Alabama does open their housing really early, but they do find space for all freshman. I haven’t heard of any not having a room. They have moved them to some apartments, both on and off campus, but they end up with a spot.
I hate having to put the housing deposits in so early. And knowing all the rules at all the places. We did Alabama early for all 3 kids and so lost the money on D26. And she’s at UAH and if you decide not to go, not only is the deposit non-refundable, but there is a cancellation penalty of $200. Fortunately, they have plenty of room, so we waited until April for that one. But, ouch!
Yeah the two different assessment scales (Excellence vs Success) could also be broken down to - the ‘academic institution’ versus ‘practical real world’. Ultimately what does Academia value and how do they score it - “Intellectual prowess?”, and GPA is the method of scoring across large swaths of people, after that on the individual level, it’s where do graduates go… graduate school, and which graduate schools and what credentials do they accumulate, what do they publish etc. At that point, undergraduate GPA performance can be a rate limiting step or the key to the next advancement. So to them undergraduate GPA is the (or one of the) scorecard.
Most folks in the ‘practical real world’ understand the reality that once out in the interactive working world - College GPA is never brought up, you are what you are based primarily on -who you know- and -what you can do- and sometimes the first outshines poor personal performance (unfortunately).
The adage of “A students teach, and B students work for C students” or “A students work for B students and C students run the companies” is rather often true.
It’s too late for the class of 26ers, but for those with younger children, I strongly recommend telling them to click the marketing opt-out option when registering for SAT/ACT; both of my kids did that, and we received ZERO unsolicited mail from colleges. I don’t know about email, as all of that goes to my kids’ addresses, but they haven’t complained about it.
Yes! We failed with our D26, but for the S29s, they just took the PSAT and they did the marketing opt out as well. The school they attend prefers to have students use their high school email address for College Board stuff, so I was really nervous about their school e-mail getting spammed. This has become a HUGE problem for D26. She originally had signed up for the PSAT with a school email and it just become innundated. She changed her account later to a new, separate gmail account and now both get spammed! But the marketing opt out seems to be a good way to go.
We have an apostrophe (') in our name. Tell me how in this digital age that a dang ’ can break the system!?
So D26 will get 2-3 (record is 4) mailers on the same day from the same school- all with different versions of our last name. Sometimes the ’ changes to random a symbol(s), sometimes her last name shows as what is after the ', sometimes the ’ is omitted …
At least it adds a bit of humor to the process- we like to lay them out and see all the different versions of our name.
We learnt this lesson with D19! She was inundated with Chicago mailers for example; I think the only stuff we have received for C26 is where they actually showed interest. Unfortunately they didn’t dodge the bullet entirely because they were doing something on collegevine that ended up in a bunch of emails, so must have missed something to click or unclick there.
(Funnily enough D19 is now considering whether to apply to Chicago for grad school! But not because of all their mailers, haha)
We’ve never toured, although we love the city. But D26’s friend toured recently and was blown away – previously she had held up Duke as the quintessential college environment, and she said UChicago was 100 times more appealing. She said being on campus was like being in some magical forest fairyland.
Now I want to go see it! Sounds like the kind of place novels are set.
D22 almost applied – and it probably would have been a decent fit for her – but she was burned out by all the essays, and when she got to the end and looked at UChicago’s essay topics, her brain melted, LOL. She was also put off by the “where fun goes to die” stigma. But it is one of only two schools in the country that offers Marathi (an Indian dialect similar to Hindi) as a language you can study – the other being Penn. And she was deeply interested in that.
I’ve been to the campus - it is gorgeous. (And I say that as a Cambridge alum so I have high standards of comparison, haha.) One of D19’s good friends is currently doing a masters there and loves it.
We learned that lesson too with D22. S26 opted out of marketing and we receive almost nothing. D22 had received buckets, wave to you Case Western Reserve who often sent 2 mailers a day, even though she never had a touchpoint with them.
Some of the few mailers S26 gets are pretty random though. I’m not sure how a kid from Louisiana got on the radar of Creighton and Duquesne
I love getting actual mail, so I do enjoy getting the college stuff, but it does seem incredibly wasteful in so many ways. I guess the colleges must have some data that there is at least a decent ROI on this or they would probably allocate their funds differently. Or maybe not and they’re just doing it because everyone else does. Who knows? Everything about the college process is hard to understand. Nothing makes sense.
What was weird was that I (not C26) got a flurry of emails from George Mason the other day thanking me “for my interest”. Huh?it was never on C26’s radar - they don’t even offer architecture - and they confirmed they hadn’t done anything at all to do with them. It had been on the safety list for D19 but that can’t possibly be why they suddenly started sending stuff. That was odd.
Sometimes it’s just weird – my D22 started getting emails from Bard College at Simon’s Rock when she was a sophomore. We learned that this is a college for high school kids who want to start college early? It has like 300-400 students.
We didn’t quite get it – are these kids who had finished their high school credits early? Had they all taken the GED? No idea.
Regardless, they emailed D22 like once a week for the next few years – even after she had graduated! It was so odd.
The only connection I could think of is that my mother-in-law lives in the small town in Massachusetts where the college is, but she has nothing to do with them, and how they’d link her to us when we’re in a different state doesn’t make sense.
But, yeah. It still comes up as a joke in our household every once in awhile.
We got that book! It just said “Yale” on the front, right? I mean, how can you not laugh?
D26 didn’t even glance at it. My Rice kid sat and looked through every page, though, curious whether her college experience is anything like Yale’s. (Spoiler – it is, lol.)
Our favorite unsolicited college contacts for S23 were from international schools with good volleyball teams. One in particular from Italy was very intriguing; you could only major in one of two programs (international business was one) and any time spent out of class was spent practicing and playing volleyball. I wish S23 had been interested, but alas, no.
Oh well, we’re done now!
