No parent veto here. All schools were discussed before applications were sent. Our DD only applied to five schools. We would have been happy to have her as a student at any of these five schools…or we would have had a serious discussion BEFORE the applications were sent.
For the record…our kids final top two choices were Santa Clara University where she matriculated and graduated…and University of South Carolina. Both schools would have been fine with us. SHE made the final choice.
Stay on topic. The Princeton women’s BB team going 30-0 is not remotely on topic. Talking about a parent insisting on Yale + $250,000 (perhaps) over Duke is on topic, and arguing that Duke is equal to Yale in many ways is in support of that argument. He admitted his bias, so if you disagree do it without attacking him personally. It’s an opinion, for crying out loud.
In my house, I have absolute veto power but know it won’t be necessary. Because we cannot rely on the NPC because of a non-custodial bio parent and a small business ownership, I allowed D to apply to 19 schools including several safeties and several reaches. But…she knows what the budget cap is. She will be allowed to choose any school under that budget but she is a bright girl, chances are she will understand that a safety school that costs more than a top NE LAC isn’t the wisest choice even if they are within close distance of a ski slope or a Panera lol. Now, if the difference between that same safety school and the top NE LAC is $20K/year, maybe the ski slope school is the way to go!
The parents chose? With two such outstanding schools, you couldn’t really go wrong either way. They didn’t let the student choose?
They knew their kid. Yale was always his first choice, but with a full scholarship from Duke it was hard for him to ask his parents to pay 200k+ (back then) for Yale. I think he was deferred by Yale for SCEA. I heard he had an excellent 4 years at Yale. My kid was more straight forward. She told us what she wanted.
Duke has such an impressive program for those who win their award, I’d have to say I’d push Duke over Yale.
Lucie, UMiami posts criteria for their merit scholarships. Plus, we are FL residents. I do not recall if the same criteria apply to OOS applicants.
I personally may have done the same, but everyone is different.
I’d like to roll back my comment a bit. Students have to figure out which school fits them best. For me, it was Duke. For others, it might not be. Parents shouldn’t intervene, and I am incredibly thankful that mine didn’t, or I might not be at Duke (maybe at Stanford, maybe at my flagship state university).
Sometimes a student will apply to multiple schools with a major in mind, and then upon visiting schools, determine that one school’s program fits the student better over the other school’s program.
It is interesting how many posters say they don’t veto but yet forbid applying to the school at all. Isn’t it the same thing just earlier in the process?
@StanManYea I’ll similarly retract my personal remarks. But I do want to take issue with one of your (repeated) positions:
“…parents shouldn’t have the final say in where there kids go to school.”
“Parents shouldn’t intervene…”
In a real and moral sense, parents never finish raising their children, ever.
In a legal sense, many students are selecting colleges to apply to, and to attend, when they are still minors. They often don’t have the legal right to make such a decision on their own.
In a basic fairness (as well as legal) sense, whomsoever is paying the bills should have final say on where the money goes.
Even when you are a legal adult, your parents (everyone, really) should retain final say on what they will pay for. For something major like college, where you have to do the work for them to get their money’s worth, you should come to agreement; but you don’t have the right to make your parents pay for your education against their wishes.
Further, they should still intervene if they see (based on their decades of experience as adults that you simply don’t have yet) that you are probably making a grave mistake. (They should never do this lightly, of course.)
@FCCDAD That is certainly a fair point re: who is footing the bill. In my case, I was deciding between two schools (Duke and Stanford) that were identical as far as my parents were concerned (similar/same prestige, both far away from home, both same price) and they decided that they would support whatever decision I made between the two since they would not be the ones living out the four years there. If the options are sufficiently different, I guess the parents deserve input and perhaps even final say. I just think students should go to the place that will best set them up for both short term and long term happiness no matter what. Parents can certainly help their students find that place with their input, I suppose.
I’m not sure the OP and some of the posters are actually posing a sensible question. Why should it be framed as a choice between “Let the student decide” (because they are going to be the one’s going to school) versus “The parents should decide” (because they are going to be the ones writing the checks or at least some of them). Having gone through this process with two terrific kids, I am confident that most high school seniors do not know what they want or what environment will work best for them. They don’t have enough experience to make that judgment. But they have some insight. I also, by virtue of years of life experience (an in my case, experience with a number of elite schools and high end business) have knowledge and insight that they don’t have.
My goal is to prepare my kids to lead happy successful adult lives. The goal isn’t to go to the most prestigious school (and my son tells his friends that when I steered him to an elite LAC instead of an Ivy with a much bigger national/international reputation, he knew I had his interests at heart). The goal isn’t to go to the school where she feels like he/she fits in best socially. I was looking to work with each to find a school where the he/she can flourish and find/develop their talents, build the capability to have a successful career, make deep friendships, build good habits, and add to their knowledge about good ways to go through life. However, this is a constrained optimization problem (with many objectives) because people might have financial, geographic or other constraints. For example, for medical reasons, we wanted my son to be no more than five hours drive from the house, whereas we had no such geographic constraint for my daughter. Others might only consider state schools and schools with good merit aid, for example.
It should be a joint decision in which the kid and the parents pool their knowledge and intuition and try to act in the best long-run interests of the kid. I would typically not try to veto a kid’s plans but to seek to influence them away from things that I believe will be bad for them (I am persuasive). I might actually veto a really bad choice if the child was impervious to reason and evidence, but that didn’t happen in our case. Influence will be a lot easier if the kid already believes I have his or her interest at heart and not mine. [Because my son believes that I have his interests at heart, he changed his mind about which graduate school to attend based upon my strong feelings/knowledge].
Cooperation and joint decision happens when there is a lot of trust between child and parent. Unfortunately for many families, when students are around 16-18 that’s when their relationships are most combative. Some parents have no choice to pull the “my money, my choice” card, and students pull the “my life, my choice.”
CC apparently stands for Country Club, the number of posters at CC worrying about Ivies amazes me. Seriously, how many people in the US have the luxury to shell out $200k plus for an undergrad degree? The going to Yale at full cost when you could have a free ride at Duke story is not one that goes on in 99.5% of US households.
Also I have yet to find any valid study that shows the return on investment for an Ivy exceeds that of a high end flagship state university. Anyone know of one? Sorry for highjacking.
“The going to Yale at full cost when you could have a free ride at Duke story is not one that goes on in 99.5% of US households.”
Spending one minute thinking about having one’s kid apply to Yale or Duke doesn’t occur in 99.5% of US households.
Amen Pizzagirl.
Just one point on the anecdote about the parents choosing Yale (fully pay) over the Duke full ride. The way I would interpret this–and the way it would have played out if this had happened in our family–is that the student would hesitate to ask his parents to pay for Yale under such circumstances, unless and until the parents said that that’s what they really wanted as well.
Reading this thread with interest. My d and I put together her school list together, after visiting all of the schools and doing a lot of research. She understands that several schools on her list are unaffordable without merit aid. She’s narrowed it down to four schools, any of which I’d be fine with her attending (finances permitting). So it only makes sense to me that she should choose. I do have a favorite, and it’s not the one she’s leaning towards right now, but I’m not the one going.
so you proactively used your parental “veto power” to agree to the parameters of the search in advance.