My S is the opposite of many of yours. In MA you can get your permit when you are 16 and your license at 16.5. So, on his 16th birthday I picked him up from school so we could go to the registry and take his permit test which he fortunately passed. Then I scheduled him for his road test as soon as possible after his half birthday. He’s had his license since mid August and is just thriving on having his freedom.
We live in the middle of nowhere. Nothing is in walking distance, there is no public transportation, and our town is part of a regional school district so the high school isn’t even in our town. Now that S is driving, he drives to school in the morning, then to the gym (in another town), then often to his favorite basketball courts for pickup games (also in another town). He usually makes it home around dinner time. Homework is after dinner. He’ll skip the pickup basketball if he has a lot of homework or has an AAU practice (which he can also drive himself to now). We also have no issues with testing pickups since he can drive himself there. Our life is so much easier now than S can drive himself around.
@liska21 Weirdly enough, S19 is really pushing back on the prestige thing. I’m glad that he’s really thinking about what he really wants in a college and not being swayed by his friends but I am a bit surprised. He mentioned very early on that he wants off of the competitive crazy-train that is his high school and he’s still sticking with that. He has plenty of friends hoping for the likes of Duke, MIT, Chicago but, when I mention the reach schools that I think might be best for him (Brown or maybe Princeton), he just kind of shrugs. He wants to be challenged in college, wants to be with bright kids, and wants relationships with his professors. I sense that he wants community over all else, so visits are proving to be very important. He went to a Tufts presentation at school yesterday and said these bigger presentations all sound the same. It was only when he met with the Davidson and Dickinson reps last week that he came home all energized since the meetings ended up being one on one.
Maybe he just doesn’t want to get turned down. Or maybe my husband talking about how great it would be for him to get merit has him less interested in having us be full pay. Or maybe he just knows he likes the kind of schools he’s seen so far (Kenyon, Denison, Grinnell) and he’s happy to leave it at that. Ok. Maybe I should ask him! :))
My S19 got his permit not long after turning 15.5, but seems indifferent about getting his license (he doesn’t mind driving, but doesn’t bug us to get him out there to rack up the behind the wheel hours). He’s only been 16 for a month and I didn’t see any reason to push it before then. He’s probably been driving for 45 minutes to an hour per week so it’s going slowly (and he hasn’t been on a major highway yet).
I just want him to have his license before the summer. If we actually do some college visits in the new year, he’s going to do a lot of the driving!
Here in Virginia, you have to hold your driving permit for 9 months, plus pass behind-the-wheel plus complete the 45- hour driving log, where at least 15 hours of driving has to be after sunset. We are trying to finish the driving-at-night part of the driving log. In mid-November she will have held her driving permit for 9 months, so we are looking at a temporary driver’s license then. After that we wait for the court date to get the official driver’s license from the judge.
Those here who have been on the class of 2017 parents board may remember my high-stats (and geographic hook) D17 who could have targeted huge-prestige schools, but knew that what she was most interested in were the sort of LACs that tend to fall more or less into the USN&WR 75±25 range. Her being able to get solid merit aid from those schools was a nice bonus for her, but it was mainly that she knew what she wanted (and is currently quite happy at a school that fell somewhere around 70 in the latest CC prestige USN&WR list).
Prestige is prestige. Prestige isn’t happiness, nor is it even success, except maybe in the bragging rights for upper-middle-class parents department.
D19 isn’t really into “prestige” in that she’s not dead set on an Ivy or Stanford or whatever. OTOH, she does look at the ACT 25th-75th range and scoffs at schools that are too far below what she thinks she’ll get on her ACT.
OTOH, we visited Rice this weekend and she really liked the school. It’s her favorite so far. And things she liked about it are not the things the big publics are going to have (things like small class size, small campus size, access to professors). Unfortunately, the big publics are the ones that will (hopefully) give her merit aid.
As for the ACT, she’s scarily confident about it. I talked to her about whether or not she wants to use the 4 free score reports. I explained the benefit (free!) and the detriment (they get sent before she sees the score). So I said she might not want to send it, just in case she does badly on it. She responded, “I’m not going to do badly on it.”
