Hi Parents,
Would you please share your best tip from college planning and/or college search and selection with your kiddos? The things you learned along the way, the best book you read, the best advice you got? The thing you wish you did differently in hindsight?
Thanks very much.
Keep the pressure off. They WILL get into college. It might not be their first, second, or even third choice, but everything will work out. I wish I had laid off of them about completing the perfect essay and application. All that stress was not good for them or me.
An occasional glass of red wine and lots of visits to the Parent Cafe. 
I read Colleges That Changed Lives and then passed it to them to read.
We took an epic college visit road trip over spring break of their junior year. We only did 1 school a day and they had control over the list and I planned around it.
For D2, we added visits on our way home from dropping D1 off at school. We asked her to pick 2 schools located roughly along the route. She ended up attending 1 of these schools.
Give them ownership of the process. While making sure they know the deadlines avoid trying micromanage how they get there
Give the kid a firm budget. Don’t let them apply to any schools that are unaffordable. If you need the kid to take the best financial offer on the table, figure it out & tell them ASAP. Swim in your own lane. Your kid might get admitted to an amazing school that you simply cannot afford. This is painful for everyone.
^ learned the hard way.
Enjoy your visits with them. My D20 seems to spend most of her time in her room or with friends. Our trips were a great time to spend some mother/daughter time together before she leaves. We had a few stress related meltdowns but for the most part we had so much fun. She just told me yesterday she loves all the mother/daughter pics we got together. We also did a big family week-long trip with some fun activities mixed in but that ended up being way too stressful for her. So I’ll start the process again next year with my S22.
Run your own race. Don’t worry about what schools “everyone else” is applying to. I feel like I hear the same 5 schools over and over again from parents I talk to. Most of her schools, no one in our area has heard of, but they are good schools and great fits for her. Just because 40 kids at my D’s HS are applying to BU or BC doesn’t mean that she has to apply there. And just because someone else “would never let their kid apply to a school that far away” doesn’t mean that she can’t apply there. Everyone has their own parameters, financial, geographical, prestige, etc. You just need to figure out your parameters and stick with them.
Getting admitted to a top ten school may not be all it is cracked up to be. Make sure your kiddo has bought in to that particular school, and is not attending because of pressure from the adults around him/her.
Apply to at least a couple of match/safety schools that they like EA or rolling. Having an early acceptance to a school they like takes tons of pressure off the rest of the process.
Listen to your kids and enjoy the process. So many reasons for this including (but not limited to):
– We learned so much about how both of our kids’ minds work, how they approach things, what they think is important etc. just by listening to them go about the college search process.
–Always let your child opine on a college before you do.
–When you tour colleges find time for a dinner or breakfast where you can just relax and be together. College hunting might be the last big road trips you take with your child. Enjoy the time together. Appreciate them as a young adult.
–Pay attention to what your kids want in a college (within the constraints of affordability and academic fit) – they may want a different expereince than you had and that is perfectly fine. Keep an open mind – there are tons of amazing colleges and universities out there.
Don’t compare your kids to their friends/family. Let them run their own race and find their own college fit.
Try to enjoy the process and not stress too much. If you go through the process in an honest and organized manner paying attention to academic fit and affordability from the start your child should end up with fine choices in the end.
While preparing and working hard toward college admissions are of course very important, it’s as important and perhaps even more so to not lose sight of letting your kid be just a high school kid. As a parent, I was insistent on that. In retrospect, that’s my biggest accomplishment and something I’m most proud of.
My son’s been a serious violinist since age 5 and as serious a student in high school, but he hardly ever missed parties, homecomings, movie nights, school sporting events and plays, summer camping trips, making and producing his music for YouTube, etc. He even went to three proms. He doesn’t look back with any regrets. When I asked him most recently about what he thought of his high school years, the only thing that disappointed him was that his closest friends, who were all top students in his class, were always talking about “grades” and “college admissions.” Because of this toxic obsession, he said he actually started to avoid them in school outside of classes.
There are many sad posts here in CC about kids devoting their entire childhood and teen years toward the goal of getting into that dream college by doing things that they “have to” do as opposed to “want to” do, i.e., being someone else that they don’t even recognize in the mirror. Getting into one’s dream college isn’t worth all these precious sacrifices.
Great posts here.
My advice is more practical.
Set up an email account specifically for and dedicated to the college process. Both student and parent should have access to it.
Tell your child not to check off those boxes that allow ACT/SAT to sell your info to marketing companies and colleges. Instead, do your own research on schools that are good fits utilizing the Fiske Guide and other college guide books you might like.
When college road-tripping, make time for a really good meal at the end of each day. Doesn’t need to be fancy just good. We’d research ahead of time so our college trips became a combo of college trips/a road trip ala Diners, Diners, and Dives. It was fun.
When road tripping, bring a cooler of healthy snacks and cold drinks. We crammed in a lot of visits to maximize limited time and if we needed to skip a sit down lunch, no worries, we had our cooler in the back.
Spend adequate time finding safeties/likelies and matches that your child likes. The reaches are very easy to uncover.
Enjoy the journey but try to keep it from permeating all the conversations, family moments, etc. There are so many excellent colleges out there so don’t let prestige become a huge factor.
These are great ideas! I wish we had set up that email account…Would have prevented a lot of my nagging inquiries!
