What are your recommendations for those new to all of this?

[Anonymous]

If you are good at administrative stuff and reading directions, are a reasonably good proofreader - do not hire a college counselor. Also set up seperate email address for all things college and scholarships, and remember to use that email for Naviance, college board, and common app.

[Anonymous]

Look at your finances realistically to decide what you already have saved and what you need to have and keep saving. College is expensive. By sophomore year, start doing informal visits to get a feel for location, urban vs suburb vs rural; size; diversity maybe; old vs new buildings; east coast vs. middle vs. west coast. Chill on pressure for the kid. Essays should be done by the time senior year starts.

[Anonymous]

Oh, and your average kid, if you have one, will be fine.

[Anonymous]

Read Who Gets In and Why by Jeffery Selagio up front. Excellent information you can use throughout HS.

It’s unlikely you kid can “win” the college rat race if you play by conventional rules— especially if you want them to get any joy out of HS. So, have your kid run their own race. Let them delve into high level class work they love and take multiple APs in Humanities and none in STEM. Or vice versa. Especially if it aligns with their college goals.

Ignore the USNWR rankings. They don’t tell you how good a particular department is or whether you kids will be happy there. Get data from the Common Data set (Google Common Data Set, college name).

Start visiting early, then look for cross applications with schools your kids loves for ideas of other schools that are similar.

Visit and interview if it’s offered. Demonstrated interest matters to some degree for most SLACs and small to medium colleges. They also do things like track emails, so they can see if you are opening them.

Be aware of the ED landscape. Small and medium schools might be filling more than half their class ED. And ED can turn a high match/ waitlist into a yes. WM is notorious for this. And that’s a better use of ED than applying to a school with a 98% chance of a no.

For now, TO does not seem to mean TO for white and Asian UMC kids. But, don’t assume the SAT is the right test. Many kids are naturally stronger in one. Down load the practice tests from the website and have them take both. Then Google concordance tablets to see which was stronger. It will tell you your 34 equals a 1520. Prep the test your kid is stronger in.

Also, don’t blow off APs exams. Scores seem to matter more in the land of TO.

Have your kid do activities they love. But by 10th grade, they should stick with band, orchestra, their sport, forensics, drama.

And the most important part. Research, research, research and find a college that’s a great fit. Niche has an interesting feature where kids are surveyed as to adjectives about their school. They seem very on point. Read the Princeton Review, Unigo, etc descriptions. And, of course visit. Most schools now also do great virtual programs.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:1. College admissions is vastly more competitive now than it was for you, your peers, or even for your kid's older siblings.

2. Further to that, a number of schools that didn't have especially strong reputations a generation ago are competitive and highly regarded now. Some people remain shocked by that.

3. As one might expect of a socially competitive environment like greater DC, there are some on DCUM who treat the choice of college like picking a luxury car, and will endlessly invent reasons to disparage excellent schools that aren't in the so-called top T5 (notwithstanding that fewer than 1 in 20 applications will gain an admissions offer from those five colleges).

4. Despite the widely available data on how tough admissions is for certain schools, some entitled parents on DCUM will guide their kid to apply to those schools alone, and will then be outraged when their kid doesn't win acceptance to their "reaches" or even to often-unrealistic "targets" or "safeties." And will then bitterly blame it on some mixture of demographics, minorities, prejudice, test-optional-policies, colleges' refusal to grant sufficient consideration to an investment in private high school education, and/or poor counseling.

5. The US News rankings are flawed in many ways, including by magnifying small differences (many of the universities on USNWR's "top 100" list are actually tied, and smaller colleges aren't even included in the same list). There are better ranking systems that have sprung up in response, like the WSJ, Forbes, or even Washington Monthly. But for status conscious DCUMers, rather than draw on the good info available elsewhere, all that matters is the difference is whether a college happens to be in USNWR's "T20" or "T30" of "National Universities" or falls just outside it (in which case, can one truly consider it a college worth attending?).

6. DCUM readers are surprisingly provincial, and apart from USNWR's revered "T20" or "T30," tend to be (moronically) dismissive of other excellent universities across the nation that aren't located in the DMV or adjacent states. But hey, if you don't know anything about a school, opine about the climate in that state.

Those six points distill about all you'll learn here on DCUM. There may be other useful tidbits of information that accidentally surface from time to time, but those are swamped by a tidal wave of bile, attitudinizing, stereotypes, groupthink, and bad information. For the rare helpful comment about a school that falls outside the top 100 on the USNWR list, there will be about ten unhelpful ones saying "I wouldn't even let my kid go to that college for free -- it's no Harvard." DCUM/Colleges is like Mean Girls [and Boys] grown up (but not matured) sitting in the high school cafeteria passing judgment on the choices others make, or have to make. The toxic sentiments expressed here will get in your brain like a cancer, completely corrupt your thinking about a challenging process, and likely lead you and your kid astray, or make you feel bad about the choices you end up making.

