At the all-day event at Austin College that D24 and I went to last month, they had a senior speak to everybody about his experience there. He talked a lot about a hospital administration internship he did in Cincinnati and talked about great Ohio turned out to be even though he initially scoffed at the idea of doing an internship in OH.
There’s still time to decide. Sometimes you have to sit on it and chew on it a little before something comes out as a front runner.
My predications were all exactly the outcome. Now choosing between sports recruitment/lifestyle college offers and career path speed. That is a difficult choice but I know S24 is fortunate to have that choice this late in the process. I just hope he decides in the next week or so. I’m ready to put down the deposit…
@sbinaz , I agree! There are few kids that can strive anywhere even though there are limited opportunities.
I empathize with your concerns!! It is hard to know what will be best for our children, and even harder to give them the freedom to choose!!!
All four schools will offer great opportunities. Does your child have a preference? Have you visited each of these schools, and allowed your daughter to think about what it would be like living in these different settings?
I think that the settings will be important, as they are somewhat distinct: UMass-A is in a very small, but charming, college town. It is two hours from Boston, and a bit less than an hour from Springfield. Temple is in an improving but still challenged region of Philadelphia, an amazing city. Pitt I know the least about, but it feels like it is right in the city (I visited once, more than a decade ago). But note that Pitt and Philly are both a few hours from the center of state government (though Philly is also not far from DC!!). And of course you know Columbus well.
If your child is majoring in economics, she will be in classes with driven, academically motivated students at all four schools, especially once she gets past the intro micro/macro courses.
I would put a lot of credence in where your child felt excited to go.
@kaslew , Thank you for your response! We have not yet visited the colleges, we’re going next week. Now she has another acceptance from American University, which we visited last year.
The other thing is my D24 is very clear on the path. Looks like she is interested in Law but do not have a complete picture of it at this point. All her high school activities are mostly targeted towards that. She likes Mock Trial and volunteered at Juvenile youth court. She is using Economics to make sure she gets some job if the plan changes. She really liked the AU’s CLEG program. She doesn’t open up clearly so it’s hard for us to guess what she’s thinking. I feel she is looking for a combination of Economics, government and political science. I feel AU has better location and in the heart of DC but it’s too expensive and also I heard their clubs are not really active and there is no much community feeling within the college. There is also not much of a south asian community.
I am not sure if UMass looks too remote for any opportunities. Of course, we’re visiting next week. I think it’s hard to commute to Boston for any opportunities. She is mostly interested in opportunities like working for a congressman/interning with a attorney or something like that. She is not a great leader so she should some opportunities that she can do silently. 
I don’t even know if I am thinking too much.
I’ve used those bags for a few years, too. But the cardboard-box idea is not a bad one. If you have access to a trolley / hand cart (or bring one), then you can even get up a flight of stairs by loading the boxes and dragging them up the stairs. And cardboard boxes can be flattened and stored under the bed for reuse, too.
Note that a lot of students do these sorts of things (interning for a congres-person, etc.) over the summers, so having the opportunity “in town” is not as crucial as the support system at the college for helping students identify good opportunities (and funding).
Many schools also participate in something called the Washington Center, which provides students with all sorts of opportunities in DC (including semester long programs that work like study abroad, but in DC instead, centered around a high quality internship). Might be worth asking about or looking into, if your daughter decides not to go to American?
This is accurate. She really couldn’t do any interning/volunteering that required regularly being in the Boston area while she is taking in person classes in Amherst.
Also wanted to mention about Honors at UMass — we’ve been told by lots of people that it is hard to get into Honors as an incoming freshman but pretty easy to get in once you are there. Students need to have completed at least 12 credit hours at UMass Amherst and have a 3.4 GPA.
Here is the info: https://www.umass.edu/honors/apply/current-students
@MAmomto4 , keeping this fact in mind, will UMass benefit in any way compared to other choices she has? The biggest advantage for us as parents is we can be close to both the kids but I am ok to be closer to the younger one as the older one is pretty self motivated and very responsible.
