"Every school is different" is even more true for transfers than it is for freshman admissions. You will have to ask each school. (Probably after acceptance, so it doesn't affect the decision making process.) Usually a deferral implies a commitment to attend (hold a spot for me, but not right now), but the school expects some 'melt' from the deferred students. Definitely do not defer more than one fall acceptance. Is it possible to apply to all of the schools for spring admissions?

You can pull multiple years tuition and cost of attendance numbers out of IPEDS, rather than going through multiple years of CDS files. I've also just discovered the student loan data system DL Dashboard (short for direct loan dashboard). Divide the full year disbursements by the number of recipients and you get an average loan amount per student. Pull enrollment out of IPEDS and you can do recipients over undergrad enrollment to see percentage of all students (not just the freshmen in the typical dataset) getting loans. High PLUS loans are a big sign that financial need is not being met.

That is awful. I'm sorry that happened! I would not hold hope for big merit from an OOS public as a spring admit - that's not all that common. If that's the holdup, I'd say don't hold back. Does she have any sort of gap year plan? Or just to bide time? That might get old. It is a big decision. If your DD has visited some/all of these schools already and has time to visit the others, it would be nice for her to be able to continue in the fall, but it's important to follow her lead if you can.

If you're staying in the state system for both DE and public university, a local high school counselor or the transfer advisor at the community college may have information as well.

This is not globally true! Frequently, you end up paying less than sticker price. Whether your discount brings the cost below the cost of a public university depends on (a) how your financial situation maps to the school's financial aid formula (b) whether the law of supply and demand drives the school to offer lots of merit aid. Vanderbilt is a "big name" school, so money from option (b) will be harder to get. (Could also toss in (c) which public U we're talking about here -- some states have pretty pricey public school tuition..) Every university has a net price calculator, so you can run Vanderbilt's or any school and see the approximate price.

Yes, it's definitely possible to do it with home-based courses. They used to require a lot more hoops for homeschoolers (for example SAT subject tests for foreign language) but they don't anymore (and don't even look at subject tests if you send them, so don't bother.) The student fills in their own transcript. You should review that part of the application carefully before hitting submit to make sure that the transcript as entered meets the CADRs. You don't send your homeschool transcript until after you accept the admissions offer.

We've talked a lot about budget (making sure you have an affordable choice at the end) and qualifications (those with marginal stats need to apply more widely), but timelines also play a factor. My second applied to a rolling admissions school (Arizona) and got admissions and scholarship info back early in the cycle. This allowed her to drop everything that wasn't better than Arizona from her list -- she applied to one more match school and two reaches.

You need to insist on some in-state, public safety schools, whether he wants to stay in Florida or not. Money buys you options, and lack of it often limits them. Don't let him hit submit on any dream schools until the safeties are done. (Many state U's don't have essays and are easy to do anyway.) Read the financial aid pages carefully about whether you need to file ex's financial info. Start your FAFSA early -- depending on when your divorce was/is official, you may be (in the prior-prior year FAFSA system) filing for financial aid based on a tax return that you filed with your ex, then having to subtract out his portion of the total income. This triggers verification. Get your documents in order.

1098-T only covers tuition. The value of the scholarship beyond what's on the 1098-T is the taxable part. While tax software may ask about 1098-T's, it's just to figure out deductions or eligibility for tax credits, it's not sent directly to the IRS. If you did something potentially taxable, like removing money from a 529 plan that was overcontributed due to the scholarship, you may need to enter the 1098-T as a parent, but generally, it's just part of figuring out the student's tax return in this particular scenario. If you are a 'normal' parent trying to justify your 529 withdrawals or get the AOTC tax credit, you'd save the 1098 for your own records. In that scenario, the parent is generally in the higher tax bracket and would be the one taking the tax credit.

The FAFSA just wants to figure out years of financial aid eligibility, not credits. Go by school years past high school.

Going to a big school is great if you are outstanding enough to stand out in the crowd. Otherwise, you're better off with the individual attention at a smaller school (assuming you get along with the small faculty, which is really hard to tell as a high school junior/senior on a college visit!)

I'm in a coding bootcamp right now! The bootcamp industry is mostly unregulated and of varying levels of quality. Mine caters to job-changers and actually requires the students to already have a college degree in some field. To be honest, the bootcamp model is not one in which I've personally become comfortable. It's a way to get trained for a new career on a short time period, but I feel like I could learn more if there was more direct instruction and not as much "throw you into a project and you'll figure it out." Stress and lack of sleep are not conducive to retaining learning, even if "coding all night" is a hacker's badge of honor. I would ask a lot of questions about what is in the curriculum - do they go narrow and deep or broad and shallow? (Mine is definitely the latter.) Is the bootcamp instructor required to cover all of the curriculum or could it be "adapted" (i.e. not covered)? Is there career support afterwards? If so, meet the career advisor. Talk to current and former students, but realize that there is a lot of pressure not to say bad things about the school (because we want our school's reputation to benefit our career and because our instructors are our job references). For whatever topics are covered, do a search on Indeed or a similar site to see how often the keywords come up. Especially in web programming, 'hot' skills change rapidly so curriculum needs to change rapidly as well.

Getting scholarships after freshman year takes as much time as a job: There are many fewer scholarships out there, and they tend to be very competitive. If there are no scholarships available from the school, that makes things worse because you are competing nationally. I recommend an actual on or off campus job instead: The hours have a guaranteed payback versus spending hours finding and applying to scholarships and not knowing until the last minute whether the hours pay off. If you manage to find some one-year scholarships to cover next year, what happens the year after that? Now is the time to look at your four-year plan for paying for college. If you can't afford where she is, perhaps a transfer is in order. Or she could look into taking a year or two off to work to earn her own way through school.

