Sweet!! Great news to get during your vacay. And you’re refining his tastes early. Good on you, dad.
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D24 made it easy on me when she got the Yale rejection. As she read the portal, her first words were, “F*ck you, Yale,” and on we went with our day. LOL I’m lucky that she had a healthy and realistic attitude on that one.
As lots of the seniors here are stopping by my office to share their good and bad news, sometimes with tears, I keep telling them the great phrase I learned here … Love the college that loves you back. I think it’s sinking in, too!
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Awesome news!! @BentWookie, we started this CC journey around the same time, so I’ve been keeping a close eye on your posts. I’m so happy for your daughter’s news.
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D24 is in at Mount Holyoke! She actually forgot to tell me yesterday, nice. I haven’t seen the aid package yet - she’s supposed to email it to me this morning.
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Love Mount Holyoke! Congratulations!!! That one was at the top of D24’s list if her ED didn’t work out. She has several friends currently there who absolutely love it and are having a fabulous experience. The 5 college consortium is really special. Excited for your D24!
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congrats to everyone on the great acceptances yesterday!
DS rejected at Wesleyan (ETA to fix–he did get rejected at Middlebury, but that’s old news!). He’s totally fine; he’s happy with his acceptances so far and being very chill and realistic about the odds for the ones that are still out there. He told me last night that Emory is the one still out there that’s most likely to tempt him away from a music school. And I certainly wouldn’t mind having him 40 minutes away instead of 1000 miles! I had a whole thing that I just deleted navel gazing about TO admissions and how hard it is to sort out (and particularly for a homeschool kid)…but basically Emory is one of the ones where he’s in the mid 50% but below the median (and above the 75th% for EWR but below the 25th% for math, which happened to him a lot because most kids applying to these schools are lopsided in the opposite way if they’re lopsided). In hindsight perhaps he should have spent a bit more time getting that math score up, but at the time I was like, “whatever–you can always go test optional!” But then he didn’t pretty much anywhere. So we’ll see! I got kind of navel gazey again, it seems.
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Our assured choice was two years at community college and transfer to a UC so we’d only be paying for two years. And that’s a great choice too because our nearby community colleges are excellent.
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lol so far my daughters only rejection is UMD. Every time we see them on tv playing basketball we boo them, loudly 
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It beat it! Wes’s NPC was nearly identical to the NPCs of the mega-endowed Dartmouth, Pomona, and Swarthmore. So I was a little concerned that Wes’s NPC was too good to be true. It turns out it was too conservative. D24 may or may not get into other schools and may ultimately choose another school, but it’s so reassuring to have at least one affordable, can’t-miss school in the bank.
We haven’t received WashU’s financial aid info yet as it’s tied to the FAFSA mayhem. The reason to choose WashU would be if D24 decides that she wants to focus almost exclusively on art and get a BFA. That’s her call, but I think she’s still intellectually curious and probably wants more freedom to explore other subjects than a BFA program permits.
Sadly, Scripps’ financial aid was terrible. It was somehow 33% more than the NPC I ran in December. We could appeal it, but it’s unlikely that we will. Wes would still be significantly cheaper.
Macalester, even with the max scholarship, is also significantly more expensive than Wes.
Anyhow, there was some previous debate about the number of schools one should apply to. In addition to the unpredictability of admissions, there’s also a bit of unpredictability in FA and merit aid for those who need it. D24 applied to a fairly well-researched and curated list of 13 schools. Only one of those schools was a last-minute addition (Penn). But I think, in our circumstances, 10-15 is a good number. I don’t think D24 had the bandwidth to do more than 15 though. Even 13 was trying and made for a stressful December and January.
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Yes, this is definitely an issue for us as well. There was a huge range (like around $10,000/yr) in my oldest kid’s FA packages even though most of them were schools that meet need. And this year St. Olaf (which I remember as one of DS19’s weakest FA offers) is offering surprisingly good aid to DS24…like it’s not much more expensive than Grinnell, even though Grinnell is supposed to be no loans. It’s another aspect that in practice is unpredictable, even with NPCs eliminating some level of guesswork. (and if we’d already seen the St. Olaf FA when deadlines came, he might well have applied to fewer RD schools)
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Yes, St. Olaf gave us amazing aid this year as well. And D24 liked it a lot, but she’s waiting until everything comes in to see where the cards lay.
