For what it is worth, https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/appletoncitywisconsin/PST045217 says that Appleton, WI is 83.4% white (not Hispanic or Latino). https://nces.ed.gov/collegenavigator/?q=lawrence&id=239017#enrolmt says that the school is 67% white.
Child is currently doing a summer abroad program where “kids who look like me” are the largest minority group, which she’s enjoying very much.
If you apply at Trinity University apply EA it makes a difference. The acceptance rate is falling year to year pretty rapidly.
San Antonio is a great city. My daughter fell in love with it first visit.
@allyphoe I know that you are trying to shrink your list, not grow it. But as diversity has emerged as an important factor for your child, you might consider Southwestern University in Georgetown, TX, a LAC that enrolls about 1500 students. About 40% non-white, with slightly more than half of them being Hispanic. Nearly 30% are Pell recipients. The broader region will also be diverse. I know a student who got an excellent merit-based scholarship there. Your daughter’s current ACT places her in the 75+ %
@mamaedefamilia Thanks! Southwestern was on the initial very long list. I suspect it won’t pop back up for her, because of the low percentage of kids who share her specific ethnic background.
Three weeks into summer abroad, kiddo says:
- no foreign universities, including Canada, because culture shock is a thing
- tree-lined sidewalks are nice!
- must have plentiful hills and/or stairs, to keep her in shape
“I will just pick a school from the mom-list,” says my child. So while she sorted school supplies, I read anonymous snippets from the Fiske guide. “Our marching band wears traditional Scottish kilts to every football game.” “Wait, traditional, that means without underwear, right?”
“We are social-justice minded, fiercely independent trailblazers who do not take no for an answer […] I am absolutely certain that we will run the world someday” was the snippet that caused her to take the book away from me. She has dog-eared Bryn Mawr, Scripps, Lawrence, Mount Holyoke, and Smith. She read the Amherst entry, and decided she wasn’t interested (“I could just go to Smith or Mount Holyoke and take a class at Amherst if there was one I really wanted to take”). She was hugely opposed to Brown’s “lowest transcript grade is a C” policy. She looked wistfully at Stanford, but really, no one gets into Stanford. UTulsa came off the list last weekend, when she announced at random that she couldn’t really see herself there.
She came home from her summer program pretty sure that women’s colleges have an edge; she’s open to a coed school, but it would have to be a really amazing coed school.
We had a long discussion about what guidebooks mean by “competitive;” my guess is that “competitive” will be less of a negative as time goes by.
Sounds like great progress!
Child: I would like to travel to Massachusetts and tour Smith and Mount Holyoke entirely by myself.
Me: Have at the scheduling!
Child: Here is my proposed schedule.
Me: I think the travel logistics that work with that schedule would benefit from adult companionship. You have a very late night arrival that would be improved by the ability to spend the night at an airport hotel, then in the morning Uber to Mount Holyoke, where you could be dropped off and we’d continue on to Northampton and settle into the hotel with everyone’s bags.
Child: Yeah, that’s a good point.
She is so unexcited about Mount Holyoke; I hope she ends up actually liking it. They have a much less polished online presence, so I think the lack of enthusiasm is more unfamiliarity than anything else.
At dinner tonight, she kept saying, “When I go to Smith,” where it was clear from context that this meant attending college there in two years, not just visiting. Smith lets you arrange to sit in on classes by emailing professors to ask; she took them at their word and plans to ask to attend five (!) classes across two days, in addition to the tour and info session.
She adored Mount Holyoke. Tour was just a tour, and likewise for the information session. The tour does go inside a dorm, which she said was a normal unremarkable dorm. Lunch with a student was fine but nothing special; she liked that they had allergen warnings for what she’s allergic to. Highlights were sitting in on a class and the interview, which I had anticipated would be informational (because she’s just a junior) but she reports was a full blown “tell me about yourself and why you you want to come here” interview. Beautiful campus, friendly students.
Highlights from the information session: if you aren’t ready to enroll in classes tomorrow, you should not apply ED today. If your parents haven’t decided that they’re willing to pay their EFC, you should not apply ED, because that’s not what “financial reasons” means. Don’t blame other people for your bad grades if you feel like providing additional information. If you send test scores, we’re going to care about your test scores, so only spend the money to send them if they enhance your application - which is not the same as being high in comparison to the overall enrolled student average.
