I just need to say that I’m terribly impressed that your school has an honors cyber security class! My S27 would eat that up! Sadly, his school has nothing along those lines–and has a rule that if there’s an “honors” class, there must be a “regular” version of the same class, so we’d have to advocate for two new classes, which isn’t going to happen. I will instead repeat, “Judged in the context of what’s available to them.”
My personal optinion: many of top 20-40 will follow in next 2-3 years, but not below that. (we shall see though!)
The cyber security class sounds cool. I wish our school had something like that. Sometimes I feel like senioritis has already found my D25. Next year will be interesting.
I think you’re right. More the STEM focused schools first I think too.
We visited Notre Dame yesterday and they made it sound like they are truly test optional. But 70% of admitted applicants submitted test scores. That doesn’t sound TO to me.
I agree. Tippy top schools that don’t need help to drive up application numbers will go back to whatever their pre-pandemic policy was. Next tier down that are actively encouraging applications in order to lower their admit rate will stick with TO.
I have a feeling that I eventually come off as sort of fan-girling re: WPI, so take it for what it’s worth and others feel free to ignore me! 
My WPI boy, when he was applying to colleges knew that he wanted to be an engineer, and he wanted to be able to row crew and he wanted within 8-9 hours drive of Northern VA. Neither of us wanted a D1 school for him (and at 5’11" he would likely be too short for D1 crew anyway) so that limited our search - there are a lot of D3 schools with crew teams and others with club teams, but not that many with a super strong engineering focus, which is what eventually led us to WPI.
There are two main things that people notice about it as “different” - first is the quarter term system, second is the project focus. Re: the terms, they do four, seven week terms, instead of two semesters. In each term students take three classes (instead of I’m guessing five in a semester). I was really worried about this - the term moves Very Fast. If a student falls behind it is really hard to catch back up. My guy has some learning challenges (dyslexia and ADHD) and I thought this could be a problem. I was wrong, it’s been actually really helpful. Because they are cramming a whole semester worth of learning into seven weeks, the classes meet often - and with more frequent meeting, he’s not tempted to not do homework tonight and put it off until later in the week and then OOPS, no time. You know you have to do it that night, so you do it. Plus there’s only three classes worth of information to digest and juggle. At exam time, he was only studying three things. It’s really helped him to focus, because he doesn’t have as much to prioritize. (Plus if you have a class that isn’t interesting, at least it’s over quickly.)
In terms of the academics - he’s double majoring in Civil Engineering and Mechanical Engineering, and he’s liked most of his classes. The school is pretty generous with what AP’s they accept, so he got a lot of the intro classes taken care of from doing well on AP exams and the double major won’t be hard to complete. The school requires some humanities depth and breadth, it’s not all STEM all the time, and he’s enjoyed those humanities courses. You have to do an end of humanities capstone class, which he just finished, where students write a decent length paper and work with a professor and small group on their writing - he has always liked humanities classes so this wasn’t a huge hardship for him, and I think the required focus on making sure STEM people can write is helpful for future career work.
More than that, though, I think the projects are huge. Junior year every student is required to complete a term long IQP project - it’s all they do that term, and the projects are offsite, with the vast majority being abroad (there are a handful of US sites too). My boy just got his placement for next year - he’ll be in Thessaloniki, Greece (the other places he prioritized were Venice, Copenhagen, Rabat, Reykjavik, and Prague). They have locations all over Europe, Australia/NZ, Africa, South/Central America and Asia. While on their 7 week project, a group of students are assigned some kind of research project to develop for their host organization - it’s not like taking class, it’s working together to solve a problem or develop a product. I think this is pretty unique because (a) project based learning just isn’t as big of a thing as it should be given what the real world looks like and (b) it’s not that often that engineers can seamlessly do school abroad and still graduate in 4 years, which WPI makes happen. There is another project requirement for senior year where students work on a project for much of the year with a faculty advisor. It really seems like tremendously marketable skill set development.
Not relevant for us, but maybe others, WPI has a really robust music program. Lots of different types of bands and opportunities to play music if that’s your thing.
