Gents/Ladies, my oldest is wrapping up 10th grade. He just got his Pre-ACT test results back and got a comprehensive score of 35. I haven't spent too much time in here, but I'm wondering if anybody has tips or suggestions on what steps we should be taking with him now to help him find the right fit for college. I was going to order the Princeton Review on Amazon for him to use, but would love to hear some feedback before making the purchase. Is that the best book? Are books outdated now?
Money is going to be tough for us. 5 kids, one income. We've been saving for him since he was little in 529s, but there's not nearly enough in there to cover his college, even if he goes to a state school. Pretty daunting and the cause of stress for me.
Would it be beneficial for me to start on page 1 in here and read forward? TIA for any help.
Hi, GM.
Congrats on that amazing score! I don't know if you need to go all the way back to the beginning, maybe just go back 10 or 15 pages. I'll give a brief summary of the conventional wisdom from this thread.
1. Despite that great pre-ACT score, he should still do at least some test prep before taking it for real. Since $ is tight, you don't need to pay for a prep course (especially since he's starting from a good place) but online and/or books are still a good idea.
2. I find the Fisk Guide to be the best book for researching schools. No need to buy the 2019 version - you can get it from your local library or get last year's version for super-cheap. It doesn't change much from year to year.
3. A helpful way to begin the search is to consider very broad categories. Is there a particular part of the country/region he wants to be in? A particular setting - like urban, or college town, or rural, or whatever. What size - big university with DI sports, or liberal arts, etc? And also field of study - is he definitely engineering/science, or business, or humanities, or undecided? Doing that exercise will begin to bring a manageable range of schools into view.
As you're doing that, try to visit at least one school from each bucket that's of interest to him - e.g., big state, small liberal arts, mid-size urban. I recommend starting close to home and even at a school/schools he's not very interested in. That way it becomes like a practice visit that you can use to inform your "real" visits. And you're not wasting tons of travel time if it turns out - like my kid - that small liberal arts colleges repulse him.
4. You're probably anecdotally aware of this, but competition at the highly selective schools is insane. More insane than you can actually bring yourself to believe. We've got parents of kids here who rocked 4.0 GPA, 35 and 36 ACTs, #1 or 2 in their class, completed high level research, etc. and were shut out not just of Harvard and Stanford, but also non-Ivy schools (like Vanderbilt, Pomona, etc, etc). But also realize that those schools, despite attracting the vast majority of the attention, are a tiny percentage of all schools. In 2017, 17 schools had admit rates of less than 10%. 29 admitted between 10 and 20 percent. However those schools accounted for just 4.1% of student enrollment that year. Meanwhile, more than half the schools in the country admitted two-thirds or more of their applicants.
I bring up the highly competitive schools because with a 35, your son might be considering some of them. But keep in mind, grades and the rigor of your kid's curriculum are more important than test scores.
5. MONEY. The very top schools don't give much, if any, merit aid. But they are generous with the need-based aid. Once you target some schools, go to their websites and find the Net Price Calculator (NPC). If you have your most recent tax return in hand, you can fill out the NPC in about 10 minutes and get a preliminary but surprisingly accurate ballpark figure of how much need-based aid each individual school will give you. Sometimes the most expensive schools are also some of the most generous with aid, so don't be scared off by the sticker price.
Merit aid (commonly known as scholarships) are essentially discounts that lower-ranked schools will award to highly qualified students in order to entice them to enroll. For example, Vanderbilt knows that all things being equal, every kid they admit who also gets into Harvard will go to Harvard - so they might offer a kid $30,000 in merit aid and now suddenly Vanderbilt is a much more desirable destination. If your son gets a 35 on the ACT (and has grades to match), he will be a target for some significant merit aid. But remember, the higher you go in the rankings, the less merit aid they have to offer. The lower you go, the more generous schools will be.
As your son builds his list, he needs to have not just a safety school - a school you absolutely know will admit him that he can see himself attending - but also a financial safety school: a school he'll get into, that he doesn't hate, and that you can afford. And it's ok to have that discussion with him. I find kids today are very aware of and understanding about financial constraints. My kid really didn't like his financial safety, but he understood the need to have at least one place on our list that we could afford to send him to if all else failed. Luckily it didn't come to that, but it gave me peace of mind.
Finally, the forums on the College Confidential website are a great source of information - though you have to spend some time there to get a sense of who has authoritative knowledge and who's a goofy high school kid. A lot of the parents there are anti-loan zealots, but there is a message board about literally every college in the U.S. and you will find reliable sources for every one. The Parents, Financial Aid, and College Admissions forums all have a lot of good info (along with a lot of noise).
I think this is a really good thread and people are happy to help.
There is definitely a lot of useful info in this thread(and many of these kids are on an amazing track) but a lot is geared towards people targeting the ultra competitive schools. My situation was similar to GMs, we had a much more casual lower pressure search with smaller schools in mind.