And she also liked Smith! She was surprised how very different Smith and Mount Holyoke are from each other, but she felt like she would be happy at either school. Interestingly, she felt that she would turn out as a different person depending on which school she choose - that Mount Holyoke would push her towards being a more community-minded, “how do I make the world a better place by working with others,” graduate and Smith would push her towards being a more outspoken, “how do I make myself the kind of person who can change the world” graduate. She doesn’t yet know which person she wants to be, so that’s a decision to be left for later.
She really preferred Mount Holyoke’s campus, which is sprawling but self-contained and full of trees, over the compact bustle and street traffic of Smith. Also sightly preferred the dining system at Mount Holyoke (dining commons open 7:15-midnight, except for the hour between 4 and 5pm) over Smith’s house-based system. But she preferred the housing at Smith, particularly the large number of singles - as an introvert who needs large amounts of alone time, she thought about the quiet housing option at Mount Holyoke, but then realized silent hours would mean she couldn’t fall asleep to soothing music. She preferred Smith’s attitude towards heavier course loads (sure, go for it, but maybe not your first term) vs Mount Holyoke’s discouragement (the student at the info session seemed confused why anyone would want to take more than four classes). Open curriculum vs distribution requirements was not a concern.
If she had to choose today, she says she’d use the course catalogs as a tie-breaker, figuring out a couple of tentative schedules and seeing which ones seemed to work better where. Since her current plans involve four years of one foreign language, maybe a class or two in a second foreign language, pre-health-professions classes, and a science major with no overlap with the pre-health, scheduling is likely to be an issue, and Smith might have the edge there. But we would all be pretty happy with either of them.
Kid attended only one class at MHC, because none of us expected MHC to be a favorite so it only got one day, and they offered many non-class activities. That class was awesomely amazing.
Four classes at Smith, which was allocated two days and only had a tour and info session as non-class activities. Two “I have to take this class if I attend” amazing, one “great but it turns out I’m not actually as interested in the subject matter as I’d anticipated,” and one disappointment. The disappointment was the class that was the Smith equivalent of MHC’s awesomely amazing class, so I’m not sure how much was just that it lacked in comparison.
Kid accidentally left her headphones in her first Smith class of the day, then didn’t find them when she went back to look after the third class, so called me for help. I went to the Admissions Office to ask where they’d have been turned in to (and they knew exactly what three places a found item would move through, based on the building that the class had been in), but she called back to say she’d looked a second time and found where the professor had set them aside for her. Admissions officer, upon learning that she was sitting in on four classes, asked if kid had a friend or relative at Smith - and when the answer was no, asked for her name and commented that anyone who wanted to schedule a full day of classes would fit in just fine.
Scripps is off the list, because this visit made her realize how much she values a green campus full of shade trees and four seasons. (Also because she was meh about the other Claremont Colleges, and Scripps taken by itself is much smaller in student body and in number of classes offered than Smith and MHC are.)
She is thinking about whether she wants to be the kind of person that Wellesley would push her towards being. Parent opinion is that she would not be happy there, because she really dislikes it when other people are openly competitive about being stressed / overworked / over committed. Honor codes that forbid the discussion of grades are really appealing to her. Barnard will be too integrated into the city / too small in campus acreage / insufficiently full of trees. Plus she says she hated Barnard’s dorms in the YouTube video that showed them.
I would really like Agnes Scott to be a good fit, but it has insufficient depth of classes in a specific area of interest. My guess is also both too small and without sufficient seasons.
Bryn Mawr will be the next visit!
You may think that now, but when your child is sick, you may want to be there.
My daughter had the flu (actual, diagnosed flu) twice last year. She was sick. She didn’t know what to do. She just wanted soup and a vaporizer. You’d think a hospital could take care of her but really, people aren’t admitted for the flu and yet people die from it. I wanted to go there but it is 2000 miles and she was sick and whining and said not to come.
If this had been my other kid, I would have driven the 2 hours to her school immediately. Oh, and this wasn’t her freshman year but her senior year, when she’d turned 21 and didn’t need me right? Wrong. It was really the most helpless I’d felt in a long time.
In Wisconsin, you can do more than just sit at a bar with an underaged kid. You, as her parent, can buy her drinks. It doesn’t matter if she’s 7 or 17, it’s legal for parents (or spouses) to buy drinks for their children/spouse in Wisconsin.
