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][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.[b] 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[/b].[/quote]

+1.  We were heavily involved with the initial list and based the budget on what was needed without taking out parent loans, cutting retirement etc.  Since all the schools on the list were a good fit on paper to some degree and either were within budget or had previously discussed caveats regarding aid needed, we were fine turning over the decision to our kid to decide.

In terms of stretching budget we never put it out there as an option to our kids but behind the scenes DH and I discussed among ourselves if it would be worth it for the no merit/no FA OOS school that was our child’s top choice.  For many reasons we decided against even making the offer - it was a spring admission, it would have been at least 15K/yr difference with costs only increasing each year, we felt we couldn’t up our budget for one without being willing to do so for the younger one so it would be a 120K decision to do so for both kids not including the impact on retirement. We also thought - what if we do all this and our kid doesn’t so well at that college.  In the end we didn’t offer to go beyond what we agreed for the budget and our kid ended up at a very good school that gave them merit and was maybe a half step down in prestige from the spring admissions school.[/quote]

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