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Yes, this was a piece of it for us as well - D23’s long list of schools resulted in a range of FA packages to consider (I’m talking about need-based because even when she got merit, she always got need-based aid in addition).
We did all the NPCs, but they weren’t always accurate. Some were within a few hundred dollars while others were pretty far off (looking at you, Bates: 67% higher than NPC). Some acceptances were unaffordable although their NPCs had suggested they would be fine, and others came in with more generous aid than we’d expected.
There was a difference for D23 of $18,000 a year between the best financial offer and the worst (in her case, the reachiest no-loan schools generally did come through with the best aid while match/lower reach generally had higher net prices). Her safeties cost approximately twice as much as her best financial aid package (from a reach-for-all school)…so adding more than just one or two high reaches to her list ended up being beneficial financially.
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It’s definitely a front-runner here…mostly because he could do a performance major there, which he’s gotten more and more set on as the year’s gone on (which is also something that likely would have cut his list down significantly if he’d been in the same place a few months ago). And I like that if he doesn’t stick with a performance major he’s still at a great LAC that would be an excellent fit for his other interests. and it seems like a place where it’s easy for non-majors to stay involved in music.
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This is something I have a hard time getting people to understand a lot of times: “no, really–the reachiest schools ARE our financial safeties!” Followed by blank looks and an inquiry about whether we’ve considered community colleges. I have a kid at Vanderbilt–I’d probably spend more on groceries feeding him than we’re paying Vanderbilt if he lived at home and went to community college. Vanderbilt is just that generous (and we’re not $0 EFC people–we’re in partial pell territory). I was kind of bummed to see that Grinnell’s idea of no-loans isn’t the same as Vanderbilt’s (though not surprised).
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4 down this week
S24 was accepted to Case Western with a merit scholarship - $30k/year for 4 years. That was a pleasant surprise since we didn’t even file FAFSA. He was also accepted to UCSB. Then rejections came from JHU and Washu… 2 lotteries down, I guess.
We still have many to go. I don’t regret asking him to cast as wide a net as possible. For all the schools S24, he falls upper 75 percentile in GPA/SAT so I wouldn’t call it shotgun strategy. I wouldn’t do the same with D26 since D26 lacks S24’s ability to brush off rejections quickly.
For S24, the strategy is working. We will see if there will be a couple more good options he can choose from after next week.
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So true. Before starting this process, my assumption would have been that the least expensive schools are the target/safety schools, which I thought lavished high stats kids with prodigious scholarship funds. In reality, for us the most affordable schools are the instate flagship and super elite schools that otherwise cost $90k/year.
So, on paper, our college list looks like we’re prestige hunting. But, in reality, that list is primarily based on financial aid.
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We experienced the same with reaches/financial aid. Both Smith (D22) and Hamilton (S24) came back with financial aid packages that were much more generous than the in-state tuition and merit package offered by our flagship university. Hamilton’s was also more than the NPC predicted it would be.
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Well this is an exciting update. I mentioned a few weeks back that S24 formally committed to Auburn 
Today he had room selection and already has his dorm assignment and his roommate. Crazy as he has lots of friends still waiting to hear from schools!!! But it def feels real and he is excited to start making connections and getting excited about what is to come. This is a big transition as he has been with the same kids since Kindergarten but he is ready for a change and ready to meet new people, live someplace completely different and have new experiences. Next week he registers for orientation which will hopefully be the end of June.
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Yes this is the same for our family.
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Make sure they keep up with the release of student football tickets. My son was in the band as freshman/sophomore so he was at all the games but they are prized if you can log in and get them (you do have to pay for student tickets). They may be limiting them by class but, pretty sure you get to order them by number of hours (at Auburn, not what you came with). Even when we have bad teams, this is a big deal at Auburn - tailgating is just as big for those that don’t get the tix. They may come out in the summer time for the fall season, check around though.
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