I am hoping the College Confidential community can help us assess our options.
Our S15 was so much more straightforward. Five applications (four US and 1 Canada) produced two options: a top 10 university and UBC (and a couple of waitlists) and he headed off sight unseen to the US as an international student and had a great four years.
D21 is more complicated. She is inspired to follow in her brother’s footsteps and study internationally but the combination of COVID disruptions and being less certain led to a bit of a scattergun approach to applications. I think this means she is likely to end up with quite a diverse range of options, and all unknown to us. I won’t bother with the list of applications but instead hope some of you might comment on the concrete options as they come in.
But first a little about her. Strong student, full IB with good study and coping skills. Unsure what she wants to study but tempted by engineering (although many of her US applications ended up being to liberal arts colleges where 3+2 programs would be the only way to do engineering). She is also a strong humanities/arts student. Main passion is choral singing and would like to sing in a really good choir. Otherwise quite resilient and adaptable - and adventurous enough to head off to a university in a foreign country where she knows no-one. She lived in France for a while as a child. Not religious but used to attending a private high school with some notional religion. Our personal circumstances are such that merit money is attractive (and we come from a country where people are not accustomed to spending huge amounts on university) but our incomes would enable us to pay full freight for the right university. Its a bit nerve wracking thinking of sending her to the other side of the world in a pandemic but her older brother is still in the US so she would have him as support.
So far we have two US options on the table: Lawrence University in Wisconsin (with 31 k pa merit scholarship) and St Olaf (with 26 k pa merit). We selected both because of their strong music options for non-music majors (and St Olaf in particular for its choirs). We also thought that the selective liberal arts colleges might offer some of the benefits that we saw our son enjoy in his Top 10 school, but with a less pressured environment. The other good option on the table is Queens in Kingston, Canada with a Chancellor’s scholarship (which reduces the already very reasonable tuition to almost nothing - she is a dual national Canadian so pays domestic fees, though she has never lived in Canada so it would still be the international student experience she wants ). Queens has the advantage that she has been accepted to both engineering and arts (and could pursue a dual degree in both in 5 years). [She has also been accepted to Bristol (geography) and Durham (international relations) in the UK but is concerned about the need to follow such specific courses but obviously CC is less likely to have advice on the UK unis]
Any advice on any of these options would be most appreciated. Interested in views on the quality of the education; the value to cost ratio; the campus culture and degree of diversity and inclusion; the extra-curricular environment and activities; and whether the locations would feel remote and isolated to an international student who has only visited New York and San Francisco and some national parks.