She actually had a couple of health issues that lead to tearful phone calls while out of the country this past summer. “I’m a thousand miles away, and can’t do anything but make sympathetic noises from here. Go downstairs and buy some OTC meds at the campus store / talk to the RA, or suck it up.” I’m a pretty unsympathetic parent and had zero desire to be there. 
That said, I found that soup-equivalent delivery can be accomplished via the internet and Google Translate.
If you’re sick enough from the flu that you’re in actual danger of dying, the hospital will admit you!
yes,the hospital will admit you if you know enough to go to the hospital. Most 21 year olds who have never been sick before know the difference between just feeling miserable and being near death.
It’s fine if you think it won’t be a problem but have you ever tried to get medical help on a weekend in Grinnell Iowa or Appleton Wisconsin? I felt lucky my daughter had some friends who could call for an ambulance if she became unconscious and would even go get her soup but I still had 2 very sleepless nights worrying about her.
I forget if Lawrence has a hospital a mile away, or two hospitals, each a mile away. The info session people apparently get that question a lot, because it’s part of the standard spiel.
Sometimes terrible things happen, both to college age people and to fully fledged grownups. It’s nice to think that as parents we could prevent those terrible things from happening, and that the actions that we take to prevent them would have no negative consequences of their own. But the reality is that terrible things happen even when you do everything “right,” and there’s an anecdote that makes every decision “wrong.” I know a kid who went to college 90 minutes from home, so she’d be close to her parents if she needed them. She fell asleep driving home one weekend and died. Kids still living with their parents in our area have died of bacterial meningitis and suicide.
My kid already has a little health anxiety. “But you might get sick” is not a healthful message to send her. “Your parents might worry” is my issue, not one to burden her with.
Parents don’t need to be able to drive and help (except in life threatening emergencies) they only need to check college facilities+make sure everything is in place in case of illness: thermometer, soup packets, comfort chocolate bar, baggie with emergency ibuprofen/imodium, cough medicine, Peptobismol, all in small box “open in case of illness”.
Learning self care is part of the adulting one does in college.
Me: I’d originally planned to visit Bryn Mawr on the Monday you have off in February, which would leave Spring Break free for other schools. But if Bryn Mawr is the only other school you care about, visiting over Spring Break would give you more time there.
Kid: I can’t only apply to three schools! [NB: Mount Holyoke, Smith, Bryn Mawr] What if I don’t get in to any of them?!
Me: How many would you like to apply to?
Kid: Five or maybe six.
Me: If you applied to Lawrence plus the three women’s colleges, and only got into Lawrence, would you be okay with that? Because Lawrence has EA, so you’d know in December.
Kid: Ugh. I mean, realistically I would be fine. But I like the other schools so much better. Make it six or seven total applications.
Me: Sometimes that’s the trade-off you have to make. If you apply to three more schools that are all harder to get into than your current list, it doesn’t really reduce your chances that you’ll have no acceptances.
Ugh is right, kiddo. How ya gonna keep 'em down on the farm?
Of the schools on the list with EA or rolling admissions, and higher acceptance rates than Mount Holyoke, I don’t anticipate there are any she’d prefer to Lawrence. Mills and Agnes Scott I think will be too small, because they are half the size of Lawrence, which she said felt small. Puget Sound is even whiter than Lawrence. Clark schedules the only sections of the two classes currently on her must-have list for the same time slot (plus she’s still thinking physics major, and the pictures prominently displayed on the undergrad physics department page include zero women).
So I think it might be worthwhile to rethink my “no out of state publics” stance, and look for some rolling admissions / auto-admit by stats schools. Ideally all four seasons, ideally a very liberal student body, ideally COA after not-super-selective merit of not more than $40k.
(Do I think there’s any realistic chance she’d be shut out of all three schools? No. They’re all test-optional and her current scores are smack in the middle of the 25th-75th range for those submitting. She’s likely top 5%, with good unweighted grades and good rigor. She’s a good writer and teachers like her. She’ll have two 4-year ECs with both school and community components and some leadership/volunteering aspects. They have RD admissions rates of 50%/37%/35%, so not crazy low. But still. A less desirable acceptance or two in hand in September / October / December takes the edge off waiting for April.)
UVermont should match everything you want.
St Mary’s of Maryland (the public honors college)- might feel small but a safety otherwise.
CNU Honors and Presidential Scholars (deadline soon!)
Watauga College + Honors at App State.