Reply to rising 6th grader asking to visit colleges

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I have a similarly aged child who is fixated on a particular university although we’ve never visited nor do we have any connection to it. He uses his plans for future application to motivate all of his middle school work and performance.

I am in full support of having goals and personal standards, but I do not feed into this by planning visits or discussing colleges.

Instead, I praise efforts, hard work and resilience. I also infuse into conversation when he brings up the college, the fact that he has lots of time to think about where he would like to attend college and what he wants to study. I also frequently remind him that there is more than one path to success and to allow himself grace and flexibility.

In my child’s case, he has a lot of self-imposed pressure and I want to ensure that I am helping him to create a release valve for all of this.[/quote]

OP here. This is EXACTLY how she is, which is why I don't want to feed into it.

On the other hand, I kinda of wonder if I can play dumb and maybe run her by this specific colleges as well as others to get her thinking more outside the box. I can see that backfiring, though.[/quote]

I was her. Definitely visit many colleges at this age! I saw Harvard on a vacation when I was in elementary school. The only other college I saw all the way through college acceptances was our local state college. I obsessed over Harvard because it symbolized “college” to me. So naive!

I ended up going to Yale, but I think I would have had an easier and healthier middle school and high school life and made better college choices if I’d seen a variety of colleges and understood the options. I turned down a few excellent SLACs, applied to and got into the wrong Ivys for my needs and personality, and never even considered state flagships that would have been way better fits just because I didn’t know what they were like. Now we take my child to every college we’re ever near. [/quote]

Same in several respects. When I was 9 my family drove through Dartmouth's campus, I thought it was beautiful and asked if I could go there. My parents had no higher education and said probably not, it was a school for very smart and rich kids. 8 years later I was back at Dartmouth as a freshman on financial aid. I might have been better off at my state school with few loans, but I got it in my head really young that I wanted to go to the smart rich kid school. For my own kids I'm showing them lots of different schools by going to college football games, taking them to my own and my wife's college reunions, etc. They should know there's a lot out there.[/quote]

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