@RightCoaster UCLA is an utter crapshoot even for qualified applicants – too many people apply. As you probably know from your time on these boards, UCLA got around 110,000 applications last year. One hundred and ten THOUSAND. So, fergit it.
We live around 15-20 minutes away from the campus, though, and even if my D19 was a straight A, 36 ACT supergenius (hint: she is not), I’d want her to go further away for college. It’s better, IMO, to go away for college and open one’s life up to new places/experiences. Makes a person more understanding of the various ways people in this country live – a less provincial life, as Belle from Beauty and the beast would say! That’s just my opinion, though.
My older D17 was a LAC kid through and through, and I wouldn’t be surprised if D19 turns out the same way.
@homerdog It’s all about the fit! I was talking with my pediatrician yesterday (well…not MINE, my kids’) and her daughter loves being at Oberlin. That kid would probably not fit at a large football school. I guess for my own junior, if I can figure out which school is genuinely the best fit for her, I’ll makes sure that it’s the very last one she sees before college app time! haha.
I am at times gripped with massive FOMO and I add a bunch of names to the list for consideration. Kiddo ignores this until I get better and prune the list down to what was there before. Kiddo is focused on the now, which I tell myself is good, but it means I get very anxious about the future. God, the summer, what’s he going to do this summer?
Kid isn’t reading this so I can harsh on him here anonymously, right?
He got the TASP nomination, he has written essays for it, but they’re… not all good. A jumble of words, two pages go without a paragraph break. One of them is an extended rant about how horrible the school grading system is. The third essay actually is quite good, but I suspect the reviewers will have thrown up their hands and tossed the app in the ‘no’ pile by that point. I’m trying to stay supportive.
On the one hand, it’s an incredible honor just to be nominated and the act of doing the essays sets us up for college applications this summer, there is a bunch of good stuff that can be recycled for college supplemental essays. On the other hand, I really wish he had dug in and written three good essays so that he would have a chance of getting in. On the third hand (yes, I’m a mother, I have many hands) what do I know about what they’re looking for, maybe this will be enough to get him an interview? On the fourth hand, if he doesn’t get in maybe that will make him work harder at it when we come to college essay time.
@ninakatarina we went through the TASP essay process with D15 and I feel for you. D15 did them but not enthusiastically and it showed. Needless to say she didn’t proceed to the next stage (I forget what it is, interviews?). But when the time came to do college essays she went into that wholeheartedly. That’s not to say there weren’t false starts, abandoned topics and many discarded drafts, but she was far more motivated about that. Anyway best of luck with TASP but don’t despair about the college essays.
Count my D in as another who has no clue as to where she wants to apply, let alone attend. She doesn’t like a single school I mention for one crazy reason or another. I thought we could take an in-state college tour trip during spring break- she has zero interest.
She visited one huge state Uni last year -she went to ‘camp’ there for 2 weeks. Didn’t do a tour, but feels that was enough to know what the entire school is like.
Like @jellybean5, I’m a planner by nature so it’s killing me but I think I am going to lay off for a while. I’m starting to finally realize that this is HER journey. If she wants to wait until Senior year to make decisions, I’m going to have to go ahead and let her. It’s strange though because up until a few months ago she was all over it. I think this stressful Junior year has really spooked her and she is afraid college will be 4 (or 6 or 8) more years of all work and no play. She was seriously considering medical school and now claims that is completely out of the question. I really feel for these kids-there is a huge amount of pressure on them right now.
@SunnyFlorida22 , sorry we are in the same boat together. I keep telling D her college choice is about her, not me and that still doesn’t matter. A few months ago I posted here on how much easier college should be than high school. I think most of us agreed. HS is hard w 5 AP classes and 2 pre-AP classes going on, on a daily basis. My D is also planning on med school after undergrad but she has a hard time w the total number of years for the whole school process. I tell her she would be 30 eventually anyway, or however old, lol.
Context: Because of our rather remote location (Alaska) we can only do any college tours during summer breaks, since it’s a plane flight to any but the local regional public. In fact, D19 is very, very likely to end up going to a college she hasn’t visited before, because her geographic spread is so wide (especially compared to D17’s).
Main claim: College tours—except perhaps accepted student visits—are mainly useful for precisely two things: (1) For those colleges that track it, demonstrated interest, and (2) more generally, not for finding out whether a specific college would be a good fit for a student, but rather finding out whether a specific type of college would be a good fit for a student. (This is why D17 knew to target LACs, and D19 knows to target medium-to-large state colleges—not because they toured specific colleges to gauge their interest, but because they toured enough different types of colleges to know what they want.)
