, mostly. I still have to do a composite digital art drawing in photoshop-I’m turning myself into a centaur and a mermaid, and I shot the local pool yesterday and the mermaid and the centaur are battling it out around the pool noodles and floaties. I am really struggling getting the reflections just right. But I digress…
Grandparents—
On my side we haven’t heard from my parents in about a decade, which is sad, but it is what it is. On H’s side his mom keeps saying "harvard’, and if I tell her about schools D is actually interested in (like at one point Auburn), she goes and tells her brother who has a daughter that’s the same age and achievement level and interest as D17, and then that sort of ruins the school for D because the niece walks on water according to grandma. His dad is awesome and is going with H and D17 this month up to Boston to go scout schools (NOT harvard, lol).
Grandma also keeps advocating that we take out “all the loans she’ll need” because “you don’t have to pay them back until she graduates”. Grandma is worth 7 figures. Thanks Grandma! Seriously, we don’t expect them to pay for the girls’ college, and they’ve never offered. It’s their money, they earned it, we expect none of it. But please don’t tell us to take out loans (we are very debt-averse) when you’re sitting on a pile of cash! (Grandma also drives around with a few loaded guns, so we’re not too worried about her getting robbed).
Affording schools–
According to the NPC (which I didn’t even know about until I started reading here) we’d get about 10k off of places like Swarthmore, UM, um, I can’t remember the other ones. But it was an eye-opener. Our issue isn’t that we couldn’t afford to send D17 to school at 50k a year-we make enough that if we downsized and changed our lifestyle we could send her debt free. But we don’t think that most schools are worth 50k a year. H absolutely will not pay for her to go to Swat at 50k a year. It’s not a good value to us when Bama is such a good option. Plus we have D18 going to college at nearly the same time and there’s no way we can afford 100k a year unless we lived in a cardboard box and pillaged our retirement, which we won’t do.
@geogirl1 wrote
Amen to that.
@dfbdfb wrote
I had a similar experience. CMU in 1988 was 24k. IIRC, I had to pay about half of it. It took six years of working full time to pay off my freshman year of debt. My parents absolutely could not afford to send me there and it was extremely foolish of my mother to push me towards that school. According to the handy-dandy inflation calculator that would be $48,000 in today’s dollars. I think CMU is right at the 70k ish mark right now, so I do agree that it was expensive then, but it’s frickin expensive now.
Safeties–
All of D17’s safeties will be automatic admit based on stats. Right now with the 33 act that’s definitely Alabama. I need to find some more for her in case she doesn’t like Bama, but I think she’d be ok there because she’s familiar with southern culture, but it’s 50% not southern for the NMSF admits, so that ticks that diversity box, as well. I don’t want a safety to reject her to protect their yield. I think there are about 3 other schools that she is more excited about right now (like Northeastern, WPI, and Drexel), but as long as she doesn’t hate a safety it stays on the list. I had to pull NC State from the Binder of Destiny because she despises the entire state of North Carolina right now, unfortunately.
@MichiganGeorgia wrote
D17 is taking it this year, and she said that’s why-“it looked interesting”. 
@longwood wrote
I think it depends on the kid. I know that the two essays I just wrote for a class would have been much more well thought out if I’d had more than a week to write them (it was a super condensed class). Sometimes it’s good to get the first draft done early and then let it marinate for a bit, but everyone has their own process. Some people write best under pressure. I think the one must-have is to let a fresh set of eyes look at the essay, even if it’s just for copy-edit purposes rather than content evaluation.
D17 is mad about her bad handwriting potentially being the issue with the scores on the ACT (26 for the essay, 33 comp), and her Lang AP (3), so I recommended that she enter some writing contests this fall. At the very least, if she wins one it’ll boost her confidence about her writing.
@2muchquan wrote
Here’s the thing with humor-not everyone finds the same things funny. If you watch Heidi Klum on America’s Got Talent, she’ll sit stony-faced through most of the stand up comedian acts. She just doesn’t find it funny. On the other hand, MOST of my digital art stuff is humorous, because that’s what I connect with and that’s what populates my imagination. Most of my published writing has gentle humor (FamilyFun magazine, for instance, always likes my funny stuff). So, my advice would be to try for humor and then be very critical about the finished product BEFORE you send it-make sure that the humor is authentic and comes through clearly in a non-offensive way. Don’t completely ignore the prompt, though. If she can answer the prompt in a humorous and unexpected way, that’s gold.
Ok, this is huge, I can’t catch up anymore…
Here is a link to the common app essays:
If you want to run with humor, I think #4 and #5 probably lend themselves the best to a humorous answer. Especially #5: “Discuss an accomplishment or event, formal or informal, that marked your transition from childhood to adulthood within your culture, community, or family.” Discussing a humorously embarrassing event can really connect you to a reader if done well.
@jedwards70 haha. Also remember granparents also are less practical with grandkids. They just want the best for them and maybe forget reality
@LovetheBard (I love your posting name, btw.)