Run from this site. There's vastly better information about colleges available in many other places. Consider yourself forewarned.

Which other sites or boards would you recommend?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Agreed this forum is not the place to get honest and candid feedback. It seems full of people whose kids have 5.0 GPA and 1590 SAT with an axe to grind because they didn’t get into their birthright university. If you want honesty, talk to your HS college counselor and other upper-classman parents who have actually gone through the process at your school and maybe a college consultant. If you get anchored to realistic expectations earlier in the process, it doesn’t come as quite the shock later on.

I agree. The one problem i saw is parents new to this tend not to believe what the veterans have to say. They just assume that your kid probably wasn’t that good and probably messed up his essay or something but their kid is better and will have a better outcome with top 20 acceptances. So they just tend to sympathize with you and ignore your advice.

[Anonymous]

My feeling is that admissions staff get bored with the parade of high scoring students with traditional instruments, sports and clubs.

They yearn for an application from a nomadic rodeo rider who wants to study the chemistry of metals to create a better horseshoe, and they will tell you all about this kid on the admissions tour.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:1. College admissions is vastly more competitive now than it was for you, your peers, or even for your kid's older siblings.

2. Further to that, a number of schools that didn't have especially strong reputations a generation ago are competitive and highly regarded now. Some people remain shocked by that.

3. As one might expect of a socially competitive environment like greater DC, there are some on DCUM who treat the choice of college like picking a luxury car, and will endlessly invent reasons to disparage excellent schools that aren't in the so-called top T5 (notwithstanding that fewer than 1 in 20 applications will gain an admissions offer from those five colleges).

4. Despite the widely available data on how tough admissions is for certain schools, some entitled parents on DCUM will guide their kid to apply to those schools alone, and will then be outraged when their kid doesn't win acceptance to their "reaches" or even to often-unrealistic "targets" or "safeties." And will then bitterly blame it on some mixture of demographics, minorities, prejudice, test-optional-policies, colleges' refusal to grant sufficient consideration to an investment in private high school education, and/or poor counseling.

5. The US News rankings are flawed in many ways, including by magnifying small differences (many of the universities on USNWR's "top 100" list are actually tied, and smaller colleges aren't even included in the same list). There are better ranking systems that have sprung up in response, like the WSJ, Forbes, or even Washington Monthly. But for status conscious DCUMers, rather than draw on the good info available elsewhere, all that matters is the difference is whether a college happens to be in USNWR's "T20" or "T30" of "National Universities" or falls just outside it (in which case, can one truly consider it a college worth attending?).

6. DCUM readers are surprisingly provincial, and apart from USNWR's revered "T20" or "T30," tend to be (moronically) dismissive of other excellent universities across the nation that aren't located in the DMV or adjacent states. But hey, if you don't know anything about a school, opine about the climate in that state.

Those six points distill about all you'll learn here on DCUM. There may be other useful tidbits of information that accidentally surface from time to time, but those are swamped by a tidal wave of bile, attitudinizing, stereotypes, groupthink, and bad information. For the rare helpful comment about a school that falls outside the top 100 on the USNWR list, there will be about ten unhelpful ones saying "I wouldn't even let my kid go to that college for free -- it's no Harvard." DCUM/Colleges is like Mean Girls [and Boys] grown up (but not matured) sitting in the high school cafeteria passing judgment on the choices others make, or have to make. The toxic sentiments expressed here will get in your brain like a cancer, completely corrupt your thinking about a challenging process, and likely lead you and your kid astray, or make you feel bad about the choices you end up making.

Run from this site. There's vastly better information about colleges available in many other places. Consider yourself forewarned.

+1000. You covered everything

[Anonymous]

What sites do you all recommend for those of us starting out to research, get organized, find information, etc.???? Free or paid. Thanks.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:What sites do you all recommend for those of us starting out to research, get organized, find information, etc.???? Free or paid. Thanks.

College Confidential website
Where you go is not who you'll be, by Frank Bruni to open your mind to wider options.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:No idea where to begin! My DD is just at the start of high school, but I can’t believe how much I’m already hearing about college. Sounds like a totally different scene than when I was applying. What’s important to know?

Also, I hear people talking about ultra high SAT scores in this area. In my day, the kids who got 1400 or 1500 were rare, even at top prep high schools. What’s changed?

Any advice welcome!

So, I had the highest SAT score in my high-achieving HS back in the early 80s at 1420. That score would correlate to a much higher score now. Both the scoring scale of the test has changed and more people pay for test prep to boost scores. So kids haven't changed that much, but the landscape has changed considerably.

[Anonymous]

Chill out.

If your DD is a freshman, don't stress yourself or her over this now. It's very premature.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:No idea where to begin! My DD is just at the start of high school, but I can’t believe how much I’m already hearing about college. Sounds like a totally different scene than when I was applying. What’s important to know?