Downsides - the food is not great, the kids definitely have had complaints about the main cafeteria, but there is currently some kind of school/student advisory committee or something getting formed to discuss and address this. The advisory committee promoting ideas and then leading to action seems to be a model for the school - if you search on this message board and likely elsewhere you’ll see reference to suicides. There were 3-4 suicides in one year before we got there - maybe the 2020-2021 or 2021-2022 school year. It sounds like most, if not all, of the students had some mental health challenges before they got to school, and the pandemic year of learning was just really exceptionally hard for them - neither of which was unique to WPI, but WPI was open about what had happened and got some press for it. Since that time, the school had the advisory committee to talk about what to do, and then they made several notable changes - there are now “mental health” days built into every term, where there are no classes or required sports or clubs scheduled, and there are opportunities for a reset and some kind of rejuvenating activity. They’ve opened a new mental health focused wellness center, that has a number of activities and space to just de-stress, they’ve hired several more mental health counselors, and they’ve made a concerted effort to talk about mental health and get students involved in watching out for themselves and knowing how to ask for help for peers. It’s awful that this is needed, but i think it’s likely needed everywhere, and I’m impressed with how open they’ve been about it and how they are dealing with it.
Pivoting back to a positive - I really like the campus. It’s a self contained pretty campus on the edge of Worcester, MA. Worcester is a good size city, with some good restaurants and sports (the AAA affiliate for the Red Sox play there now), and several other colleges (notably Holy Cross and Clark) but most students don’t really venture off campus. If they do, it’s to catch the train into Boston (relatively short train ride, only something like $10). There are fraternities and sororities on campus, but they aren’t like big party drinking greek organizations - my son is in a fraternity and while they do definitely have parties, they also have helped with resume writing and practice interviews, they run meetings to talk about how the IQP process works, and they seem like good guys.
If your child is a gamer or into robotics, they will definitely find their people. The school has a team that competes on battlebots, and the high powered rocketry club travels to somewhere in the southwest every year to launch rockets. But if they aren’t that person - it’s ok. My guy is definitely NOT a gamer or robotics person, and he hasn’t felt like that’s all there is around him.
Sorry to everyone for the novel (that probably isn’t relevant to most). I know the school is big in New England, but where I’m from (VA) it isn’t well known at all unless you work in a STEM field. So I feel like the school needs more non NE boosters.
And after that long soliloquy, I promise I’ll get back to the business of my class of 2025 guy. 
We are currently putting together his senior class list and also planning our spring break driving trip to visit a bunch of colleges. He and I have been having some hard discussions - he’s in BC Calc this year and it’s really been hard for him. He got an A first quarter, but BARELY scraped by with a B second quarter. I’m concerned he’s not going to be able to manage a B for his end of year grade (he’s otherwise a straight A student). There’s no reason he needs to be in BC Calc as a junior. I want him to drop down to AB, but he’s always identified himself as good at math, and thinks if he focuses on getting things done on time and not falling behind again, he’ll be ok. Which might be true, but the reality of it is that he’s almost guaranteed to fall behind because he stinks at staying on top of things.
He’s got a challenging schedule this year, and his spring sport starts up in two weeks and I wanted him to drop down to AB to make his spring less miserable, but he is adamant that he’ll be ok. We had a hard conversation over the weekend re: what he needs to do to be successful and, well, I figure it’s time to let him own his decisions. I’ve given him all the scaffolding and support he needs to be successful, he knows what needs to be done, and now it’s time to do it. If he bombs this class well, then that will make the college search different, because those reach schools on his list now will come off, and more “likely” schools will need to get added.
Have her review the math. My D24 went from 28(practice) to 35 on the actual. If she has the math base she should be able to improve the score with a bit of work and finding what she’s missing and learning the tricks.
Thank you so much for your thoughtful, detailed review! This is really helpful information. My son has ADHD and anxiety and so those are definitely being considered as part of our decision. My son was originally thinking about engineering, but now he seems more focused on math only. I am hoping he will consider adding something to it (computer science, ECE, etc), as well. I’ll encourage him to take a closer look at WPIs programs.
I’m so glad your son has had such an amazing experience at WPI. Do you mind if I ask what their merit aid looked like?
Thanks again for your insightful response!
