At our school, senior year classes are still really tough, no let up here with homework and papers. And ecs, for a lot of seniors now include leadership positions so that’s more time spent there. Add sports, essay writing, college rep visits, interviews, it’s a time crunch like never before. Hoping that it all calms down a bit by mid November.
@soxmom I’ve written about this before. The Naviance data for our school from Wash U show a very clear sweet spot above which very few students are admitted.
I’m just going to say this because I feel I’m being misunderstood. High stat kids many times go to top universities and LACs. Digging on them for doing so is weird. I don’t get that. Some posters here seem to think a NMSF with high rigor and all 5s on APs should be applying to local schools EA and just call it a day. Why would a strong student who has worked their butt off do that? It’s not elitist for those families to look for schools where kids have similar stats. It’s exactly the same thing families do with any type of child. Look for best fit. Academically and otherwise. High stat kids are no different. I don’t know one high stat student, at our school or otherwise, who would be like “eh I’ll just apply to Illinois State and be happy about that acceptance and be done.”
Our D21 is a strong student but not like her brother. Maybe more like what I’ve heard called an “average excellent” student here on CC. We will help her look for schools that match her. And they won’t be top 20 schools.
Our looking at certain schools for our S19 isn’t any different than the process we will go through with her. We don’t care about the name of the school. We aren’t pushing S19 to apply to certain schools. Believe me, if we were, he wouldn’t be applying to some of the midwestern LACs on his list. I’ve gotten lots of bizarre looks when I’ve mentioned Carleton or Grinnell to parents who have asked about the list. One mom even said “oh then have you looked at Depauw?” Obviously, folks around here don’t know LACs. And we don’t care.
@gallentjill In Wash U’s case, that’s a demonstrated interest thing but Wash U is not a safety school for anyone like Denison could be.
@momtogkc I used to go hear Rhett Miller play with his band in HS (I went to the sister school of his all male school). I had honestly not followed his musical career until you mentioned him and I googled. What a blast from the past. Glad to see he’s still at it!
I think the point is that there are high-stats students out there like this, and their choices shouldn’t be dismissed as somehow wrong (as often happens not just on CC, but also in wider discussions of “undermatching”) any more than the choices made by other high-stats students to target selective colleges. Some of them may do so out of a lack of choice (e.g., a perceived or real need to help care for an ailing parent), while some of them may do so out of a sense of practicality (e.g., the high-stats students at my local open-access college who see a chance to get a solid engineering degree for cheap), while others may do so simply because they like, f’rex, Illinois State. (And that’s not to mention the parallel cases of the occasional high-stats students who go into the trades via apprenticeships.)
They may (or may not—I honestly don’t know the numbers) be the minority among high-stats students, but they’re out there. (And I know this for a fact, because I teach some of them, and have mentored undergraduate research involving a few.) And that’s an outgrowth of one of the strengths of the US higher-education system—we have a wide range of tertiary educational institutions and programs to service a multiplicity of desires.
@parent2one Wow. We’re at opposite ends of the spectrum! I wish my kids were doing more. It’s too late now and I’m not sure I’d do much differently re: their small school and how the past two years had health issues for both kids, however, it will likely hurt them in the application pool. I hope Oct. 11 comes quickly! Kudos to your son for such breadth in his interests.
We are feeling the stress here. for the first time in his life, my S19 is very stressed. He took 4 AP classes last year, but this years are much harder and he is feeling it. His grades have slipped a bit. He is doing internship, and did not realize that 2 hours a day and writing reports, keeping logs, etc , in essence a job, would be so hard. He still has 2 ECs and now needs service hours. Add in the college stuff, and he is working pretty hard. I am sorta glad about that, as he is learning how to juggle things, and not just play games on the computer when homework is done. He is in his safety, and we are almost done with all the applications to the other 3 schools. Luckily his list is not large.
@dfbdfb yes. I understand your point. In fact, weirdly enough, our S is seen as shooting too low for most parents who know him around here. Those same parents, though, seem to have blinders on as to how hard it is to get into the elite schools that are talking about. Some think (yes, they say this to my face!) that going to some of the schools on S19’s list would be a waste. Does he have some elite schools on his list? Sure. But his list is mostly schools people around here don’t consider even though most of them do have low acceptance rates.
Davidson? Where is that? Virginia? South Carolina? Somewhere south right?
Grinnell? Oh, Cornell is the best!
Amherst? Why would he go to UMass?
