I understand! Its easy to give the advice about finding a rolling safety that is affordable and the kid loves, but that isn’t always easy in reality. I’ve probably shared this before, but its worth repeating. My D1 was not immediately in love with the school she ultimate chose. We found it because she was in a panic that she might be shut out everywhere because of her specific major. We basically went searching for ANY school that would be a safety with her major. She liked it well enough that she said she wouldn’t mind going and so we applied. It wasn’t until March/April that she actually decided that she loved it and chose it over others which were far more “reachy” and originally “dream schools.” So, I would go ahead and apply to one or two of the schools your son would at least tolerate - just for the peace of mind. By the way, we have many times talked about how lucky we got that her original dream school did not have ED. You never know!
@homerdog - Can he set up an alumni interview? That’s a way to show interest without actually going to campus. And as long as EA is non-binding, then he can go visit as an accepted student.
@Trixy34 Yes. I believe he can set up an interview either with an alumni (which is unlikely since I honestly do not think there are any alumni of this college nearby but I could be wrong) or through Skype. Also, he will email the AO he met last fall and ask if he’s coming to the high school again this fall. Maybe they can find time to talk and call it an interview. 
@bjkmom Sure. We could maybe make it a family vacation but our D21 has exactly eight days between the end of her summer ballet intensive and the start of school. Those are the only days we can make work as a family vacation. S19 says he wants to be home that week working on his essays with his AP Lang teacher who we’ve hired (assuming we don’t know supplemental essays until 8/1).
If we do go, I’m considering using NYC as our base. D21 would be interested enough to go there if we go see a show or two. NYC in the summer is not my favorite place. My husband and I used to live there and we couldn’t wait to escape the city on summer weekends. We’ve taken the kids there a couple of times, both visits involved the US Open and then a weekend in the city and we never ended up seeing any musicals. D21 would like that so maybe that could work as the “vacation” part. She’d love to see ABT but the ballet doesn’t have shows in August. The thing about going to NY is that I’d like to take him to see Williams if we are there and that’s in a separate direction from the other schools I’ve discussed. Heck, we could spend two weeks driving around the NE looking at schools but who has time for that? S19 has lots of commitments this summer as well so there aren’t that many weeks that he has available either.
I don’t know. Maybe I should actually talk to my husband about it. All I’ve told him so far is that he needs to block off that first week in August and not be travelling for work.
@soxmom @me29034 @EastGrad My D is a double legacy at Stanford by virtue of her parents both having gone there for masters and doctorates, and we are active alumni. She is also an undergraduate legacy at a selective LAC, where I am also active (although not a big donor). She is not applying to Stanford at all, but we’re considering using the ED card at the LAC.
@dowzerw I was curious why you felt the advice was bad advice, so I wanted to hear more. I really believe in gathering wisdom through “lessons learned” of others. I even have done this with moving through the driver’s education process with my daughter (when should we go to the DMV? Who’s the best driving instructor?). I can anticipate that there are going to be things we will wish we’d done differently, so anything we can preemptively avoid/pursue is something I want to learn more about. And as @homerdog said, everyone is different. My D will not do spectacularly well with long-term uncertainty and a lot of disappointment, so we’re among those who are trying to cultivate a relationship with the safety schools, and on a purely emotional level, D needs those responses back early, I think. Since she’s my eldest, we’re essentially clueless on how much effort is really involved in each application though.
Good luck right now to all the APUSHers! My D is wearing her new “APUSH me off a cliff” t-shirt today. Hoping it’s smooth sailing for everyone. Last year for APEC D’s portable fold-out desk in the gym collapsed during the test!! She was actually giggling about that memory this morning…
One benefit of applying early to safeties is that for schools that include “demonstrated interest” in their equation, it makes the student look more interested. For an overqualified student, some schools try to “protect yield” by rejecting students they think don’t really want to go there and are only applying as a safety, which could put the student in a bad place if they don’t get accepted by their reaches.
I think the right strategy depends in large part on what your financial circumstances are. If you need your kid to apply to lots of schools and compare financial offers, then I think the right approach is to apply early to as many schools as allow it, so that you can hopefully have at least one affordable option in hand early on. That means passing on ED and restrictive EA options like SCEA. In our case, “top choice” is going to be a combination of the school’s intrinsic merits and their aid package. We have in the past and continue to encourage our kids not to fall in love too deeply before we have the full picture. We will be nearly full pay at schools that don’t offer merit, and our DS knows that if he chooses such a school, we will expect him to have more skin in the game than if he chooses somewhere with a lower out of pocket cost.
If you want to apply ED, because you have a clear first choice, and can afford not to be able to compare financial offers, then go for it. While technically you can back out if you can’t afford to go given the financial package they offer you, at that point, you don’t know if anyone else is going to offer you anything better, and if they don’t, you can’t go back and say, you know what, we’ll take it after all.
