Your high school senior will be receiving responses from most of his or her prospective colleges by the first of April, and the universal enrollment deadline is the first of May. After all the agony of completing applications and essays, and the excruciating anxiety of waiting, now the ball is in your teen’s court at last.
April carries a different kind of angst. How to decide?
I encourage you to turn to several of my posts for advice, empathy and support: Waiting for the “Fat Envelope“, Standing Out on the Waiting List, Admitted Students Day: A Different Kind of College Visit, and Decision-Making 101. In this post, I offer three principles to keep in mind when making that final decision:
1. There is no “perfect” decision; compromise is part of life. There may have been a time, earlier in your son or daughter’s senior year, when he or she thought, “There is only ONE college for me!” Perhaps this all-or-nothing ideal has already faded, if your student was denied, deferred or waitlisted at an early notification or regular decision “dream school.” Your teen has probably become wiser and more realistic over the past few months. How nice that this painful process has resulted in enhanced maturity!
Compromise is part of good decision-making. Sometimes we can’t have everything we originally wanted, but that does not mean we can’t have anything. Hopefully, we can be resilient enough to de-invest in the original choice, process the disappointment, and redirect our energies toward another worthy option.
For example, just because the most beautiful girl in the senior class has turned you down for the prom does not mean you cannot persuade another desirable girl to go with you. And who knows, you may actually have more fun with that girl than with the original one, if you approach the situation with openness, flexibility and enthusiasm. This simple metaphor applies to getting into college, finding a job, a spouse, and many future life choices. Hopefully, it is a life lesson you yourself have successfully learned, and you will be able to guide your child in learning it.
2. The “wow” factor is something worth considering, but not everything. It is certainly desirable for the chosen college to offer a “wow” factor that gives you and your student a feeling that this long struggle has had a rewarding outcome. By “wow” factor, I mean your teen’s gut feeling that he or she can be really happy at this school, driven by the perceived “fit” from college visits.
Yes, the “wow” factor can even include jazzy features like being located in a “hot” city, offering academic prestige or a social caché that enables a kid to hold his head high among peers, and so forth. We’re all human, after all, and we don’t have to be so morally superior so as to pretend these things don’t count. It is okay for these elements to be a part of the “wow” factor, within reason, as long as they do not become more important than the student’s authentic belief that he or she will be happy and successful at the school.
So it’s desirable that the chosen college offers a “wow” factor. But just like any big-ticket, complex purchase, the buyer needs to look beyond that overall good feeling. For example, if you are buying a car, you probably want a “wow” factor, such as snazzy styling and speed, or prestigious, classic luxury. A car is more than transportation; let’s face it, nobody wants a boring, ho-hum automobile that offers no excitement.
But you also need to pay attention to attributes beyond the “wow” factor. Can you afford the car, or can you get financing that will be acceptable to you? Does the car offer the practical features you need, such as: four wheel drive if you live in a snowy, mountainous area; high safety ratings if it is for a first-time driver; large trunk if you will use it for family travel; or economical gas mileage if you have a long commute?
You and your student need to look beyond the “wow” factor for college, too. Affordability (now that financial packages are in) and numerous other dimensions all need to be analyzed now, with a much sharper pencil. You may be comparing two or more schools, and the one with the slightly higher “wow” factor may lose out once you have compared all the relevant factors in this complex decision.
Below is a checklist of the key factors to be considered, most of which you have examined before. These features need to be revisited again, however, because your teen has evolved over the past year. Your son or daughter’s perspective has changed, and priorities have most likely shifted.
• Affordability (family financial situation, need-based aid, merit scholarships, estimated future debt your child will carry under each school alteranative)
• Public or private university, or liberal arts college (visits may have shifted student’s preferences)
• Academic program (student’s likely major, changing academic interests, flexibility for further mind-changing)
• Extracurricular activities (student’s changing priorities)
• Size (visits may have shifted preferences)
• Urban, suburban or rural setting (visits may have shifted preferences)
• Physical campus (visits may have shifted preferences)
• Social atmosphere (visits may have shifted preferences)
• Geographic region (visits may have shifted preferences)
• Distance from home (student’s tolerance for distance, transportation costs)
• Support services (for physical, learning or emotional challenges)
3. Remember, this is not the only important decision your adolescent will ever make. The college choice is the first of many major, multi-factor, life decisions your son or daughter will make in the future; decision-making is a “lifetime sport.”
The beauty of this situation is that you are sharing the decision, providing guidance and role modeling, and you obviously have major skin in the game. Since you are most likely financing college, this decision will not be entirely left up to your child, no matter how autonomous, mature, or determined he or she may be. From my perspective, it should not be totally up to your student, who is, after all, only seventeen. Your son or daughter should have significant input, but I feel it needs to be a collaborative decision, leveraging the parents’ wisdom and experience.
This decision should be a participative learning experience, in my view, that will set the stage for your adult child’s optimal, independent decisions in the future. When your student chooses internships, a job, a place to live, graduate school, and other key decisions in the next few years, he or she will have a valuable template upon which to draw. Choosing one’s college, with parental support, is one of the initiating “rites of passage” to adulthood!
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