FWIW my S went to Fordham Rose Hill and had a great experience. He was in the b-school but recieved a rigorous and well rounded humanities education with the Jesuit core.
7 Likes
Thank you for Sharing this. We are experiencing something very similar in physical therapy. Unfortunately, it’s resulted in shrinking students entering graduate school and people leaving the profession for other jobs with higher pay. The income ceiling is quite frustrating and it forces everyone to think out of the box toward other models to make more because the debt is just too high on the COA.
Add to that capped borrowing as the result of the OBBBA, and the future is bleak.
4 Likes
That is awesome! Congrats!
1 Like
D26 also received the Fordham Scholarship with Lincon Center Honors program and we are also in CA. I suspect she won’t end up there.
I was fully prepared to pay for her tuition from the start but it’s hard to say no to free tuition for 4 years.
She was accepted to Amherst yesterday while being waitlisted at UCLA. I’m pretty sure she will decide to go out of state for college at this point.
22 Likes
The decisions are indeed rolling in! D26 was accepted to Haverford and Wellesley! Haverford was one of her favs for quite a while. She applied to Wellesley a bit on a whim, but is now more interested.
She was waitlisted by Swarthmore. She didn’t really love her visit to Swat, but I pushed for an application since she did the visit and interview. She was surprisingly satisfied with the result. “Not a denial!” She’s undecided on accepting the waitlist spot since she’d rather go to Haverford. That’s right kid - you deny them first! 
She still has a few more decisions coming including the ultimate Ivy. We’ll see how that goes, but I think she’s feeling a little spoiled for choice. And now we’re starting to plan out the visits. April is looking a little crazy right now…
26 Likes
Congratulations to your D26! My best high school friend went to Wellesley and it was truly life changing for her. She remains active in their very strong alumni community. What an amazing opportunity to be able to consider.
1 Like
Just want to note that the downside of the core is that students have limited free electives. This was fine for my S. However, my D had a specific areas of interest outside of her major that she wanted to (and did) pursue in-depth with upper level coursework during college. The extensive Jesuit core would not have worked for her.
Congratulations to her on these admissions! Though Haverford and Swat are very similar on paper, they are culturally quite different with Haverford being more “chill” and Swat more intense. So, not surprised she has a strong preference.
And, Wellesley was one of my two absolute favorite visits and seems like an incredible place for a woman to go to school. So many resources (deployed thoughtfully and frankly better than most equally rich schools in my opinion) and so many talented and ambitious and interesting students along with a gorgeous campus. The alumni loyalty and connections are second to none as well. Truly a lifelong community. Family member in their 40s went there and it is still an active professional resource and they are always helping out younger alums making connections and sharing opportunities. D26 was so close to applying there but ultimately decided she would rather not be in New England, that far from Boston if she were, and truthfully did not have it in her to write one more original supplemental essay (she couldn’t have pulled from her others to do their more unique one for her). What fabulous options your kid already has!
6 Likes
I’m hoping she can add on minor.
1 Like
Mine was WL at UCLA and Amherst yesterday. Congrats to your daughter!
5 Likes
Hooray – this is fantastic. Congrats!! Now comes the hard part – picking one, lol!
But what a great problem to have. 
2 Likes
Thank you for posting this. I know 6 veterinarians personally:
One is still working as a regular veterinarian, and he is able to do so only because he married into money and his in-laws heavily subsidize his family.
Two others still work in the field but not in any sort of role they would like like; one works for a pig slaughterhouse, the other does euthanasia for the Humane Society.
The 3 remaining don’t work in the field at all. One works as a high school biology teacher (and takes home more than she did as a vet), one teaches yoga, and one left the field due to mental health struggles and is unemployed.
These were all top students.
7 Likes
My D22 has been thinking about these things for some time as she considered what to do post-college. She would have loved to stay in academia and pursue a PhD in linguistics or classical languages – but in researching and talking to folks, she realized there were likely to be no jobs available. The advice she was given was, “Only get the PhD if you can’t imagine yourself doing anything else with your life. Don’t expect a job working in the field.”
