Parents of the HS Class of 2025 (Part 1)

UC apps are done. Praise the gods. For some reason, D25 really struggled with the questions. Not her first or second choice schools, but she is applying for an affordable in-state option (and to satisfy her alum parents). Also, I’m really curious to see if she gets in.

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I’ve never heard of something like this. How can it be required? What’s the context for this requirement? Just curious.

S25 applied ED as a finalist for the Posse scholarship, which covers full tuition for 4 years for the recipients. Personally, this was literally the only circumstance under which I would have okayed an ED application – if there is a guarantee of a full tuition scholarship upon admission.

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Rostov, you described our situation as well. My daughter says all the right things about understanding that getting into her ED school is a very long shot but when I ask her to rank her other choices, she looks at me with bemusement, as if I am foolish for doubting that she will be admitted. This is a kid who has experienced a lot of success academically, so I fear she is not going to be prepared to handle this (likely) rejection because she’s so overconfident about her chances.

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I experienced that same glitch, too!

Unless there is a very clear top contender, I tend to lean towards lets see where the chips fall over ED2. If ED1 works out, you get to be done, but for ED2 you have to put in all the work regardless. ED2 exists strictly to the benefit of the school with nothing in return for the student. It annoys me in principle.

Having said that, based on our school history, we were fully aware that forgoing ED2 almost certainly meant forgoing certain schools.

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We’ve been in UC application hell all break. PIQs still a little rough. Visited UCSB on our way back home from family and damn, it’s nice. Then I looked up the GPA histogram and noted that S25 is in the bottom third (depending on how they measure the GPA) and…oof.

He was supposed to submit RPI today too and he’s dragging his heels. We never visited it. The idea of going to some random engineering school in upstate NY isn’t particularly appealing to him. They don’t have a foreign language program (although you can take courses at a nearby college if you’re really serious about it). Should I force this one? No, right? His dad is disappointed because it’s one of the kiddo’s match schools that his father and other academics seem to respect.

I just heard them talking; grandfather was wondering why our son wasn’t applying to Berkeley and Stanford. sigh

Onward!

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It’s an all-DE high school (aside from once-weekly “advisory” meetings), and the required application is to the college they partner with.

ETA: If a student refused they’d presumably go with it, but since it’s a less than 10 minute application with no application fee for students in the program, what’s the worry?

D24 did ED. She had a clear favorite. We knew we could afford it and were okay with paying for it. We knew that she would likely choose it in the end despite more affordable options. We also knew it gave her an advantage with nearly 4 times the acceptance rate. I also think when they are looking at 4000 applications vs 40,000 there is more chance of not getting overlooked. We are a year out and have no regrets. As it happens, she ended up with a long lasting concussion due to a car accident January of her Senior year and her being in to her college of choice when all that happened was a huge blessing. I realize that is a very unique circumstance so not a reason to do ED but it made us that much more thankful that she had done ED.

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D19 did ED. She had a very clear first choice, we were going to be full pay anywhere, and it was a school that also advantages (unhooked) ED applicants. If it wasn’t a clear first choice or if finances were going to be a meaningful consideration, I wouldn’t do it.

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My daughter did ED to her top choice. It’s a clear favorite and the only school that ticks all of her boxes. She visited and toured, then went back for a tour of her planned program and to sit in on a class, after which she was ready to move into a dorm.

She’s a great candidate, around the 75th percentile in gpa and sats, but really wants the increased odds of ED.

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D25 is waiting for 4 more acceptances (the Jesuits). No TE decisions for her yet. She did get the first draft of a college specific scholarship essay done with plans to revise and submit by next week. Her fave school right now is not a Tuition Exchange school. Current COA of non TE with her auto merit is around 23k/yr. Could go down to around 18k if she gets the extra essay scholarship money.

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The break wasn’t as relaxing for D25 as I’d hoped, and she’s still churning through homework and apps whenever she’s not dancing. Nutcracker–all 8 shows–are this week, so there’s no rest for the weary here.

Two schools fell off the list. I was a little sad about one, but recalled an AO saying “Listen to your kid” and (blessedly, for once) kept my mouth shut. An honors college app also got shelved, but the app went in. She’s wordsmithing her last PIQ for the UCs as I type, hoping to get the app turned in tonight. After that application goes in, she will be doing more videos for dance pre-screens/arts supplements, and then has a few more apps due the beginning of January. I never thought I’d say this, but I’m looking forward to the plethora of flights for dance auditions; I’m hoping that we can create some fun memories together during these jaunts.

