@bigmacbeth Ha Ha. My thoughts are 1)if she doesn’t get it, I certainly didn’t need to waste the time (and money) visiting and 2)they are completely unaffordable if they don’t give me some money… so why bother until I know the results.
I’m really very lucky, she visited a school last week that the department tour told her the admit rate for her major is 82%. She LOVED this school. Its on the edge of financially affordable. I can make it work, but would appreciate some $ to make it less of a stretch.
We are visiting a financial safety next month. She loves it on paper and the online tour. We will see how it pans out in real life.
Its really exciting to see it all come together like this.
For my super high stats older kids, both majored in engineering, the state flagship was the safety, nearly everything else was a crapshoot. We were on edge until the last minute waiting for those acceptances to come.
D20 has average grades and test scores. She picked schools with mostly 50-70+% admission rates, and is sitting very close to, or over the 75th percentile for most of them. I’m not feeling worried about acceptances. Hopefully, that won’t come back to bite me later. Fingers crossed.
@Mugglemom We are the same way, not worried about acceptances. We would certainly like to pay as little as possible for a school she loves. We shall see how things go. Worst case will be to dip into her sisters’s, D17’s, 529 
. Most of her schools have something close to automatic merit, so we basically know how much it will cost. There are a couple that are less transparent, so we shall see how those work out.
@bigmacbeth I love those publicized automatic merit charts. Only one of D’s schools has them, and for the schools with sections on CC, I have scoured this year’s results and the merit is all over the place. People with top scores not getting anything and those with lower stats then D getting nice awards. I really don’t feel like I have any indication if she has a shot at merit at most of these. Even the NPR’s say ‘you are eligible for a merit award up to XX’. What on earth does that mean? I can get $0-$XX. That’s why it was so important for me to find financial safeties that she likes. My head is in such a different place than it was with the first two. I don’t know if I’m smarter or just a cynic.
ACT is done. How did it go?
Did anyone here benefit from the May SAT score correction?
It went slllooow. D said the proctor told them he’d never proctored before and they ended up getting out at 1pm- no writing. She said she prefers the pace of the SAT.
Proctor ate chips during one section. Can you believe it? Of all foods to eat as a proctor, he chose the most noisy food. I am not impressed with the training of proctors given by ACT. On the bright side, son thought it went very well.
Re: today’s ACT:
S thinks he did really well on the Math but is not as confident about the rest. Math was his lowest subscore going in, so he may have improved his superscore if nothing else.
Even with only five colleges on the table, it’s a complicated game: three schools don’t superscore but one wants to see all scores regardless, one superscores, and the other superscores Math and English sections only.
For the record, S has been using the Barron’s ACT 36 prep book and he feels it has helped tremendously. He has a 33, shooting for 34+.
Two funny things happened at my daughters. The test was at a K-12 Christian school in town and the proctor not only taught at the school but in the classroom the test took place in. Second they give the 5th test that doesn’t count. my daughter retook the test because of a low science score and the fifth test was in science
Thanks all for your input regarding “competitive” high schools. In the end, it doesn’t really matter since we aren’t changing high schools. It was more out of curiosity since I keep reading post after post on CC where the author claims their high school is competitive.
Our state does not have a governor’s school. And there aren’t competitive admission public schools (admission is via lottery, not test/audition based.)
Interestingly, in our area, families tend to use most private high schools as a way to bypass the rigor and competitiveness of our public schools. Is this common in other areas of the country too?
Our public HS has 25-28 AP offerings, ranks top 10 in state by usnews, about 80% go to 4 year college after graduation, 30% on free/reduced lunch. The average ACT & SAT scores are higher than the state and national averages, but still look awfully low to me. Based on word of mouth I’m going to guess at least 10 kids per year end up at ivies but none at Stanford/MIT. I believe like several prior posters, there’s a very wide range of abilities at our school.
I tutor math and chemistry and have students at the church based high schools in our area. They are not as rigorous as the best of the public schools.
What about the non-parochial private schools?
The Catholic HS in town has a less rigorous curriculum than public HS, but the 2 non-parochial (EXPENSIVE) private high schools also have less rigor. I’ve talked to several parents who flat-out stated they were paying for their child to be in a less stressful environment with less rigor (so it won’t be held against them that they didn’t take a million AP’s) and increase their college chances.
There are also elite private schools in our state with competitive admission and are known for being extremely rigorous (moreso than the public HS I presume.)
In the Boston area, there are a fair number of very competitive private high schools. Acceptance rates are comparable to many elite universities. They are generally more rigorous than most area public high schools, although there are some very good public schools in the Boston area, as well. Having looked at a few of these private HS’s, they do NOT market themselves as gateways to the Ivies or other elite universities. In fact, they discourage families looking for that. They believe they provide an exceptional HS education that will prepare their students for whatever path they choose past high school.
But, my own view is that the competitiveness of the HS only matters to colleges, to put context around the student’s stats. So, a 3.9 WGPA may put that student in the top 10 at a less competitive HS that doesn’t offer APs. But a 3.9 WGPA may not even put a student in the top 25% in a more competitive HS that offers 25 APs. Which one looks better? Some may say the one from the less competitive HS. It’s a matter of how the student does relative to what is available to them. And of course, that’s just one piece to a much larger puzzle.
@curiousme2 we dont have many non religious private high schools in the area and I don’t know any kids who attend them.
@stencils I never knew how many APs our school offered so I checked and funny enough it’s also 23.
I never knew either: 33. 7 of those are foreign language, though.
One can Google private school SAT scores by state to get a sense of which schools perform well and where that occurs.
I got down to 37 in California and only 2 were in OC. Which confirms my suspicion that the public.schools here tend to be the most academically competitive.
In LA alone there are lots of very competitive private, non-religious high schools:
- Harvard Westlake
- Poly Technic (Pasadena)
- Archer School
- Flintridge prep
- Marlborough
- Viewpoint
- Sierra Canyon
- Brentwood
- etc.
The bottom line is that there plenty of very competitive public, private, and religious high schools in SoCal.
I don’t live in LA County and it is not.worth my time to travel more than 5 or 6 miles to tutor.