Reply to "Outside of financial constraints: the kid should fully decide w/out parental influence"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Strongly disagree. Why would you want 17-18 year olds making life changing decisions without parental input? That's crazy. 17 year olds aren't even considered competent to enter into contracts.[/quote]

+1 My kid is asking us a lot of questions and wants some guidance. I can't imagine shrugging that off and telling them they're on their own. [/quote]

+2 I do generally think that once you have a set of acceptances in hand and they fit the parent's finances, the choice is the student's. If they want to bounce ideas off me, ask questions, etc. happy to do that. But I'm not going to tell them which one I'd choose, they need to own the decision and not feel like the are disappointing me if they pick differently.

For us, the building of the initial list was heavily parent-led. My kids were swamped with school work and intimidated about how to discern from so many schools what might be a fit. So I set up the initial set of tours to figure out if they had a size/setting/location/etc. preferences. From that I figured out what we could afford, learned about merit vs need aid, did a ton of research, proposed schools for them to go read about and say yes/no/maybe. We did some more tours and I suggested other schools to research based off that feedback.[b] Basically, I did what people hire a college counselor to do. Most kids (unless they are research nerds like me and don't have to consider cost) are going to have a hard time building an appropriate list with zero guidance[/b].[/quote]

New to this process: can you really hire someone to do this? I thought college counselors were more about suggesting strategies etc. -- [/quote]

An essential part of college counseling is help in figuring out your list. IMO, that's really the most complicated part of the whole thing and really where the parent needs to be most involved. As the parent, I wanted to be 100% comfortable with every school on my kid's list and, for some, that meant having very up-front conversations with the kid that school X would only be a possibility if they got aid to meet our budget. Then, once the acceptances are in, you can back off and let them decide (from options that are in-budget if that matters for you) because you have already vetted the schools for the basic criteria so from there it's up to kid to decide what they prefer.[/quote]

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