Secondary claim: In most cases—the only exception I can think of is a student who has a history of being overly picky, in which case they need to pretty much just get over it—potential applicants should be encouraged to strike potential colleges off their lists for even seemingly-trivial reasons. Think of it as the applicant’s equivalent of holistic admissions.
The TL;DR thing underlying all this: I claim, and will continue to claim, that there is no one best college for any applicant.
Hi. I’m popping over from the Class of 2018 thread to mention something that is bothering me on behalf of some kids.
The vast majority of the kids at my D’s school applied Early somewhere, including my daughter, but now that acceptances have come out, I see that there is a huge difference between applying to a school Early Decision or Early Action on the one hand, and Single Choice/Restricted Early Action on the other (I’ll just call this “Restricted”). So Restricted means you can only apply Early to that one school, and usually you can also apply to a state school. As far as I know, the only schools that have Restricted Early are the uber selective schools with 8% or less admit rates. Anyway, now that schools have announced their Early results, I feel really sorry for the kids who applied Restricted Early. At my D’s school, only 1 of the kids who applied Restricted Early was accepted, the rest were deferred except one student was rejected. So now there are a whole bunch of kids who have perfect or near-perfect standardized scores and grades and amazing ECs, and they either have no acceptances or an acceptance to a state school that is basically an auto-admit (they should have applied to Michigan, but didn’t). And then you have the kids who applied ED; they could also apply EA somewhere. So yes, some of the ED kids got deferred or rejected, but within a couple of days before or after that ED result came in, the EA results came in too, so kids usually had some kind of acceptance in hand that they are relatively happy with. The Restricted kids, though, have to wait until April before they can hear back. And that is very, very tough on them emotionally to have to deal with the rejection for so long before they hear any positive news, all the while seeing many of their other classmates getting good news. FWIW, this isn’t sour grapes on my part; my D got accepted ED to her 1st choice, but as the Restricted results were coming in, we were very grateful to have the EA backup. My last point is that, unless you have a hook of some sort, I don’t think applying early to one of the Restricted schools really gives them an advantage over applying regular decision anyway. Knowing what I know now, I’d do a lot of research before letting my child apply Early to a Restricted school.
I generally agree with @dfbdfb on the value of college tours (and definitely on the “no one best college” thing), but also would add that for us, college tours were a way of making the college process “real.” Certainly, that might not be necessary (or possible) for everyone, but I feel like all of us (D19, the parents, even S24) are more focused on the college process than we were before fall tours.
There are probably some things that students might not realize they care about until they see them, some of which are particular to individual colleges. For example, none of the dorms we visited were the luxurious ones sometimes raved about here at CC. While I don’t think D19 cared about the living conditions, it’s entirely possible that somebody could see a particularly bad one and think, “ummm, don’t they have anything nicer?” I realize that dorms can vary widely within a campus, and even within a single dorm, but it’s an example of something that somebody might not think about until they tour a few, even if those few aren’t all the student’s top choices.
To me, it seems like tours can definitely be the equivalent of making policy by anecdote rather than data – the data probably weeds out some bias, and the anecdote can be just wrong – but sometimes the anecdotes do say something true that provides a lot of context to the overall data. It’ll be interesting to see how our daughter uses the tours (and the data) in her overall decision-making.
And I agree with you about the reasons to visit. I think S19 would as well. We keep visiting remote LACs and, after his Carleton visit in Oct, he was like “why don’t we just stop this and wait until acceptances? We know I like these types of schools and, until I know if I’m in, I don’t see the point of running all over the country.”
@melvin123 Thank you for sharing. Our kids’ school counselor advises EA to whatever schools offer it on the student’s list. But, they’re negative about ED. (SCEA schools aren’t on my kid’s list, so that didn’t come up.)
Restrictive can get confusing, because it can mean very different things, e.g. Stanford’s REA is really SCEA, while ND’s REA only prohibits applying binding ED, but allows applying EA anywhere. And Georgetown and BC have the same policy as ND, but call it EA rather than REA.
Binding Early Decision seems like such a bad idea, I was always leaning against it for D19.
As for college visits, I also think they are overrated. They can be great way of determining what schools you don’t like (e.g., D19 wasn’t on the Georgetown campus for more than 5 minutes before she decided that she didn’t want to go there), but don’t really do much to distinguish between schools that you do like. By the time D19 visited her 4th school, she predicted that the guided tour would be worthless and they’d say the exact same thing the other 3 schools said. And she was right.