Also, I hear people talking about ultra high SAT scores in this area. In my day, the kids who got 1400 or 1500 were rare, even at top prep high schools. What’s changed?

Any advice welcome!

Get a free Niche.com log-in, so you can see their admissions scattergrams filtered by major. Just seeing how much easier it is to get into most schools as a history major than as a CS major is really educational.

Niche can also help with filtering colleges. You start ny looking at the entry for one school, and Niche will give you a list of comparable schools.

Another thing to think about is whether you have an independent kid who’d enjoy going to an English-language bachelor’s program in Europe. If so, that might make a good, affordable alternative to your state flagship, but, to take that route, it would be helpful if the kid could have four AP scores of 3 or higher in hand by the middle of the senior year.

Finally, if your kid wants to take charge of the application process and seems to understand it, let your kid do everything possible. Just make it clear how much you can pay, that your kid understands the concept of “financial safety,” and that your kid knows how to use tools like College Confidential, Khan Academy and Niche. Learn how this works for entertainment value, but try to talk about it with your kid as little as possible. If your kid is handling things, come post here, so you have some place to talk about colleges that doesn’t affect your kid.

[Anonymous]

relax and 90% of what the people say about their kids academic record is BS and made up to fit in with the wacky groups that are living and dying with this topic.

find a school where your kid will be happy and run with it. they will make their career, not the school they go to.

[Anonymous]

"Do a quick reality check on whether you’re expected to be full pay at https://finaid.org/calculators/quickefc/ . If you’re full pay and your kid isn’t at the top of the school’s stats, don’t expect any merit aid. Our kid got into two $75k year schools. (Yay, you got into a hard expensive school! Were aren’t paying that.) We should have focused on ED at a reach state school she later got waitlisted at. Doing EA helped get some early acceptances so we weren’t stressed all year. Get the essays done during the summer."

I haven't read the other posts yet but I just had to jump on and tell you to absolutely ignore this bad advice.

The EFC (Expected Family Contribution) has nothing to do with absolutely anything other than your eligibility for a Pell Grant. Pell Grants are for lower income families, and unless you make around $50K or less, you won't qualify. In the next year of so they'll change the name of the stat because it's very misleading and causes confusion.

Instead, Google Net Price Calculator and the name of a school you think your kid might want to apply to. You'll input info on your income and non-retirement savings/assets, and often info about your kid's grades and SAT. You can just estimate all of this. A number will pop out that is the amount that your family will likely pay for your kid to attend that college. You could then go back and do the EFC as PP suggested and you'll see that 99% of the time those numbers won't be close at all.

Also, your kid does not always have to be at the top of the school's stats to get merit aid. There are other reasons beyond stats that the school may be interested in your kid. Geography, race, gender, intended major, skills or talents, etc... can all come into play. My kid had below a 3.0 GPA and got merit at places like Loyola Maryland. He went to high school in DC, so I'm assuming it wasn't geography that got the big $$$. Rather, it was probably that he's a URM and is a male who plans to major in something in the humanities. There are lots of SLACs where female applicants outnumber males by a lot, and those schools will not only be more willing to admit a URM male, they'll also offer merit aid.

Most importantly, schools will be more likely to admit your kid if they're full pay, like my kid was. They know that you have the means to pony up the rest of the tuition even if they give you a deep discount, so they still profit from having your kid there instead of losing them to another comparable school that was willing to offer $10K more. For example, Fordham might offer you $20K off their $80K price tag, and Santa Clara might offer $30K off their $80K price tag. They know you've got the money to pay either $50 or $60K. Either is going to be a net positive for them, and you'll probably choose Santa Clara if your kid likes both equally. In contrast, if you were only able to contribute $10K each year, the schools like that won't bother wasting their time trying to dangle money in front of you, and they'll most likely choose to admit a kid like mine with a 3.0 full pay over your 3.7 kid. Google Ron Lieber and read all the articles by him to get a grounding in how the game is played these days.

"The modern practice of enrollment management was invented in the mid-1970s by a man named Jack Maguire, who was then the dean of admissions at Boston College, and one of his most important innovations was to deploy financial aid strategically, as a way to attract the students he most wanted to admit, whether they genuinely needed financial assistance or not. It was something of a radical idea — giving aid to students who didn’t need it — and it didn’t seem, at first, to make sense. But in the 1980s, other colleges began experimenting with this new strategy, giving these grants the euphemistic name “merit aid,” and they found it worked remarkably well. It turned out that offering grants — even relatively small ones — to students with high family incomes made it significantly more likely that those students would enroll in your college. (If you called the grant a “scholarship,” it worked even better.) And if a well-off student was willing to pay, say, $30,000 of your $40,000 tuition, that was still a pretty good deal for your college." https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/09/10/magazine/college-admissions-paul-tough.html