I also agree that the child needs to take ownership of the process, but recognize there are some pieces that the parent absolutely needs to take charge of (e.g., those items that impact finances). I recommend as soon as the “race” starts in earnest, having a conversation with your child about who’s going to manage which pieces, where you’re going to insert yourself (and why), and how you and your child envision the process. Having a “map” that everyone can follow and a set of “agreements” will reduce a lot of stress.
I would also include in that conversation a discussion of how your child envisions the process from the lens of what happens at school and conversations with peers. The peer pressure in the process is real, and each kid experiences it differently. Talking in advance about what that might look like, and responses to it, can be super helpful.
College admission isn’t personal. Rejections are to be expected if you have reach schools on the list.
Start early. It takes time to visit schools and find the right fit. And aim to be done with standardized testing by the end of junior year.
Apply to a safety that has rolling admission. It’s psychologically very helpful to have an acceptance in hand early.
Spend as much time identifying those safeties as you do the rest of your list. Safeties and matches are the most important schools on the list!
Focus on safeties, ones that are good fits are harder to find than reaches. When you are visiting schools early on to get an idea of the type of schools, don’t only visit reaches for small vs large, rural vs urban etc. Visit schools where your child has a decent chance of admission.
We didn’t do that with our 1st, and so wasted many visits. Also usually the lower ranked school suffers by comparison. Visiting DC my son fell in love with Georgetown (where he had no hope of admission) and then compared American’s campus to it, and didn’t like American. There just was no point in visiting Georgetown, for him.
On one college visit road trip, when D was my captive in the car for hours, I made us listen to Frank Bruni’s book “Where You Go Is Not Who You’ll Be”.
I loved it. It made no apparent impression on D.
The culture at her small private HS was all about getting into prestigious elite schools. Granted, there were a LOT of affluent families at the school. We are not one of them. However, we are also not poor. We needed BIG MERIT money to rain upon us.
In hindsight, I wish I could have found a way to be more sympathetic or empathetic to her plight & wishes.
She was a very good student and she thought she earned the opportunity to go to one of those elite (unaffordable for us) schools. She had worked so damn hard, and now we are telling her she needs to go to one of the OOS public U’s that threw money at her?
It was HARD. I’ve had decades to get used to not being able to have nice things. As a rule, it doesn’t rub me the wrong way. It just is what it is. I guess I had sort of forgotten she was only 17-18 years old, and went to school with peers who had no obvious college budget restraints. I sorta expected her to gracefully accept reality and move on, but she fought us, and spent her freshman year at college unhappy & resentful (things are good now).
I’ve posted before that peers and adults alike in her world would light up like a Xmas tree if you said you were choosing between, say, Northwestern or Boston College. And there were a lot of tight polite (maybe confused) smiles when she said she was going to either U of Alabama or U of Kentucky. It felt BAD for her. She wanted to be SPECIAL and be one of those great students going to a prestigious school.
All of that to say – there is a lot of pressure on the kids, and we parents may not understand it all or get frustrated when their reasoning doesn’t seem mature and sound. There is often peer pressure about what school they are going to attend & what that says about who they are and who they will be.
A few observations and advice:
I am going through this for the 2nd time, and the process is different for each.
Parents can do research (and glean info from CC), and make suggestions for college list etc.
The most important tips I learned from CC (not in any particular order)
Do your best to enjoy the college search process. This child is gone from your house at the end of it and you’ll miss them terribly. Try not to make that last year one filled with stress and anxiety.
Start early when there is no pressure and it’s really just for “fun” - to think about small vs large, near vs. not so near, etc.
Made a spreadsheet of due dates, costs and space to deduct any merit aid, etc. - so you can end up with bottom line costs after fin aid results are in.
On visits/tours, student first, parent second. Give them the opportunity to take the lead, ask questions, etc.
Look for fit first, not prestige.
Be honest up front what you can afford. Be honest up front what you can afford. Be honest up front what you can afford.
Don’t go by rankings unless you are in a few selective majors where it really matters. Go by fit (meaning best for your major for your career goals for your liking).
Don’t visit too early if the student isn’t ready. We did one visit before son wanted to and he basically didn’t like anything about the school when it was probably a good fit and he would have liked it a year later.
Don’t go by admit rates (goes with first item). Some schools with high admit rates can be perfect in your major. If a student has only safety schools on the list, even if he could get into better schools, it is ok if the schools are good for the major and career goals.
Safety schools others may discount can lead to wonderful opportunities. Even big schools can offer individualized opportunities.
Greek is not all bad. S didn’t want it starting college. Got there and decided to do it. We were hesitant but said ok as long as grades stayed up. Turns out it was really the best thing for him and helped his growth and leadership a lot.
To add to @abasket 's tip
S17’s spreadsheet was absolutely crucial. He created it with Google Sheets and shared it with me. It had every critical piece of information from the many schools he applied to - Links to applications and portals, usernames and passwords, ID numbers assigned to applicant, etc. You will encounter **data overload ** - use the spreadsheet to help.
He and I referred to this spreadsheet multiple times a day during the process. He gave me access for when it wasn’t available to him (class time, soccer practice, etc.)
S19 did a direct copy and paste of S17’s spreadsheet for his journey.
It was so helpful.