SCEA is kind of in the middle. If you want to use SCEA, then that limits your options of where else you can apply early, but is probably worth a shot, again if you have a clear first choice. It also still gives you the option to roll the dice on RD and see if you get a better offer, but at that point your kid may have their heart set on their SCEA school so may not want to put in the effort on other apps to see if they get a better financial offer.
In addition to the finances, the stress trade off here is that if you apply to only your first choice early, and you get accepted and can afford it, then you’ve saved a lot of work on applying to schools you didn’t need to, but on the other hand, if your first choice rejects or defers you, then you are scrambling to make sure that you end up with something, and things become much more stressful. But students banking on an early admit to a first choice are unlikely to want to have other apps ready to go “just in case.”
I think @soxmom nailed it in the description of ED and where it provides a bump. ED is a way – at least in part – for schools to maximize their scores for rankings, improving their yield and their enrolled test scores. (It serves other purposes, such as filling out athletic squads, but that’s not my concern here.) So the sweet spot for ED is probably for those students with scores above the 50th percentile (and preferably closer to the 75th percentile) which the school perceives might want to go elsewhere “better” if given the opportunity. I’m sure there are exceptions – the person for whom the rest of the application suggests someone that the college “has” to have. But I feel like the majority of people applying ED to a HYPSM-level school with scores below the 50th percentile are wasting their time, and I’m wondering if the benefit to those who are above the 50th percentile are minimal.
Now, we are not playing in the HYPSM world, so I’m not even sure if they do ED (as opposed SCEA). But you get the idea.
D19’s current list of top 8 features two schools with EA, one of which is the local university. That starts July 1, though we’d probably wait a little bit b/c she’ll be taking the SAT a second time in August and it would be nice to make sure we’re submitting whatever her top SAT score is for merit consideration and the honors college. The other EA is at an LAC that she’s definitely interested in – I guess the worry there is that if it’s her secret #1 choice, should that be the first application she finishes? Might it be better for her to have written a couple other essays for other schools first? And there’s another school with EA not in her top 8 that I think is an excellent fit on paper, has no application fee, and the briefest of supplemental essays. (Also: I think her scores make it likely that she is admitted there.)
The book “8 First Choices” suggests not applying EA because it also raises the possibility of early disappointment. (I think? Haven’t read the book in a while so my memory is fuzzy regarding the reason for not recommending EA.) But I think the value of having a couple acceptances in hand can’t be dismissed. EA is really good for those schools like the not-on-the-top-8 list school above who can then spend the next 3 months wooing the admittee.
If she wanted to take a run ED at one of the other 6 colleges, I would be willing to consider it, but I think she’d need to a) raise her SAT scores a little bit for some of the schools, and b) more definitively designate one of those schools as her favorite. (She has been very much a “8 First Choices” person.) I’d also need to feel more comfortable that the price as produced by the NPC is reasonably accurate. If it’s 2% off, eh, we’ll manage as the NPCs via the CSS have produced affordable numbers for us. But if it’s 20% off, that’s the difference – in either direction – between no loans at all and us taking unsubsidized loans, which we’re not willing to do.
I do feel like ED won’t save a lot of work – with notifications back from colleges generally around Dec. 15, I feel like D19 probably would have most of her application work for RD finished by then…
My DS16 applied EA to every school he applied to and had acceptances with heavy merit from every school by Christmas. He had to wait until Feb for notification for one Honors program and March for notification of acceptance into top tier section of the Honors College. We plan to use the same strategy for DS19.
@carolinamom2boys So was his school list limited to EA schools, and if so, consciously or coincidence? Or did you drop the non-EA schools based on EA success?
@homerdog - Now I’m so curious as to what school you’re talking about! It’s a shame you can’t go in July, because the NYC ballet is at SPAC, which would just be a hop, step and a jump from Williams.
@trixy34 The EA safety is Dickinson and the other school is Lafayette. The thing about visiting Williams is that they don’t track demonstrated interest and don’t care if we come. Williams has a lot going for it for our S19 who likes math and art but its RD acceptance rate is insane, like 8%, and even lower for a non-URM, first gen. So, while I would love for him to see it, it really makes more sense to get to the other two and interview at both. If by some wild chance, he got into Williams, we would visit after acceptance.
Bummer about NYC ballet in July. I’ll have to look at the dates. D21 has July 4th off so MAYBE I can convince her to go away from the July 4th-8th and miss Thursday and Friday of ballet. Not sure that will fly though.
@Trixy34 Ugh! That NYC Ballet show looks awesome!!! It’s only one day and she can’t be gone that weekend so that stinks. I think for her 16th birthday in Jan, I’m going to have to just take her on a girls trip to NYC and get to the ballet. 