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Well, that was close. S25 got his UCs submitted at 11:58 PM (I think he has until noon tomorrow but we were working on the assumption that it was midnight tonight.) RPI submitted after all, with essays cobbled together in haphazard fashion. He missed the deadline for the Pitt Honors College application b/c it was midnight EST. :frowning: Still, 2/3 ain’t bad. I’m taking the win and hitting the hay.

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My kiddo did apply ED. He wavered between schools until nearly the last minute. Ultimately, he felt that the school he picked offers the best balance of what he wants out of his college experience. He had a great visit, enjoyed the community and atmosphere as well as the class he was able to visit, and he could see himself being happy there for four years. While the other two schools he was weighing for an ED app had the appeal of slightly “higher prestige/fancier” and being closer to home than where he did apply, all of the other factors outweighed that in the end. There is a big part of me that wishes he had applied EA instead, but really that is out of my own somewhat selfish curiosity to see how he would have fared in the regular round with some of his reaches. I’m not the one that has to write all those supplementals though, so when he decided he felt great about his choice to ED, I had to let the “what ifs” go for the time being. He’s not in yet though!

I am also 99.9% certain we will be full-pay, so while he could have applied EA and regular to a bunch more schools that offer decent merit (his ED choice is known for good merit, so we’ll see), finding schools that would also meet his other criteria (ability to continue competing at the NCAA-level in one of his two sports and be in a community with a strong music culture for non-majors) was pretty tough. He was for sure tempted to do an ED application as a way to improve his chances for admission to those higher prestige schools, but ultimately his choice to ED was 100% driven by more important criteria around what he wanted in a school.

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I’m struggling this morning. I thought my S25 had gotten so much work done over the five day break. There was a lot to do, but we chunked it out it to little bites each day and he kept telling me he was doing it. Well, he wasn’t. Last night he wrote me a note asking for help, telling me he hadn’t been truthful with me, and that he was so far behind he didn’t know what to do. While I’m glad he’s asking for help, I ALSO don’t know what to do. We’ve been down this road before and I was doing all the things. Sigh. When we talked this morning before I had to leave for work he told me he had a plan, that he was going to go talk with his SpEd case carrier today and ask him for help too. The case carrier has been largely useless for four years, but maybe he’ll be more on the ball now, who knows. Tonight I’ll sit down with S25 and try to help him get a handle on what there is and make a plan to help him tackle it. Sigh again. I’m just so tired of this cycle with him. I was so so happy for him when I thought he’d gotten it all done and was caught up - to finally have some breathing room and to not have that anxiety seemed like it would be so great for him. So to instead find out that NONE of the assignments actually got finished, and he’s still got all that plus what’s coming… and December will be worse than November because we had a lot of days off of school in November and… well… I’m just exhausted and sad thinking about it.

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I don’t know the specific school but I would be careful with this statement. A significant number of early acceptances are driven by institutional priorities. This includes a very large number of recruited athletes (sometimes 25%+ of ED) “guaranteed” to get in. The chances for an unhooked applicant in ED tend to be much closer to RD rates than people realize.

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This is a good point. We don’t actually know what goes into the decision-making for the ED acceptances. They are likely to vary by institution. And this is not information you can get from the CDS. Where I think there could be a benefit is that the applicant is being compared to fewer others than in the RD pool. It might feel like you have a better chance even if that’s not wholly accurate.

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I am a college professor and sometimes I see this happen with students on assignments for class. The fact that he has come to ask for help is really a good step. If anxiety is getting in the way, one thing he might try is to work on it X number of minutes/day instead of tasks. He might be getting overwhelmed by the need to complete a task. Are the essays the stumbling block? Pre-writing strategies could help there.

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D25 also applied ED to a school. The rationale was that this school is world renowned in a niche biology specialty that she has been interest in for several years. A few other US schools have the program, but the ED school has by far the better program. From her perspective, if she got accepted to that school, she would attend there regardless of what other schools she may be accepted to.

From my perspective, the above made sense, but two other aspects were important as well: a) we can afford it (although wanting to pay for it is a slightly different question) and b) the school is well positioned with an array of highly regarded options in the event she may at some point decide that the current major is not what she wants to do (viable “Plan B’s”).

So, given the above she applied ED along with 8 EA schools (2 acceptances so far and a decision for a third coming Friday).

ED2 is an interesting question. D25 doesn’t really have a school on her radar that offers it as an option so we do not really have to think about it. I think, however, I would struggle to jump on board with that option as TonyGrace points out above that it rewards the school without any obvious benefit to the student (with the possible exception to 3 or 4 schools - e.g., UChicago, Tulane, etc.).

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