I think the point that is always missing on these threads is the fact that the top tier schools also happen to give the best financial aid. If I were in the financial position to pay for my daughter to go to a lesser ranked school, I wouldn’t be stressed at all. The need for a ton of FA creates a stress in and of itself. I ran the net price calculator at some of the mid-tier schools and laughed. While my daughter is above the 75th percentile stats wise, there is no way we could afford them. Match my daughter’s need for aid with her desire to study both Japanese and Arabic at university and there are not limitless options.
As much as I try not to be stressed about it, I can’t help it. I am sure there are many other parents in the same boat as I. We aren’t prestige hounds. We just can’t afford state schools and mid-tiered schools.
@momofmusician17 Check out IU-Bloomington, which has good merit aid and will be one of the top options for that combination of majors. Ole Miss would be another and has great merit aid. The best language schools aren’t highly ranked, except Middlebury.
But in order to qualify for those top tier schools with the best financial aid, the student also needs top tier stats-- and in most cases those stats are going to qualify for substantial merit money at lower tier schools, including many state publics which offer stats-based full rides to out of state students.
I agree that finances can be a huge barrier and source of stress for students who don’t have the stats to get merit aid — but hoping to get lucky with college that is a huge reach is probably not the best way to go about addressing the financial issues
+1 to the money side of things. We’re at the spot for financial aid where good merit money from lower-ranked LACs and need-based aid from most meet-full-need schools get us to the same net price at every point along the spectrum - except that HYP would be half that cost.
If we couldn’t pay the higher amount, my kid who hates her big impersonal high school would have the option of big impersonal flagships or HYP. If she were an outgoing go-getter or a potential business or engineering major, she’d do fine at a flagship. But she’s the kid who will step back rather than fight for space and a likely social science major; it would be easy for her to get lost, even in an honors college.
Not necessarily a good fit for HYP either. The elite schools have a lot of resources but not necessarily all that much hand-holding-- and in that environment the student can expect to be surrounded by and possibly overshadowed by a lot of highly-competitive, ambitious students with go-getter attitudes.
That description really sounds more like the “Colleges That Change Lives” type of kid-- perhaps a smaller LAC where her talents will be more likely recognized and supported.
And yes, I realize that the money thing is still a problem. I’m just saying that HYP and their financial-aid-generous peers are known for many things… but not necessarily as supportive environments where less confident students will be nurtured.
@momofmusician17 Pay attention to @itsgettingreal17’s post. She and I both had dd’s going through college apps last yr and both of them wanted to pursue languages plus an additional major. Our budget is very, very tight and we can only afford about 1/3 of our EFC. (We cannot afford even “generous” schools.) We also had no in-state options that fit our dd’s academic level (she graduated from high school at a 400 level in Russian and no in-state options had enough Russian courses.)
There are publics like Ole Miss (check out the Croft program) and IU (Wells Scholarship) that offer merit. If your dd is competitive for top schools, she should try for competitive merit at a wide range of schools (there are many out there; it just takes a serious commitment to researching schools and finding ones that fit your dd’s criteria.)
@allyphoe You might be surprised at how intimate depts can be at “big impersonal flagship.” My 2 current college kids both attend flagships and both of them have excellent relationships with professors and with depts. Some depts can be huge, but some can be very, very small. For both of them, their respective depts are definitely on the small side.
@momofmusician17 You are absolutely right to make sure that finances are part of the conversation. For families who really can’t afford college without the help of those few “meets full need” schools, the stakes are much higher. In that case, it isn’t about prestige but out access.
@momofmusician17 I thought of Connecticut College when I read your post because our tour guide there was an Arabic minor living in the language house, I know a graduate who is a Japanophile, and their NPC seems to be working.
Now we’re getting to the heart of it. My hunch is that one of the principal causes of overreach is misguided parental expectations. I knew a couple who had a very bright, even gifted son. From the time the kid was about 6, the mother’s constant refrain was, “Johnny’s so smart, he’s going to get into Harvard.” It wasn’t a joke, she meant it. I thought, “Poor kid, he’s talented enough that he might very well get into Harvard, but he’s being set up. If he doesn’t get into Harvard, he’s going to be a failure.” I tried to encourage the mother to tone it down, pointing out that it’s a longshot for even the brightest applicants, but she was hearing none of it, so confident was she of Johnny’s extraordinary abilities… And guess what, Johnny didn’t get into Harvard. He did get into Michigan, his parents’ alma mater, which he regarded as his safety. For an in-state applicant with a sterling academic record Michigan was probably a match, certainly not a reach, but that’s a kid who could easily have overreached because all his life he’d been told that he was so special that schools like Harvard were a lead-pipe cinch.
II suspect there are many similar stories out there—in fact, I can think of several others in my own experience. Parents of very bright kids want to believe their kids are special, and sometimes don’t realize there are tens of thousands of similarly bright kids out there who will be competing for the same handful of slots at the same super-elite colleges. And if the parents don’t do their homework, their expectations—and the kids’—can easily get out of whack. As others have said, there’s nothing wrong with reaching. It’s only if you fail to have reasonable fallbacks that it becomes a problem.
@gallentjill We can’t afford our EFC at the generous “meets full need” schools. Thankfully our kids have been awarded competitive merit and have been able to attend college at a fraction of the cost that those schools would cost.