Well, no thanks – she didn’t want to spend that amount of time and money with zero assurance of an academic job in the field.
So, she pivoted and decided to pursue a speech-language pathology professional degree. The overwhelming advice for this was to choose the cheapest possible program that was ASHA-accredited, because graduates of the “elite” names make exactly the same money as graduates from anywhere else. And SLPs don’t make a ton of money, so trying to pay back excessive student loans is a burden. (Even though the schooling isn’t nearly as long as vet school.)
Ironically, the fact that our D26 chose an in-state school means she’ll spend less than half of her 529 on it – and she is very unlikely to go to grad school. We could transfer the unused portion of it to D22 to pay for SLP school. She is VERY lucky that she won’t need loans – but still, she’s considering programs right now and trying to make a decision. She has two elite (expensive), two solid and practical (inexpensive), and two in the middle.
No idea what she’ll do.
3 Likes
My son, who is a senior at Fordham, has had no trouble fitting in a minor. This is despite the core. He was able to do it because he tested out of some of the core (e.g. foreign language classes, math and physical sciences) and because he often takes more than 15 credits per semester (mainly because there are so many classes he is interested in.)
Fordham also is revising the core to include more classes that can count for credit in more than one area. And I believe that STEM majors don’t have to fulfill the foreign language requirement either.
In any case, when he enrolled, my son thought that Fordham’s core was a negative, but now he says it has been a big positive. Some of his favorite classes were taken to fulfill the core.
5 Likes
Congratulations! Your kiddo has such awesome options. Fingers crossed for the remaining ones, but sounds like she’ll land somewhere perfect!
2 Likes
Last night I mentioned I had a lot going through my head on the process for D26 and want to share more. This will be a little long, so I know many of you will not read the whole thing, which is fine, I just need to share it somewhere, and this is the one place I feel comfortable doing so.
Believe it or not, as of October junior year, I was deeply worried that D26 would not get into a single school that she would actually want to go to. Like anxiety dream up at night worried. To my core worried. I was looking for high acceptance rate schools that she might be “fine” with. And, here we are a year and a 1/2 later where she has been admitted to every single school she wanted to go to. It is one of the few things in life lately that has made me cry with joy and gratitude. I’ve been thinking about how we got from there to here and how appreciative/lucky I feel.
As some of you may have seen me write before, October junior year, I high pressured D26 into taking the SAT early when she was not ready, prepared, and had no time and too many things going on. I had her skip the PSAT and take SAT instead, and it went horribly. Less about the score (though that was not ideal) and more about the experience, she wanted nothing to do with taking the test again because of the way I went about it. She knew as a California kid that test optional was a path, and committed to that after that experience. It was a parenting low for me. At the time, it was before the college counselors at her school meet with her or us, so I “knew” very little and had no real support yet. I had not yet found this forum. All I knew is that a bunch of other parents were having their kids take the test early, and I jumped on that train full steam. That’s not totally true, there were other things I knew, and some I “knew” (e.g. thought I knew, but were dead wrong). I knew that D26 was not anywhere near the top of her class. I knew her GPA, which was closer to a 3.5 than a 4.0, was well below the median for all of the schools I imagined she might want to go to (and is in fact below the median for almost every school she ultimately got into). I also “knew” that meant she had to crush the SAT to have any shot to get into any “decent” school (which was dead wrong). And “knew” that all of the schools were “impossible” to get into (also dead wrong. At the time, I didn’t even know yet, that schools like University of Oregon, which I think of as a good school, accept 80%+ of students). I thought most of the UCs were off the table. I was low knowledge and high feelings then. I was ignorant and afraid at the time, trying to do the best by her, and making things worse with my efforts. l thought all was lost at the time, and if I’m being honest, I thought it was largely my fault. I know, ridiculous, but true feelings.
