Yep.
I send son an updated list of colleges he has applied to and will apply to every few days. His job is to memorize the list just in case his GC grabs him and asks.
Oy! What we do for them.
My people!
I heard back from the university that requires the GED for homeschoolers. They have accepted dd’s application as is and will not require the GED.
Both of my kids are at big public flagships.
The older one is a senior and really enjoys the upper level classes in her major. She has had some excellent (and tough!) professors. Each semester, she tries to take at least one class in a subject she knows next to nothing about. Last semester, it was Economics of Africa. She took her basic requirements at community college, then transferred in junior year.
The youngest one, a freshman, is finding her first semester classes to be “easy” thus far. She was on a STEM track, but over the summer switched to Humanities. Without Biology, Chemistry, and Calculus first semester, yeah, she’s finding it “easy”. I don’t believe it’s going to stay that way all four years and encouraged her to enjoy the free time while she can.
It was a shock to her system that so many kids did poorly on one of the first exams in Intro to Psych. I tried to explain to her that a big public university is not going to be like her private prep HS. It’s called academic diversity and I don’t think Intro to Psych is exactly a hot bed of intellectual discussion on any campus, much less a big public!
She has found a bunch of super bright kids, in her dorm, a lot of them on an engineering track.
@Mom2aphysicsgeek Yay! The Uni. gets a point for being not dumb! :D/
@Midwest67 – "I don’t think Intro to Psych is exactly a hot bed of intellectual discussion on any campus, much less a big public!:
I think there are also a lot of students arriving on many campuses not really knowing how to study for the type of exam administered in a large intro course. I had never really studied in high school and boy, was college a wake-up call. Four Ds on my first round of prelims. Freshman Writing Seminar graded papers along the way, as opposed to two large exams and one final, or I probably would have earned a fifth D.
Time to open the books and stop attending so many keg parties…Seriously though, it was a different way of testing for a lot of students, as evidenced by the curve.
Thank goodness @Mom2aphysicsgeek!
UA roommate selection: @MotherOfDragons, I don’t know it’s so much that UA allows it, except by not disallowing it—it’s a simple text box with free entry. Doesn’t mean that folks at UA shouldn’t know some people are using it that way, of course. (Not sure who to tell, though…)
Intro psych’s lack of rigor: Hey! Those are going to be my daughter’s people! Okay, yeah, so she’s the sort who had a psych professor at a campus visit say (after D17 talked about her interests), “Oh, so you’re going to grad school…” and then proceeded from there, but still she’ll have to start there, too. 
Hit submit on the FAFSA. Even if D17 hasn’t hit submit on any applications, I’m doing my part. Anyone know if the EFC that is spit out is an average? She has 1 state school and 5 LAC on her list and obviously the full sticker prices vary dramatically. I’ve run the net price calculators on each school so I have a good feel for that, just was surprised to see one EFC number automatically generated.
Next up is the CSS profile required at 5 of her 6 schools… I’m saving that fun for the weekend.
This week two of the six schools on her list are doing visits at her high school and she has a college interview on Saturday so hopefully she too will be hitting submit in the future.
Peer pressure: I can now report that D’17 has completed the NMSF application. First submit button that she has hit.
Pitt short answers have been completed, pending one round of edits. Common app is (over) done, needs to lose 50 words or so.
Counselor has submitted rec and school report to common app, teachers assigned for all schools.
Getting there…
Never a dull moment.
I managed to re-dislocate my shoulder today. Fun times!
I haven’t tested it, but I think that would be your EFC at all FAFSA only schools. It would be different at schools schools that award their own grants or include merit in their NPC.
@Atyraulove and @nw2this The FAFSA EFC is a rather misleading number. In order to have it make sense, you have to first understand that financial assistance from a school is not required nor a given. The EFC it generates determines if your student is eligible for a Pell grant and if the school awards them, an FSEOG, another federal grant.
All students are eligible for student loans. Some students demonstrating need are eligible for up to $3500 of the loans subsidized. The difference between subsidized and unsubsidized is when interest starts accruing. Subsidized loans don’t start accruing interest until 6 months after graduation whereas unsubsidized start accruing interest immediately.
The vast majority of schools do not offer anything beyond that. So if you don’t qualify for federal grants (which have income thresholds somewhere around $70,000, depending on family size…and that is a guess. I am basing that off of comments made by friends), student loans of $5500 freshman yr is what your student will be offered. Then, many FA packages will include info on how to take out parent plus loans.
In all of that, your actual EFC is meaningless. You pay whatever it costs to attend.
Some schools will offer some institutional grant $$. Some will offer merit $$. Only about 70 schools “meet need” and only a small percentage of those meet need without loans. Meet need schools will approach your EFC as calculated by FAFSA and/or the CSS according to their institutional formula. Say your EFC is 28,000. Then depending on the school, the student could be expected to contribute $5500 in loans, $3000 in work study, and $2000 of summer earnings. That $28,000 may now look more like $38,500. The point is that there is no real EFC. It is just a number generated by a federal formula. It does not translate to college costs across schools. The only numbers that matter are individual schools’ calculations.
