I have no high schoolers next year (! That will be weird!) but I've been meaning to ask my soon to be middle schooler if he's interested in the middle school architecture. And can vouch for Farrar's film as lit class being a blast. Every time I ask my kid how class was he says, "good," which is the highest praise he gives 😂.

Re: the CDC, DH the math teacher said, "I mean, I still recommend my students do their homework." Sigh.

Did you fill out the fafsa earlier and not get the SAI? Or did you just get it submitted now? We did two, and it gave us an SAI for one but not the other.

DS just got what I guess is a likely letter from the music school at UGA...an "official decisions will be released later this month, but we think you'll be pleased with the results" sort of e-mail. When I said I didn't know if anywhere could compete with St. Olaf I meant, "I mean, except probably the music school at UGA." VERY different options, but lots of pros and cons with both. In my mind the main con for UGA is if he doesn't stick with a music major he's just at a giant state school, which isn't what he wants. And the main pro is it's only an hour and a half away! Also it's his only non CSS school, so we won't have any idea how the money will compare until the FAFSA mess is sorted out (I'm fairly certain he'll get SOME pell, but don't know how much). Also until music scholarships are released at the end of the month. They could end up pretty much the same price or several thousand dollars a year different. This is all because the St. Olaf aid is surprisingly good, so it's a nice problem to have.

It makes sense; it's a really big decision! But it was sort of agonizing to live through on my part!

I'm impressed with all the narrowing down happening! My first two kids both waited until the day before the May 1 deadline to deposit anywhere. We'll see with this kid, though...he won't hear from anywhere else until March, but I have to say I have trouble seeing how most places compete with St. Olaf. It's just got everything he's looking for with good liberal arts college where he can also do music performance. Lawrence has that, too, but I'll be surprised if they can match the FA at St. Olaf (assuming he gets in--that audition is a video one due later this month). But I've certainly been surprised before by kid college decisions!

I thought, "hmm...maybe it doesn't make that big of a difference how many dependents we're listing"...but then I did a calculator online and apparently it makes about $2000 difference in our SAI. Then I got nervous about how I filled out the CSS and made a correction to that. Only I can't actually see anymore how the question was phrased, so I don't know if I answered it correctly! He's not our dependent right now, and we won't claim him as one when this next kid is actually in college, but we will claim him on our 2023 taxes. I'm pretty sure the FAFSA specifically asked if we would have a different number of dependents on our 2023 form, and I clicked yes because I was thinking we wouldn't be able to claim him since he graduated mid-year. ANYWAY, for the CSS they just let you put in an explanation if you think you made a mistake (they don't appear to allow you to change the already submitted form) so I said what the situation is and they can do with the info what they will!

I just checked, and this is what is says right now: 😞

I guess I can add myself to the list of people who need to make a correction and can't until March...I said on the form that we'd have one less dependent this year, but I just went through the requirements for claiming dependents and realized we have one more year of claiming my oldest since he was in college for the first 5 months of 2023. Ugh.

I haven't said much about my oldest kid who's applying to grad schools (math phd) this year, but I guess I'll throw it in here since there's nowhere else for it...he applied to I think 7 or 8 schools and just heard that he got into UC Denver. UC Denver was his closest thing to a safety, and it's also where his girlfriend is. Also the lowest stipend I believe of any of his schools. So it will be interesting to see how he approaches this decision (if there's even a decision to be made. He has a really strong application, but he watched a lot of his friends with equally strong applications not get into any very competitive programs last year, including the girlfriend). My job I'm pretty sure is not to say a word unless asked for advice and even then to tread very, very carefully. On one hand, he's looking at a VERY competitive field, so it seems like he should go to the best program he can. On the other hand, he and the girlfriend seem pretty serious (we met her over Christmas. We like her a lot!) and I'm sure staring down 6 years of long distance relationship seems pretty daunting. So we'll see! I know from sleuthing on message boards that one of his other schools, Georgia Tech, sent out a round of acceptances last week. I don't think HE knows that, though, and I won't tell him. My understanding is that there's a lot of movement on this stuff after the first acceptances go out anyway, so I don't think it means he has no chance there yet. And other kid just had his UGA music audition this morning, and DH reports he was in a very good mood afterwards, so yay! He's chugging along with interviews and sample lessons; I can't even keep up. He has a Vassar alum interview Monday, had a Kenyon one this past week, is trying to set up a Middlebury one, is touring the music department at Emory at some point soon (Emory is, interestingly, probably his brother's top pick of his grad school apps...I would love having both of them at the same school and so close...but odds of that are extremely low. They both applied to Brandeis, too, so there's one other shot at it there).

I'm sorry 😞Georgia Tech is so tough these days, particularly for OOS. My husband teaches at a STEM magnet school north of Atlanta and practically EVERY kid is trying to get into Tech. It's rough out there.

huh! interesting! I ended up starting a chat today, and one person offered to try to find the SAI for me and then the chat timed out. When I started another one she said she couldn't do that, but when I said my other son had his SAI and this kid didn't she said, "I understand but occasionally it is not able to calculate it and you have to wait until the form processes to be able to access it." Which suggests that they're pretending most people are getting the SAI like they're supposed to. This is such a mess.