The question I have from those who seem to understand: Is the medical disqualification from military service at all, or just from the academies? There are other military academy style schools this child could aim for, but might not be worth it if he cannot serve afterwards. If he can join the military, look at other schools with military components (for example, Texas A&M Corps of Cadets). If he cannot join the Air Force, perhaps look at other aviation related careers? I do not see the point in tailoring courses to a school the child will not get into.

Your house payment is not going to affect your financial aid -- a larger payment will not get you more aid and smaller payment will not get you less. For all schools, having a pot of cash will get you less aid. If you're refinancing to pay off debt and are not getting cash out, you would not see any change in financial aid. Paula Bishop keeps a good list of financial aid resources here: http://www.paulabishop.com/financial-aid-reference-materials-handouts.html

The phrase you may be looking for on college websites is "freshman early college credit" -- many private colleges we looked at were pretty generous at accepting transfer credits from transfer applicants, but much more stingy about what they accepted from freshmen.

Citing is a basic college skill. I’d try to make a go of it. There are bibliography tools on the web where she could paste in an url and get a citation back. A last slide with image credits and a list of urls would be simpler.

I think there are a couple concepts to talk about — “in the small” the Queen Bees and Waana Bees” concept is good. When exploring out into larger circles, the concept of privilege helps. So, the kid at school who gets away with things because their parent is on the school board and they inherit privilege. And then their peers clue in to this students power and form a clique around him/her to have that power rub off on them. And of course we can move out to privileges that you carry with you (or not) when out among relative strangers. An adult usually gets more respect than a child. If you seem to be of a certain race, religion, gender, level of wealth, level of education, and so forth, these things can be of benefit to you or not in your interactions in the world. In the workplace, a manager has power and privilege the rank and file do not. A teacher in a classroom, the pastor in a church, and so on. When “so and so” gets away with things: are they packing some sort of privilege or less obvious power that others lack?

Also two in college -- My junior is doing well. Which is new. It seems like every break (winter and summer) we've been scrambling to "patch her up" and get her as well as we can before sending her back to the fray. This has been the least worrying break, ever. So very nice. My freshman is adapting to her big university better than expected. She's overthinking the classes she's registered for next term, but is signed up for some good ones, too. She's an hour away by city bus, so has been home a couple times during the term, and we went up to campus to see her in a performance as well. So, the "haven't seen you in forever" feeling isn't there. It's nice to have her home, though. We've taken a couple walks together and talked.

Self-reporting is often implemented in the counselor report -- so the school is reporting it but saving the student the test score fee. Some applications also have self-reported grades, where you only send your transcript after acceptance to confirm your self-reported grades were honest. Self-reported tests could be done along that fashion as well. I suspect that many students will be tempted to report "the score I'm going to get on my next retake" though.

Agree with happysmileylady -- the more related the job is to his future plans, the more likely this is to be a benefit rather than a positive. DH worked full time through college -- on the one hand, it hurt his GPA and ability to participate in extracurricular activities. On the other hand, he worked first as a computer backup technician, working his way up to system administrator by senior year. He graduated with a lot of practical computer skills and a work-ethic that have served him well in the long run.

They're looking for the future NASA workforce type people, so I'm guessing data analysts/stats/computer math, not theoretical math. There were some math people in the program, but I do not know if they were double-majors with something else. Best to ask the program manager directly if she's not sure she's a fit.

I’d bet it’s the nature of studies. The study designers probably trained the teachers in the technique that they wanted to test, so the group projects probably had a lot of best practices built in. Moreover, the teachers knew that they were in a study and their students would be tested for retention (it’s hard to do a “control” in these sorts of things). So, there was definite incentive to make sure the kids learned from their experience.

The virtual learning environment was through zoom meetings. (If you’re not familiar, their website is zoom.us), plus email and file sharing sites. As I mentioned before, the group was required to do project tracking in Trello as well. They become familiar with several different tools. The general class time is listed on the application (her class met on Tuesday afternoons), and then each PDR team sets their own meetings for the team work. The class schedule runs on ASU’s academic calendar — so for my kiddo it started two weeks before her regular classes started and ends just before “dead week” (the study break before finals). One of her team members has it ending during her finals week. It really just depends on what his and his college’s schedules are like. The project is a ton of work, but they try their best to balance team members among the different majors (engineers/scientists/math people) and the class levels from freshmen to seniors in each group. They also built the teams with a little extra wiggle room. DD’s team started with 9 and ended with 7 as two dropped out.

So, my college-freshman daughter just finished probably the most amazing group project experience she’s had in her academic life so far. It’s a student team project for the NASA L’Space program. (Https://Lspace.asu.edu) One unique thing about this program versus any other class she’s done: The program taught project management alongside the technical curriculum. The students were expected to create project timelines, keep a running status board on Trello, and otherwise gain skills on how to work with each other well. They had multiple lectures on these things. The project itself was based on the NASA standards for a mission preliminary design review (PDR) so they were creating their project based on a well-established, highly-structured framework. NASA project managers talked to them about the different roles they would need to fill and how to do it. There were a lot of things that could have gone wrong (like, her team had people in three different time zones, from colleges of different levels of selectivity) But overall it was a fantastic experience. The last page of their (75 page, group written, not going to get any academic credit) paper gushed about the friendships and the meaning they found in their teamwork experience. I never had anything remotely like that when I was in college. L’Space is an ongoing program for STEM majors if you want to check it out at the link above.