It is funny you mention that, because I was just noting to him the time is coming where he actually will need to make decisions about all that. I think his open-mindedness has been a virtue until now, but he can only attend one!
I also am really impressed by how many applications your son submitted! The supplements for Wake Forest alone were so daunting my son ultimately didn’t even apply! Wake is very much a fit school and I am so glad they saw something special in your son.
I won’t lie, it got stressful at times, including for me, with all the other things he was balancing too. But at least I appreciated the colleges like Wake that really made him reflect.
I’m actually in a similar space. It seems very possible they actually had the right read on him and rationally concluded others with similar (or better) qualifications were also better bets to really get the most out of Williams. In fact . . . .
All this resonates with me too, and perhaps part of their thinking is when a combination of a personal statement, activity list, and academic paper is enough to make a kid to stand out to them, that alone tells them a lot about fit in their particular cases.
So my personal feeling is pretty much everywhere you look, self-motivation and self-advocacy are among the keys to making the most of any available opportunities. I am personally skeptical, for example, this would be less true anywhere on the East Coast than it is in Columbus.
The good news is I think the whole ritual of going away to a residential college has a lot of received wisdom in that it helps many of us–certainly me included–find ourselves and become better at that sort of thing. Not necessarily in the first week, but over time.
Of course I get the concern about whether a big public university is the best possible environment for that to happen, and I think this is ultimately a question of knowing your kid and making sure you are confident they will be positioned to evolve well in college. And I can’t answer that for you, including how to trade off versus cost, but I do agree it is worth thinking about seriously.
C24 got into Oberlin! This has secretly been my top choice school for them, so although I am trying to play it cool, I’m dancing on the inside. It just seems like a perfect fit for my quirky, curious, creative kid.
(and to keep things real, I should note that they were also rejected from BU today).
congratulations! My son, too. And my husband graduated from Oberlin…definitely a great place for a particular kind of (quirky!) kid!
Congratulations! That’s awesome. What are the 3 Ivies he’s waiting on? It’ll be an icing on the cake. Good luck! Less than a week away!
I like your insight here. The thing that makes me feel kinship to OP and their post is that my own child has that specificity of needs. While we parents tried to urge her to consider smaller schools, she quite clearly felt suffocated by an environment in which there weren’t “endless” people to meet (at least in 4 years). OP has the opposite personality type to deal with—and when my daughter’s friends go to Hampshire or Hollins, I have to suspend my disbelief and understand this introversion. I would say my daughter’s type is “I am an introvert, but I want to make some core friends and then see new people all the time.” 
also.admitted.at Oberkin today, and BU. Let the final week of.all this begin…
Congrats to everyone on all of the acceptances!
The second of your three reasons is just spin for yield protection. The schools are guessing the student will have other strong options they they prefer over their school. That’s the literal definition of yield protection.
My whole “model” is actually based on yield management. My understanding is that most (all?) colleges use yield management models to make sure they don’t over- or under-enroll. They feed preliminary acceptance decisions into their model and look at the size and composition of the resulting expected class. Then they may go back and fine tune their acceptance decisions. The second type of student I describe would have a low probability of yielding in the yield management model, and that may impact the college’s decision about the student. Some colleges would no doubt still choose to admit the student because of what the student brings to the class; others may have a large enough pool of desirable candidates that they prefer to avoid such a student.
This is definitely strategic behavior. But it is different, in my mind, from more egregious yield manipulation tactics, such as talking students into converting their applications to early decision, or waitlisting students and then offering spots conditional on an acceptance.
Yale (after being deferred SCEA), Penn, and Brown. We know from SCOIR his numbers from our high school make him competitive (I guess the deferral indicates that too), and we also know they still reject a significant majority of people with those numbers, so . . . we shall see, but I am very glad all the pressure is really off at this point.