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[quote=Anonymous]Too early.  Prior to junior year, stop by colleges when you are on family vacations, maybe for a walk-through or drive-through, just to see what they look like.

As the others said, you have no idea what your child's academic stats will be.  It doesn't take much to kick them down a notch from a remotely realistic reach to unreachable.  For super-highly-selective schools, one bad semester will do it.  (Ultimately, the college list will be divided among reaches, matches and safeties.  The schools in your list are reaches for all due to low acceptance rates.)

What you can do in the meantime:  spend your own time reading on the internet, to get the lay of the land in college admissions.  Understand that Stanford is practically a joke, with a 4% acceptance rate.  Learn about what these schools require, not just for stats but the special sauce, the subjective factors beyond stats.

By junior year, you can get an idea of what sort of student you are working with, from grades and any prior standardized test scores.  For example, there is no point in taking a 3.5 kid to sit through &gt;two hours of info session + tour at Stanford; that kid's reach might be Santa Clara.

A large part of your job as a parent will be to manage the financial angle.  Plan the budget.  Run Net Price Calculators on colleges' financial aid websites to see whether they might be affordable.  Look at rising cost of attendance and plan ahead for the cost to be greater than what it is this year.

NB, like many public universities, the UCs do not give financial aid to out-of-state students and also charge more.  &gt;65k cost of attendance (probably closer to 70).  Usually, that is not worthwhile from out of state, because a kid who can afford that and can get accepted may find a better deal at a highly selective private university where there are no overcrowding issues or issues with getting courses and graduating on time.  (Notable exception to the CA public affordability situation is Cal Poly, a Cal State university that is cheaper, 43k out of state cost of attendance, with an excellent reputation.)
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