Regarding driving, like @me29034 we also live where nothing is in walking distance and there is no public transport. So last year we had kids 21, 18 and 16 years old driving, and with wife and I , insurance was over 5K a year. At least the middle D turns 19 in December, which means she has 3 years experience and her rates will drop. (She is at college 2500 miles away, with car at home, and get no reduced rate). We know other families who want to wait till their kids are 18 or older to drive, but in NC the beginner rate applies to the first 3 years.
Now at college, D17 is using public transport and Lyft, and D19 will likely do the same. D17 has a very good friend already from Brooklyn who never needed a DL. Transportation diversity, and that’s a good thing.
Another, somewhat disconnected, thought on prestige and its lack: My D19 is interested in a field (industrial engineering and its joined-at-the-hip sister manufacturing engineering) that, it seems from our poking around, is more frequently offered at public regionals than at state flagships or private research institutions. (And yes, there’s LACs with engineering, but she’s not a LAC kind of girl.) She’s started to get promotional mailings from some schools, and it’s quite interesting the differences. To take one concrete example naming names, stuff she’s gotten from Wisconsin’s flagship institution are pretty much generic “We’re a great school, so of course you want to come here!”, whereas the printed and email correspondence she’s gotten from Wisconsin-Milwaukee have driven home measures of student happiness and how she would fit in, and Wisconsin-Stout has been pretty clear in talking about the ways their program can be used in all sorts of flexible ways—and both Milwaukee and Stout have clearly semi-personalized some of what she’s gotten with an eye toward what an engineering prospect from Alaska with a strong background in performing arts might be interested in. (They’re not always right, of course, but the attempt shows, and they hit more often than they miss.)
Now, I recognize that marketing is marketing, and so all of this should be taken with a grain of salt—but let’s be honest, it’s kind of cool to see that some (not all, of course) of the schools a bit further down the prestige scale are willing to put in the extra effort at the front end. Some of this is presumably because they have to, but as someone who works at a public regional that hasn’t figured out how to work that part of things yet, it’s good to see.
@dfbdfb - my son just graduated from UW-Stout and they are everything and more that their brochures and mailers talk about. If you ever have any questions please feel free to PM me. He was a CS major in the Game Design department and had a GREAT experience.
We have scheduled the first college visit during an upcoming four-day weekend.
“S19, we’re going to Pittsburgh on [DATE] for a college visit.”
“Oh, OK.” (pause) Wait, what’s in Pittsburgh?
“The University of Pittsburgh.”
“Oh.”
If you don’t like it pick something else and we’ll change it.
“No, that’s fine.”
Obviously, he’s overwhelmed with excitement. I’ve heard good things about Pitt, they seem to take most kids who apply from his school, and he just barely made the minimum test score for merit, so off we go!
@eh1234 my older son did not really know where he wanted to go, all the way through the admissions process. He applied to a range of schools he liked, and made up his mind in April after everything was sorted. He didn’t care for campus visits either. I don’t think campus visits really played much of a factor either, except he decided he didn’t really want to go to school in the middle of the woods. He wasn’t picky about size, architecture,facilities etc.
My younger son is kind of the same way, I guess it’s just not being too picky, and I’m not complaining. He doesn’t caught up in any sort of prestige race. He has not visited anywhere yet where he’s said he definitely would not attend if accepted.
We’re just going with the flow and not trying to rush things, especially since we don’t have test results back. Maybe by Spring we’ll have a better plan.
A part of me (possibly a large part of me) thinks college visits are nearly useless. The colleges will be putting their best foot forward and only saying the things that they think attract students. So the small colleges will talk about the small class sizes and talk about how it’s a “community” and you get to know your professors (you’re a name, not just a number). We haven’t visited a large state school yet, but at the college fair, they were talking about the how the large size enables you to access things that small campuses can’t, and how you still get a small school feel even though there are 20k+ students.
The student guides are a self-selecting group of people who like the school (someone who doesn’t like the school will not want to be a student tour guide.)
The reality is that college is what you make of it. I know people I went to college with who loved their experience, got to know all their professors and made a ton of friends. I know other people who just took the classes and graduated.