Happy to talk about merit aid - if no one does, then no one knows, right? At the time, his acceptances + merit aid looked like the chart I’m going to try to paste a picture of - I’m including other schools in case the comparison is useful to anyone. These are all the schools he was accepted at - he had also applied to VA Tech/engineering, but was waitlisted (annoying, as we are in-state). Purdue and RPI are grayed out because he decided he didn’t want to go to either relatively early (Purdue was too far away, he didn’t really jive with RPI). Lehigh was a no-go because it was cost prohibitive, but they were the last we heard from, so they weren’t gray at the time I made the chart. Tuition, board and misc costs were either what was included in the acceptance letter info, or what i found pulling from the common data set or school website.
Re: WPI specifically: he received a $20k merit aid per year for all four years, plus a one time $5k “global scholarship” to help with IQP costs. That extra $5k is not referenced in the overall number below.
My 2020 received $30k per year from WPI plus a $5k study abroad thing
Yeah, I think of a lot of places as test-“optional”, with the scare-quotes being very much scare-quotes. It’s like yeah, you can get in without scores, but if you want one of the good scholarships? As if.
Is your 2020 by chance a girl? I have heard rumors that they give girls higher merit aid to try to balance the gender split (and that was why the percentage of girls enrolling this year and last went down, b/c the merit aid to women went down and couldn’t compete with what the other STEM schools were offering). I have absolutely zero knowledge as to whether this is true, but I’ve heard it enough to wonder.
Yup!
This is very helpful, ty!
Have you looked at Pitt? What were you thoughts? My 2025 may consider Pittsburgh, but we have not visited as it’s a plane ride away.
We are starting to work on D25’s senior schedule. How is she already going to be a senior?! The tricky part is she doesn’t know what she wants to study in college and she doesn’t really have any idea of where she wants to go. So I am not sure how much rigor to push for.
She has a 3.8/4.2 and is in the top 4% of her class. Most of her Bs in high school have been in math which is where the dilemma is. She is in honors Pre Calc this year. The only math AP offered at her school is AP Calc AB, however the teacher isn’t the best. Her other math choice would be Trig/Stats. No honors or AP. She has been in the highest track of math all through high school, so Trig/Stats would be a ‘step down’.
If she had certain schools or majors in mind, it would be easier to guide her. My gut is saying have her take Trig/Stats to gain confidence and calculus will always be there in college!
The rest of her schedule is looking like this:
AP Computer Science Principles
Physics (maybe AP?) same teacher as Calc
DE English
DE Economics
AP Gov
Newswriting
She is taking AP Chem and AP Lit this year. She said ‘no way’ to APUSH. Too much work! LOL.
I agree with you about the boost in confidence that would come from Trig/Stats. If she thinks she’s not going to major in Computer Sci or Engineering or Math, then AP Physics would be more useful as a “credential” for the application. Senior year is really tough because of all the college applications, and all the hard thinking they have to do about who they are and how to write about it. For my D24, the tradeoff was that she took AP Calc, but she did not take Physics (not offered at her school!–we didn’t go for Dual Enrollment). I never thought my child would graduate with just Physical Science, Chem, Bio, and AP Environmental. However, I’ve very glad she has that “easier” Science (APES) to balance out AP Calc. She is a future Psych major, by the way, and she has done very well with acceptances and merit. So it appears not to have made much difference.
We did look at Pitt - and liked it a lot. It was actually his second choice (and he really debated long and hard before going with WPI) even though it was, by far, the “less good” engineering program of the schools he was considering. One thing I’d note re: the merit aid - the year he got in (which, again, was for Fall 2022 entrance) the engineering students got more merit aid then the liberal arts students (at least according to totally unscientific comments on the accepted students thread on this website). He liked that it was sort of in a city, sort of not - I mean, it’s in Pittsburgh, but sort of on an outskirt-neighborhood, so it doesn’t feel like right downtown. (For people familiar with DC, I’d say it’s like American, not GW, in terms of location.) There was good green space thanks to a large park, and all the students we saw seemed happy and engaged and excited to talk about their school. Some of the architecture is stunning (gorgeous “Cathedral of Learning” gothic building that some honors and other classes are in) and some is awfully ugly (three dorms that my son thought looked like nuclear reactors). But the vibe on campus felt welcoming to a wide variety of people and the programs they offered seemed really robust.
Plus, super benefit of it, Pitt is rolling admission. You can apply very early, hopefully get accepted early, then you have one less stress because you know you got in somewhere.
AP Calc is pretty hard. My D25 is a very mathy kid and says it’s hard. She has a lot of work. If she wasn’t planning her science/math major in college I don’t think she would have taken it.