@homerdog I totally get the “let’s wait and visit after acceptance” thing – especially for schools that don’t track interest and are not easy to visit. My DS is probably applying to some reach schools in CA that we’ll only visit if he gets accepted (Stanford, Berkeley, maybe Caltech). We also haven’t visited Cornell (though he’s been on campus once or twice because his brother attended) and Princeton, and likewise, we’ll visit if he gets in. His list is stacked with reaches, partly because we figure it makes sense to roll those dice several times, and partly because we haven’t visited them all yet (so haven’t have a chance to decide which would be his best fits). I believe the list at this point is:
MIT, U Waterloo (Canada), CMU, Yale, Northeastern, Pitt (all visited)
Stanford, Berkeley, Caltech, Cornell, Princeton, RPI, UVM
We’ll squeeze in RPI and UVM visits at some point (fall probably).
So, that’s 13 schools (eeek!) but very reach heavy. We may find ways to weed out some of the reaches before applying.
I think his top choice right now is MIT :-o though he knows the chances of actually getting in are slim, with Waterloo second. MIT has unrestrictive EA, which is nice. Sadly Waterloo not only doesn’t have any kind of early admission program, they don’t even normally let students know they’re in until early to mid-May! (The do know that American applicants kind of really have to know sooner than that!)
We did not approach the college application process like most of the people on CC @peachActuary73 . The only reaches were financial reaches. Clemson technically did not have EA , but he had been granted provisional acceptance as a Jr and was notified of official acceptance in December. His list was small, 5 schools, all instate because of lucrative lottery funded scholarships. He was accepted bat 5/5 schools and 2/2 Honors program s. No schools dropped from the list.All of the schools on his list required applications by Nov or Dec to be eligible for merit. He also applied to 2 Honors Colleges by Dec. He was not interested in applying to any highly selective colleges, but the school he attends had very rigorous criteria for acceptances and attends with some very successful students. Many have already been published as freshman and sophomores, studied abroad and have been awarded Fulbright scholarships. One if his best friends is a Goldwater Scholar as a 18 year old sophomore . My point being, there are successful students and opportunities at many schools. Don’t get caught up in the fallacy of one dream school.
@carolinamom2boys I think you misunderstood. EA is not an option at most of her schools, so I was impressed that the process was so simple for you. Most of our publics do have merit deadlines. I think Alabama Huntsville is the only one that does not. We don’t have a dream school (yet). I am giving mine a lot of room right now to feel comfortable even if it means turning down our lottery dollars. Mainly because I don’t think we’ve come as far as we think we are in terms of STEM women. I know how it was for me 20 years ago, and some comments made at some school visits definitely gave me pause. It’s good that your boys found good fits in-state.
@homerdog - you’re right about Williams - they couldn’t care less if you visit. At least, that was my experience almost 30 years ago. And they really don’t want to give interviews - at least not to regular folks. Yep, not really a great way to get to Dickinson, unless you want to stay in Harrisburg. But I’m sure they could set you up with an alum. near you. I’m sure they are more plentiful than you think. Heck, my first sorta kinda real boyfriend is an alum. I’m not in contact with him, but if you get desperate, I could reach out.
So @peachActuary73 - so what kinds of schools do you think she’ll be interested that are a better fit for STEM women? Yes, it’s too bad she doesn’t like GT as the in state acceptance rate, especially for women is pretty good. My son does like it there, and likes the sports, traditions etc. It’s just not the best academic fit since he won’t be going into engineering or computer science.
@homerdog - If you end up flying into NYC, you could also hit up Vassar!
@peachActuary73, if it makes you feel better my oldest did apply GT for non Stem and was waitlisted, and had no desire to go to UGA or any other school in state. She is in DC right now . Lucky that between merit and savings we could do. Now S19 will apply to GA tech, but i doubt he will get in, or even wants to go, and likely will end up in upstate NY or UAH. so neither of my kids will be staying in state. At our HS though its all everyone wants… UGA or GA Tech, and financially why not? But its not for everyone. i know an engineering major who did not get into either last year, and ended up out of state with merit for in state tuition and is very happy where they are.
Heading out to watch a track meet in the rain and 49 degree temp. Ahh, spring time in New England. It’s been sunny and 65-70 all week, today gross. Don’t think we are going to see an PR’s set today when all of the kids have to basically wear sweatpants/tights/jackets, ha.
It will probably be 90 degrees at the next meet in a few days, lol.
@RightCoaster good luck to your S! Conference meet here today too. 50 and raining. S19 continues to get faster. Has set a new PR in the mile with each meet!
I asked my D about APUSH last night. She said it’s fine. She slept at least 9-10 hours last night.