Our current high schooler is not so competitive. She will be living at home and commuting to the local school bc that is what our budget can afford. But, for our really academically strong kids, competitive merit has been the blessing that has enabled them to attend colleges that are better academic fits in terms of providing majors and courses that they want/need. (They applied broadly and really focused on their merit applications. Some they were awarded; many they were not. Kids definitely need to apply with complete anticipation of not being awarded them. But, the chances are 0 if they don’t. Automatic merit has been our back up plan.)
@Mom2aphysicsgeek Fortunately, we don’t have a financial constraint, so a smaller LAC is where she’s likely to end up. She did a tour of the local LAC-like U, with 3,500 undergrads on 100 acres, and sat in on a class with 20 kids, who happened to be doing some in-class review, so the professor spent 15 minutes talking to her about the program. “This school is somewhere between about the right size and too big, both physically and in the number of students,” she reported back.
And that was when I said it would probably not make sense to look at ASU Barrett over Labor Day break.
Her teachers all know her and like her. She has solid friend groups in both lunch periods, and the number of kids she’ll have ever had a class with is actually pretty small. She still feels like a nameless faceless number. The heart wants what the heart wants, I guess!
I think sometimes kids overreach because they don’t have adults who are guiding them. About one year before my eldest applied to colleges, I immersed myself in College Confidential to try and learn what I could. I came away from it believing it was most important to find the great safety schools for her rather than the dream schools. And, most importantly, we focused on that elusive notion of fit. We created a list bottom up, not top down. It is easy to find the dream schools. It is much harder to find the safety schools that our “average excellent” student would want to attend.
Her guidance counselor was new to the field and didn’t offer much help. Her high school was a small religious school that mostly sent kids to local junior colleges, states schools, and several Christian colleges. Her peers were no help. Her teachers really couldn’t help. And at 17, she didn’t know what was out there. So her mom and I worked with her to find what type of college, where did she want to live, what did she want to study, and then she visited several on her list to make sure it was what she wanted. In the end, she had great options because she loved her safety schools as much as her reach schools.
I think too many kids/parents chase prestige and, knowing little else, overlook really great colleges and universities because they are not highly ranked. As we discussed my daughter’s admission options, ranking was never part of the conversation. She never once looked at US News or other ranking services. Her mother and I did in order to get a read on creating an college list but only because we didn’t know what was out there either. But we did not suggest colleges based on ranking. While she did end up at a highly ranked school, ranking had nothing to do with her selecting it. She liked the campus, the curriculum, the community and the opportunity to leave home for an adventure.
@BearHouse it’s great that you were able to pull that off but the kids at our school are very aware of rankings and are competitive with each other. I can talk until I’m blue in the face but S19 knows what’s what. Now, I can keep explaining that admissions is crazy competitive and he knows that many bright seniors this year ended up at their “safety” but I don’t know that he won’t be at least a little disappointed at the end. Of course, we are doing our best to find matches he likes.
I often cite this example: A few years ago, we visited a tip-top LAC. At the info session, the admissions rep said 70% of applicants were fully qualified. Admissions was confident that they would succeed academically and otherwise at the school. At the time, the school accepted 14% of applicants (lower now). So 4 in 5 fully qualified applicants were denied admission. Now do the math at a 7% acceptance rate, assuming 70% qualified applicants. That would mean 9 out of 10 fully qualified applicants are denied admission. Now how about for Stanford, Harvard, etc., which have a sub 5% acceptance rate. Not to mention that, considering “hooked” applicants, like recruited athletes, many spots are already taken, so the real numbers are lower than the overall numbers.
It’s just incredibly important for students to understand that there are many, many schools outside the Top 30 or Top 50 that are outstanding by every standard, but have much saner admissions numbers. In my state alone, I think there are five schools where students will find absolutely tip-top students, faculty, and staff and where they will receive an education every bit as fine as at the most competitive schools, in surroundings just as beautiful.
@homerdog That is too bad! And yes, our daughter did not come from a competitive environment. Only a few students left the state and only one other student went to a highly ranked college. However, that student was pursuing a particular major more than the college.
How do you think kids are being fed the ranking info? Other parents? Counselors? Or are the kids just that motivated on their own? I see posts on CC all the time with “school A is higher ranked” only to discover they are 5-10 places separating the colleges. It is clear that they do not even understand what the ranking is telling them. I wonder if your son could tell you what he thinks the ranking actually means? Better school? He will be more successful? He will have a better social life?
Aside from “ranking,” other important issues are department or program, curriculum, type of school (LAC or Uni), class size, what are the campus /dorms like, social life/sports/greek, region of country/weather, student body characteristics. All the “fit” qualities that are actually more important than ranking. Perhaps trying to shift the conversation from safety, match, reach to helping him discover colleges that offer those intangible and un-rankable qualities. Good luck! All teenagers know it all!
@momofmusician17 – count me as one other parent who discovered that the strongest foreign language programs were at large public U’s, back in the day when I was doing the research for my daughter. Unfortunately my daughter did no test well, so didn’t qualify any sort of automatic full ride awards based on test score or NM status- so publics were equally unaffordable. But I just think that there is strength in numbers and the larger enrollment of many state publics gives them the number of students needed to sustain stronger departments in multiple languages; plus they have graduate programs that are often welcoming of international students, so often plenty of native speakers available to teach the language courses.