When you look at NPCs and FA packages do not fall into the marketing ploy of looking at the bottom line to determine cost. They throw loans, workstudy, expected summer work contributions, etc in the package. That bottom dollar amt is usually just what your aid package doesn’t cover. But, it most definitely is not your cost. You have to add back in all of the $$ expected from your student and from you in order to compare apples to apples when looking at different offers from different schools.
http://www.thecollegesolution.com/schools-that-meet-100-of-financial-need-2/
https://studentaid.ed.gov/sa/types/loans/subsidized-unsubsidized#subsidized-vs-unsubsidized
Hth, the EFC terminology is confusing and often misleading.
I saw this university-based merit scholarship resource referenced on a different website. I asked about it and I was told based on how much research I have done that it probably would not offer me much that I didn’t already know. But I thought it might be helpful for people jumping head first into this and are now recognizing that some merit $$ might be necessary.
It is not free; it costs $8. I can not vouch for it myself bc I didn’t pay to download it. But in the scheme of it, I thought it might be $8 well spent for some.
Honestly, my kids have had all of that at the publics they have attended. They have had the odd class that they have felt was a waste of time or some students in their classes who they have wondered why they bother to attend class, but I doubt very seriously that that is not the norm on every single campus.
The only school that I would say was an extremely poor fit due to undermatching is our current local directional university. The professors are still good, but the depts are small and the number of students tiny. It made student interactions awkward bc ds was 16 in classes with jrs and srs and had the highest grade in his classes. His professors were still amazing, though. They offered him books out of their personal libraries. They would talk to him in their offices about complex topics outside of the scope of that course.
When he started as a freshman, those courses were rock solid prep for jumping into the 300/400 level classes at Bama, so the content of the classes themselves at that directional had been fine. (His very first semester he took a 300 level EE electromagnetic wave theory class.)
I guess many people would be concerned about under matching at Bama, but he has not felt that way. He has wonderful friends who are all top students.
Fwiw, I think your latter concern is very valid. I don’t know how much thought people actually give to students feeling like they aren’t as strong of a student as they thought they were and probably actually are but… If they don’t have a strong, confident self-view, top kids experiencing not being top kids can undermine their view of their abilities and they don’t rise up, but sink. It is a reality and probably one of the causes of that subversive major change discussion on the main forum.
@LoveTheBard Yikes! I can’t even imagine. I hope your shoulder fully mends soon!
@Mom2aphysicsgeek Thanks! The 5 LAC D17 is applying to are all 100% meet need schools from the link you included. The NPC does a nice job of breaking down things, so the schools that are 100% meet needs still expect the student to take out a loan, have a summer job and do work study and for the parent to take out a loan and contribute cash on hand from my reports - and the remaining gap is paid for by an institutional grant.
We attended a presentation from one of the 5 LAC schools which stated that they were not just need aware, they were VERY need aware, during the admission process.
They also talked about students filling an institutional need, like if the school marketing materials state they have students from all 50 states and their student from Alaska was graduating, they were desperately looking for a replacement from that state.
Any school that requires the parent to take out a loan does not meet 100% need, imo.
Thanks to those who offered some advice on adding " nominated for NBHS" to my son’s apps. That helped. It also helped me to remember that he earned a business concentration award/certificate from his school so now he has 2 things to mention in the award section on common app.
Anyways, there is a new calm here in the house today. 5 of his apps were submitted, and he’s doing one more easy one when he gets home today ( fee waiver, might as well apply he said). Feeling great to get those all in. He will probably submit 2 more that have Jan 1 deadlines. Question: when would submit those apps? They’re not due until January, but they’re all done and ready to submit, but the schools don’t offer early action ( just ED and we will not do that)? I wouldn’t mind just submitting everything and be totally done with the process asap. Is there a reason to not just send those final 2 apps in asap?
***Congrats to the rest of you with acceptances and congrats to those kids making continued progress!!
UA Housing stuff completed. To the tune of $500 / I was too tired to read about how much of it we get back, but I figured it was the cost of doing business for protecting her experience at her safety. She did read through some of the people who matched her and was like, uh, no. I think her best percentage was 75%.
I said not to worry too much-that this first day sign up group was a lot of specific self-selected kids-a very small group like my kid and @dfbdfb 's kid who have it as a serious safety and housing means a lot, and the kids who know they want to go to UA as their first choice and are RAH Rah rah UA Roll Tide, etc etc so are super enthusiastic about rushing, Jesus, and being bff’s forever. Which is fine if that’s your thing, but it’s not our thing.
H asked if we’ll do the same thing at all the colleges. I know at least three of her other choices don’t have housing issues like UA does, I don’t know about UMD (depending on what htey come back $ wise with I’ll worry about it when she’s accepted), and one just has not-great dorms (WPI) so we’d be looking at possibly getting her an apartment if that was her final choice.
So much to think about.