The one thing about visiting Rice that I liked the most is that D19 said she would live at home if she went there. In fact, she’d prefer that. Though that was at least partly selfish on her own part. She was raised as if she was an only child (her brother is 13 years older than her) and she’s never had to share a room in her life, so she’s not looking forward to that part of the college experience. So at least I know she’s thinking of what college life will be like. OTOH, Rice is expensive and difficult to get in to.
@gusmahler I somewhat agree with your points about campus visits. Info sessions all sound the same now. Tours are telling us a little bit more since we get to talk to a student and see dorms/facilities. The things that help more are going to class and eating in the dining room. You get to see what the kids are really like. It’s all a waste unless you’re really paying attention. “Discovery Days” or special “Junior Days” also seem to be better. More breakouts for parents and more chances for kids to get to know students. At least at LACs, the groups are still small enough to get a lot out of those visits.
I’ve been making pros/cons lists for the LACs on S19’s list and, boy, the pros all look almost the same. You have to dig pretty deep to find differences. The biggest differences seem to be the student bodies and the locations. With only 2000 kids on a campus, it’s important that S19 feels like it’s a place he could spend four years.
My husband is visiting Macalester and Carleton with S19 tomorrow. Mac will be the only school he’s looking at in a city. And it’s got that super international feel with kids from 90 countries. That’s what sets it apart from the other schools on his list so he’s going to see if he could like that. At Carleton, he’ll get to go to class as well as an info session and a tour. I want my husband to look closely and see if we can figure out if paying a full $65,000 would be worth it here. How is it different from LACs on his list where he could possibly get merit? What sets it apart?
We will visit Wake, Davidson, Richmond, and a new addition (William and Mary) in the spring. I’m dying to know how S19 will feel about going that far away from home. I don’t know if he would know unless we actually step on a plane and travel there, even though I don’t expect the info sessions and tours to be all that much different from the tours we’ve already seen!
I found that the first few campus tours that we attended were immensely valuable in terms of getting the kid informed about what college life is like and getting the kid into a mindset of what to look for in a college. My kid had never really been on a college campus before we went on our first tour. I chose F&M because, while it wasn’t my first choice for him, it was a respectable college and somewhere he could potentially be happy. The tour must have worked because it’s still on his ‘plan to apply’ list.
But yeah, college tours are all looking the same now. So much of the information is somewhere on the website. Really what’s useful is the feel of how far you have to walk from dorm to academic building to dining hall, whether there are hills or busy streets in your way, and occasionally the tour guides are wonderful gems of personality that make the visit entertaining.
We have found touring colleges to be invaluable. We usually don’t go to the information sessions, though. D19 arranges meetings with faculty members and meets up with current students. These conversations are worthwhile to her as she sifts through her options.
(We have only been to two information sessions as part of visiting at least 16 colleges so far.)
We are fortunate to live within an easy drive to tons of different types of schools. My son has been to some soccer camps on college campuses where we just walked around on our own and checked the scene out. We went to a really good info session at WPI recently and that was very helpful for son19 as he learned more about their robotics program. That got him excited and he was really impressed. I think most of the general info sessions are pretty standard and not really worth the hassle to get to. If you live close by and the school offers an “Open House” and have free time, why not? You can always leave if you want.
I doubt we’ll get to see all of the schools my son will apply to, but he should have an idea of what he likes and doesn’t by then. We probably won’t have much time until the summer to see any more schools.
Ha @gusmahler the aspect of sharing a room is by far what my d19 is least looking forward to and she hasn’t been raised as an only child. If she goes somewhere that requires sharing a room, it’s definitely going to have to be one that pairs kids up based on questions they answer rather than random choices.
I think my d needs to tour a couple of colleges just to get a general college feel. I’m not over worried about her having to tour every college she applies to. Most of her possibilities are going to be pretty big because smaller places don’t usually have chemical engineering. She will tour at least one medium-large and one large-large but I mostly what she would see on a tour isn’t going to effect choices much anyway. For her, it’s going to be (after major) cost, distance from home and/or family, availability of single rooms for freshmen, etc.