Definitely not opposed to religion. We are devout Catholics. Unfortunately, we cannot afford any Catholic universities. Our dd’s college budget is tiny (the irony! Catholic schools are amg the least affordable for us.) ND reduces instutional aid with merit aid. Their institutional aid is no where close to what we can afford.
UMD is on her list, but it is definitely in the “competitive merit” category. Not close to being one she is counting on. That category is her reach. Too many of those on her list.
BYU…we sent her to French camp there last summer bc we knew it was a school we could afford but were concerned about isolation. We thought camp was a way to dip her toe in. Great language experience, but she came home saying no way. (During one dept meeting, Dd mentioned having to gone to camp there. That professor started talking about how BYU has one of the best French teachers in the country. Turns out it that is who taught Dd at camp and encouraged her to attend BYU. She even gave Dd some of her textbooks at the end of camp. Dd was flattered then, but she shared that with that professor and let’s just say she left there glowing.) But, Dd says the culture on campus is overwhelming and she would never feel part of the campus, only an outsider residing there.
@BigPapiofthree Right there with you. My parents passed away 10 yrs ago. I am the youngest of a large family, but unfortunately, I have a “pass the bean dip” type relationship with my siblings, especially when it comes to our kids.
Safeties
I don’t know if we have a safety, except for our local CC followed by transfer. But by the College Confidential definition that isn’t really a safety bc DS really really doesn’t want to go there. But what other option is there, if somehow we can’t swing one of the SUNY schools? And it does look very tight. They are a lot more expensive than when I was a kid. For his freshman year, we’ll have three in school so full Pell, but for junior and senior years he’ll be the only one and it looks like we lose Pell. Then unless he gets a few thousand for athletics the budget just doesn’t work 
. Maybe if I drop the adjunct gig and go work retail or something 
.
So yeah, it’s a worry. I try to not let it keep me up at night.
(An aside…DD’14 had a lot of Pell freshman year when she was the only one in college and I haven’t figured out why this isn’t predicted to be true for DS’17. Is it that we were dropped from employer sponsored health insurance and so our paycheck now has more $ because the health insurance premiums aren’t being taken out anymore? Is it the recent change in the way assets are counted? We own a house where my mother lives while we stay in a parsonage. Haven’t had the time or energy to try to track down the Pell disparity.)
Admittance wise, the four on the list admit anywhere from 40%-60% and DS’s stats are right at 50% for the less competitive ones, and and little below 50% for the more competitive ones. Again, that doesn’t seem to qualify as a safety by CC standards. But what do you all think…is the definition of a safety different for a B+/A- student than for the high flyers that are so overrepresented on CC?
I’m hoping to add a regional SUNY or two to the list, so that could be intermediate between the big SUNYs and CC.
We were looking at UA Huntsville but it looks like that’s not going to be an option. Whereas our GC calculates DS’s GPA at 3.5 (converting from a 100 scale) UAH has put up their conversion table and that puts DS at 3.3. I.e. 89 = 3.3, 90 = 3.7, and DS has a 89.2. There doesn’t seem to be an intermediate number for 3.5. Technically he would have time to try to get it up because they’ll take the GPA from the end of senior year, but I don’t want to be putting much hope on that.
@BigPapiofthree @Mom2aphysicsgeek sorry for your losses. I’m also one who has lost both parents–my dad this February and my mom several years before. Though, honestly they didn’t really keep track of which of the 4 grandkids were mine and which were my sister’s. Memory issues for my mom and lack of it being a priority for my dad. Recommending colleges would have been outside their frame of reference; they weren’t at all involved with my college selection and didn’t tell me there was no money available until after I had admittances in hand.
DH’s parents started in the “he’ll get in everywhere and the elites will give him money” camp. But, we told them it’s completely different now, and they’ve accepted that.
@mdcmom I remember the good old days when I applied to college, “safety” was you applied to the SUNY system, listed 5 schools or so in your order of preference and were guaranteed admission to 1. Everyone applied (probably randomly making selection based on location) and if you didn’t get accepted to the other schools you really wanted to go to you knew you had this in your back pocket. It was a pretty stress free process.
I think the safety schools you describe with 40 - 60% acceptance rates where your child falls at 50% will be fine.
@BigPapiofthree @Mom2aphysicsgeek - I am sorry for the loss of your parents. Not complaining about the grandparents just throwing them some good humored shade. I am sorry about your situation because I know how grateful I am for the relationship my parents have with my son. He’s very lucky to have them, particularly since he is an only child, and needs an outlet from his crazy parents some times. They relocated to be closer to us during a medical crisis and he sees them four or five times a week. It’s like he has a second set of parents except that they are much cooler than his actual parents and I’m fine with that. 
How do we find out which colleges we sent the scores to for SAT from college board’s website?
@motherofdragons - DS17’s handwriting is so so bad I have a hard time believing that your DD’s could be worse, Seriously, I feel for the high school teachers that have to read his handwritten work. I think that the ACT essays have just been screwed up since they changed the way the grade them. I don’t think I would worry about her handwriting at this point.