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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I have a junior who is at a private school that literally forces the parents into this circus. Perhaps all the privates do, but at ours, it's a military operation. It has me going completely crazeeeee! [b]My child plays a sport that's only played at a relatively small number of colleges, most of them private, so that is a restriction on the schools that he will attend that is doubling my craziness! On top of that, we are not eligible for FA, but can't afford to pay for any private college, so have to negotiate this very hazy world of "merit" aid in order to get DS into a school we can afford and where he can play his sport. [/b]I feel like DS will end up at a community college in the end -- to the complete revulsion of parents (and the counseling office) at our school!

[/quote]

To me, this kind of limitation is actually very freeing. There are, literally, THOUSANDS of colleges. It's extremely helpful to have objective measures by which to narrow the list.

If the sport is that important, start with the list of all the colleges that offer that sport. Let's say OP's son is a potentially world class fencer. According to wiki, these are the schools with NCAA-sanctioned men's fencing teams:

BC
Duke
UNC-Chapel Hill
Notre Dame
Brown
Columbia
Harvard
Penn
Princeton
Yale
US Air Force Academy
Cleveland State
University of Detroit--Mercy
Lafayette
New Jersey Institute of Technology
Ohio State
Penn State
Sacred Heart
Stanford University
St. John's University (NY)
UCSD
Wayne State
Brandeis
Cal Tech
Drew
Haverford
Hunter
Johns Hopkins
Lawrence (WI)
MIT
NYU
Stevens Institute of Technology
Vassar
Yeshiva

This is actually a great list from which to start--a mix of reaches, matches, and safeties for almost any kid; public & private; very pricey privates and not-so-pricey privates; large, medium, and small; some that give good merit aid; some that are Division I and may give athletic scholarships if your son is of that caliber. Etc.

If you can start from a list like this (schools that offer your sport of choice), you and your son can sort them into groups depending on their selectivity vis a vis your son (reaches, matches, safeties) and then within those groups estimate their likely affordability by running net price calculators, and doing some research on which schools offer merit aid and whether your DS is a good candidate for merit aid (test scores in the top 25% for the school, etc.). Then you can start to narrow the list in each group based on location, size, social elements, fit, etc.

Easy. :-)[/quote]

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