Dear Academics/Teachers/Et al: Im going to summarize the process (so far) on how our son is applying to college. There are plenty of academics on my FB List -- if they (or others) have additional advice, Im open to hearing it since our sons application process begins this coming school year. Backchannel (remember email?) is fine too... First, our son has not decided on a career or major, but is open to areas like business, healthcare, art and whatever utilizes his bilingual proficiency with Spanish. So Im thinking of him in the undecided category... He took the SATs during his junior year. Taking his test scores and GPA by end of junior year, he researched schools where hed have a good chance of acceptance (some bias was given to Western schools as thatd be nearer family). We judged acceptance in this case by looking at the schools stats on their students standardized test scores, acceptance percentages, and other factors as described on the schools websites. (We also looked at freshman retention rates and actual college graduation percentages as well as class sizes but, for now, are holding those in the back of our minds vs letting them be a dominant concern in choosing target colleges.) From that grouping, he researched those schools academic curriculum to make sure thered be something of interest. Hes undecided but not entirely clueless :) Weve also done various college visits during the past year. And weve listened, to the extent theres information, to anecdotal information about various colleges rising to our attention based on his research. He then narrowed down his target list. Partly due to his story (briefly, whatever hes achieved in the last five years of school had to occur as he learned English from scratch), we also encouraged adding on his target list some reach schools who we know would offer good education -- schools who might recognize that because of new language acquisition issues, his potential as a student is greater than as revealed by standardized test results (and yes there are issues with standardized testing but thats another story). Humbly I ask, what else should we/I know?
Posted on: Wed, 13 Aug 2014 21:10:08 +0000