There can be exceptions. E.g., D19 absolutely loved the Emory tour. I didn’t do the tour with her, but she said it was unlike any other tour she went on and she would love to go there. However, she also knows they give somewhere between diddly and squat in merit aid and there’s no way we could afford to send her there (we won’t qualify for need aid).
@evergreen5 I totally agree that Restrictive can get very confusing, and thanks for pointing out that sometimes it really means that you just can’t apply binding ED anywhere else. I was talking about schools like Stanford and Harvard where you can’t apply to any other schools except state schools.
It’s interesting that your school’s GC is negative on ED. What I’ve heard is that the kids who apply ED to a school that they like, but don’t love, sometimes regret being bound to their ED school come spring when other kids are hearing from schools that they might have otherwise been interested in. And of course the bad thing about ED is that if your student will qualify for financial aid, you have to basically take the package offered or else turn down the school altogether; your ability to negotiate finances with the school is severely limited. But if it’s clearly a student’s first choice and if the finances work, I think ED can help admissions chances, and it really is nice to be done with all the college acceptance stuff before January, so they can really enjoy the second half of their Senior year.
^Somewhat ironically, last month not long after we met with the GC, for the first time ever at this school a senior was accepted early to Stanford and word spread like wildfire. (I might call early results week “gray hair week” or something.)
Right now DS19 wants to SCEA at Yale, send an app to the safety school which does rolling, and be ready to hit submit on 5 other applications when he’s denied/deferred. But we’re still 10 1/2 months away from submissions deadline and kiddo hasn’t taken a single official standardized test besides the PSAT, so everything is obviously subject to change.
If kiddo takes the ACT and SAT and his scores aren’t what he thinks they will be, then Yale is off the table and we may think of ED somewhere. I’m very reluctant to ED because we have a slightly screwy financial situation, but it may happen with the right school.
Hey wow, didn’t take very long for son19 to get an invite out to the flagship to meet with coaches/team and get a tour of the engineering dept. They asked him to forward some grades, classes he’s taking, sat scores and all that the other day. He’s planning to visit in March or over spring break in April when he has some free time.
I’m not sure if he’s really all that thrilled to go to school there, and he hasn’t really even thought thru it. But he should go and check it out and pursue it, even if he decides it’s not the right situation for him.
He thinks it sort of cool because he now has at least one Div 1 school expressing some interest in him now. Not many kids from our school get to pursue D1 athletics, mostly girls too. There are usually 10-20 kids that go onto some sort of D3 sport, maybe a couple of D2, and then maybe 1 girl makes a D1 soccer team. And this is from a very competitive athletic school. So it is kind of cool. I told him he should look at any school that expresses an interest in him where he “might” fit in. It can’t hurt to look and keep all options open.
He would still probably rather play soccer, but only a few coaches have expressed solid interest so far. So we’ll see.
@evergreen5 sounds like our school – we had a senior get into Stanford early and it had everyone talking. We are a small school with limited offerings so it was definitely noteworthy among the kids.
We will make visit plans for late spring. She wants to go on a weekday while college is in session, but doesn’t want to miss any soccer so I don’t know what we’ll work out. We’ll probably only visit 4 or so. Might have to do something over the summer or early fall. None of them are selective, so no need to wait for an acceptance. My fear is that she will love the most expensive! She will definitely have her superficial reasons for liking or not liking. A few months ago she stated she could NOT go to a school with a red in the school colors. Now her favorite has red. (I told her I went to a school with red, and I hate wearing red, but I bought my college sweatshirt in teal and all was fine.)
DD’17 went on 4 visits. First one she didn’t like the basement art studio complete with mouse traps. Second one didn’t like the urban setting or the art displayed in art department. Third one she got “the feeling” plus it was a debt free option. Fourth one she was already accepted but they didn’t have her preferred major and she didn’t care for it until after the regular tour when she and another art student got to go in the art building. She liked it and she and the other girl showed each other their art pages on IG. That experience left her with a better feeling at the end. But it was expensive and she was good with #3 and that’s where she is. She is a big proponent of visits, but they were all within 2 hours of home and none of them were reaches, so travel and acceptances weren’t a consideration.
DS16 fell in love with his first tour. You could immediately see it when he walked on campus. We toured 4 more schools and none compared , and I could see it whenever we visited one. He has the opportunity to visit several times each for scholarship weekends and accepted student events. Nothing compared. He’s attending his first choice and loving it
I guess for my own junior, if I can figure out which school is genuinely the best fit for her, I’ll makes sure that it’s the very last one she sees before college app time! haha.