We've finally gotten both submitted! (my current college kid kept getting a "this form did not save" error, so I logged in and went back to the beginning and clicked through, and the error stopped popping up). And it says HE should get a pell, even though it told my senior he wouldn't. But it didn't actually calculate the SAI for senior when he did it (said "still calculating" or something). There's no reason one of them would get a pell and the other wouldn't (senior has slightly less in savings than the older kid, and that should be the only difference). So--question! Is there a way to go back and see if they've finally finished calculating the SAI for my senior NOW? Or do they just never tell him if they don't tell him right away? It won't show my anything on my end, and I don't know if there's somewhere on his end that he can find it.

This has come up a lot on college confidential; the question is poorly worded...you're supposed to answer yes to that only if you're financially eligible for free lunch, not if you get it because everyone in your school/state/whatever does.

I did! I put one of the albums from a few years ago on my Christmas playlist this year, too 🙂

aw, I'm sorry 😞

St. Olaf finally posted FA, and it's totally doable! yay! He also met with the horn teacher online the other day and liked her a lot, so that's the all the pieces that had to fall into place for St. Olaf to be a great option. Now I'm just going to keep trying to keep his hopes low for March, which ended up being very, very reach heavy since we knew he already had good choices from EA. After his oldest brother's March of the Waitlists, I am all about managing expectations. There are a couple more that he should get into (and there's nowhere where he has no shot or anything, it's just a lot of places that are in that crapshoot for everyone territory). But we're all big St. Olaf fans here, so it will be fine no matter what.

We had a...fun experience last semester where DS took a DE sociology class with absolutely no assessments/feedback whatsoever. The prof assigned tons of reading and had them do a whole bunch of informal writing (posts on the class message board and short responses to the reading), but no grades at all. The most he got was that the prof told them they could all come ask him after class what their midterms grades were and he told DS he was "on track for an A." He stuck with it because the prof had very good reviews and it seemed like everyone who'd put in much effort had gotten an A. And he did get an A, but I'm nearly certain he did more work than almost anyone else in the class, because he actually DID almost all of the massive amount of reading assigned and the 8 million little writing assignments. This was a 3000 level sociology class in which he was the only high schooler; aside from that it was mostly criminal justice majors for whom it was a requirement. The professor spent a lot of time telling them all that the administration hated him and wanted to get rid of him because he's such a radical, but I can think of some other reasons he might not be an administration favorite. Anyway. /tangent.

You're sure you did the 2024-25 form? My understanding is that there's ONLY the IRS retrieval tool now; it's impossible to bypass it and enter things yourself.

oh, sorry--missed that before!

Anyone catch this on NPR? https://www.npr.org/2024/01/09/1222664638/fafsa-student-financial-aid-college They were supposed to change the income allowances to adjust them for inflation, but they...forgot? at any rate, it didn't get done, and now they're trying to decide if they should fix it this year or just have people not get as much FA as they're supposed to get. Wonder if THIS has anything to do with why it's saying DS won't get the pell the estimator says he'll get? What a mess.

Does the professor have reviews on ratemyprofessor? My first thought is that some professors like to talk up the difficulty of the class early on to manage expectations (and perhaps to encourage less serious students to drop the class) and that the reality doesn't always match the hype. If the class IS an unreasonable amount of work (and, yes, I would definitely consider 15 hours a week outside of class for a C to be unreasonable) that should be clear if there are many reviews to look at it. I guess the other thing I'd ask is whether there's a reasonable alternative available to taking the class at this school from this prof? Can it happen a different semester? Can he do it somewhere else (or at home)? That answer would affect my decision.

We managed to get one of the two submitted, but it's still calculating the SAI , it tells us. Also, the estimator told me he'd get a pell, but the e-mail they sent him says he doesn't appear to be eligible for one. BUT ALSO it says it's still verifying his SSN, so maybe it thinks he can't have a pell because it thinks he doesn't have a SSN? who knows? (I wouldn't have been shocked if he didn't get one; we're down one dependent this year and our income was slightly higher, but the estimator showed him getting a bigger one than his brothers have gotten, so it got my hopes up. Also it should only really matter if he goes to our in-state public; all his other schools would be mostly institutional aid anyway). Other kid is just for a renewal of FA, so I'm not as worried about his getting done anytime soon.

yes--I assume that as well--we'll see how it all plays out!

DS had what sounds like a very good lesson with the Emory horn guy, who told him, "we'd love to have you at Emory." I have no idea who "we" is or how much pull "we" has with admissions, though! But _I_ would also love to have him at Emory, since it's so close! Emory is one of those where we were on the fence about submitting test scores; he's in their middle 50, but below the median. We ultimately decided that the "submit the slightly below their average score rather than let them wonder if you're hiding a really low score" approach was probably best, particularly for a homeschooled kid. But who knows in this still very new test optional landscape?