Then, second semester junior year the college counseling started. They informed us about grade inflation most places that they do not have at her school so her grades are way better than i perceived. They informed us of the success of students like D26 in the past (though she still outperformed expectations in admissions). They informed us that D26 100% could go test-free, and in fact none of the schools she actually liked required tests. Not a one. They introduced us to Agnes Scott, which we had never heard of, and D26 and we loved. They helped me understand that most schools, including a ton of great ones, accept most students. They made me understand and appreciate the meaning of privileges my kid has- a very well regarded independent school and the ability to pay full tuition. They reassured me that I had not screwed the whole thing up. And hope returned for me.
After my October junior year fall fiasco, my wife took over the lead with D26 on applications. In the summer after junior year, I found this forum and it was a godsend for me! Not only did I learn things, share things, etc. But it gave me a place to channel my energy that was not counter productive. D26 decided she did not want to ED anywhere despite the chances of getting into two of her schools she ranked first at the time being way better if she did so. She worked with her counselors who told her she did not need to ED because she had a school she loved that she would get into (Agnes Scott). I bit my tongue and eventually came to the conclusion (in part through the collective wisdom here) that D26 was right and this was her process, and I needed to let her do her thing. And it turns out she was right.
Some of you may recall, that I saw my D26s application package and essays for the very first time after she submitted. I had rightly not been involved at all in that. And, I was so moved by how she had truly put herself on the pages for the schools to see, and if they decided yes or no, she had really given them a glimpse of who she is. I was so proud of her. Yet, I never imagined that all of them would say yes! It remains true that she is not at the top of her class. It remains true that her GPA is below the median for most of the schools she applied to. It remains true that she was test-free. But it is also true that every single school she applied to, she carefully selected because she felt it was a place that truly fit her. She was able to convey precisely why to each and every one of them in a way that was authentic to her. She was able to show them what they would get with her that was different than some of her classmates who have more impressive stats or flashier activities.
I sit here this morning in amazement at my daughter. Amazement that she did things her way, and they worked out so well. If you haven’t figured it out yet, how she did it was 100% not how I would have done it. So much so, that I had to take a seat and let her do her. And, I am also confident that my way would not have turned out so well (in addition to robbing her of agency over her own future). She did not care how her friends were doing things. She did not care how anyone else was doing it. She did it her way and outperformed expectations because of it. Of course, I appreciate the amount of luck and randomness that goes into admission at some of these schools as opposed to denial. There are plenty of kids who are just as admissible who did not get in. But, she set herself up for her best chance at success at the places she wanted to go.
I am at awe at where we have ended up a year and a 1/2 after my major parenting fail. I feel so lucky that I have a daughter awesome enough to overcome my flaws. And, I am so grateful to all of you for helping me through this journey! I can’t wait to see where she decides to end up. The biggest thing I’ve learned is that I need to stand back. She’s got this and she knows what she is doing more than I do. Humbling, but also fills me with pride.
Thank you all for giving me a place to productively reflect and emote!
39 Likes
Great to hear, thanks!
This was a lovely read. 
I am so happy for you guys – your daughter sounds like a smart, independent and resourceful kid who is going to thrive wherever she lands.
And I daresay that there is not a single one of us who has done everything right in this process! But I don’t think your daughter succeeded in spite of you – rather, your support and the knowledge that you are always in her corner – even if you fumble through bits – is invaluable to a kid. I promise it made a difference. 
4 Likes
It’s been quite a while since I’ve been here, so long that you guys have a Part 2!!!
Congrats on all the acceptances. It’s all stating to get very real!
We just returned from a spring break trip to Costa Rica, which was awesome. And yesterday I finalized the parent ad page for the yearbook. Going through pictures to Include was a very bittersweet experience.
10 Likes
Thank you! I know she knows I support her and only want want what is best for her. I just wish I could have done it better in the early stages. But I found my role that worked. I organize all of our travel, planning, organize spreadsheets, find resources, etc. I talk through things with my wife and then she has initial convos with D26 before my “energy” comes into the room. 
It has worked well for all of us since.
9 Likes