And don’t get me started about the blank stares if I mention Bowdoin.
We know a few kids who went the Alabama route. Hard to pass up full ride on NMF. We also know a few who had to turn down Duke and NU because they couldn’t afford them and are having good experiences in ASU’s honors program. Of course high stat kids make decisions based on a lot of different criteria and no choice is a wrong choice.
I guess my point is that I don’t judge people about their choices and I’m hoping to also not be judged.
DS19 has joined another EC this year, Students in Action. Their platform this year is to bring awareness and decrease the stigma of mental illness in children and adolscents. Couldn’t be prouder . He has plenty of ECs and leadership already, but he felt strongly about the cause and dove right in. Community service has always been imorotant to him and our family. It’s never been about the resume. Reining him in has not always been easy , but he continues to thrive.
I’m sorry if I gave the impression that I think high stat kids should do that. I think kids should aim for the schools they feel drawn to whether that be elite or not. I think this started because you were worried that your S would be very unhappy if he had to go to his safety school and some of us were trying to give some perspective about why that might not be a terrible outcome. I was certainly not suggesting that its wrong for a high stat student to aim high.
@gallentjill no worries. It’s not your comments that set me off. 
Maybe this discussion about high stats kids/school selection should become its own thread.
@DCNatFan I’m sorry for detailing. Let us carry on talking about the kids and their searches.
@homerdog @dfbdfb I see the point about wanting to surround yourself with academic peers, but anticipating that classes at your safety would be like a non honors high school class in terms of lack of challenge is not a valid comparison. A college class at a LAC, even one outside of the top 30,will likely teach to the highest denominator not the lowest. There will be a much bigger range of students in those classes than in the typical non honors high school class.
My D has a bunch of friends outside of the most rigorous track. Yes, she probably thinks she should end up at a more selective school, but she’ll miss those kids. I think my D has an interest in some very selective schools, not necessarily because of the potential peers, but because some of the higher ranked schools (though not all), just ‘show’ better, on tours, seem more special. Some (but not all) of the less selective schools she has seen come off as a little generic. It’s like car shopping- the Chevy seems fine until you sit in the Mercedes. Or you test drive the Porsche and the Kia is never going to do it. And for cars, there’s a price differential. With colleges a lot of times the Ford costs the same as the Mercedes.
I went to my safety school and It was great. I could party all of the time and hardly needed to do any work to pass my classes. I felt exceptionally smart, even though I’m not. Good for my ego, lol. It was also dirt cheap so I had tons of extra $$ to utilize, where so many of my college friends were straight up broke. Ahh, good times :). I had a great tan too. I don’t know how my parents let me go there, ha! Maybe they were just happy it hardly cost them anything to send me there at the time. They did build a nice addition to our house while I was in college, hmmm.
Yeah @wisteria100 but for us the Mercedes schools will cost Mercedes prices and S19’s safeties will be less. So, just like car shopping, we will have to decide if they are worth the premium.
For us too. The affordable schools will be the safety schools except for a couple which are really just wishful thinking. On the plus side, D is really happy with her choices. She was really thrilled with one school because of the campus, the offerings and the professors she met. My problem is that it has a reputation as a party school for a certain kind of kid and she is definately NOT that kind. I will make sure she spends at least a night there before she makes any final decisions. Am I the only one who keeps second guessing everything all the time?
@homerdog There are so many options for schools, your family should look for the best fit. There are no doubt exceptional students all over university campuses. But different schools do have different vibes. I have trouble, given everything you’ve written about your son, thinking that he would go to any school and not thrive. If a school is a better intellectual fit for your son, then so be it.
I was NMF back in the day. Math was my strength, but I was a voracious reader. Still, I learned quickly that certain levels of literary analysis and intellectual bla bla bla was just plain uninteresting and at times painful to me. I’ve heard some of these elite schools in their info sessions wax poetic about their amazing Core Curriculums. Shoot me now. But to each their own. I’m not the one going to school. BUT, one of my daughter’s complaints about her high school was the low popularity of STEM and geeky EC’s like quiz bowl. She has great friends, but not with a lot of common academic interests, unless you call fan fiction academic. While she doesn’t need a full tech school like RPI, she’s looking for a bigger pool of potential peeps. So not even 3/2 LAC’s or Bucknell (which got dropped for multiple reasons). Yes, meet all kinds of people, but increase certain odds.
Ha! This is how Bard got dropped from D’s list. Too “head in the clouds.”