You can check koofers for professor ratings and see if they agree with ratemyprofessor. Additionally there might be a reddit subforum for the specific colleges, you can check https://www.reddit.com/r/college/wiki/faq for a list of college subforums. Some colleges have active reddits, some don't, but if the forum is active it can be a great way to get an idea about the college and various departments.

My oldest lost her scholarship after sophomore year. Her scholarship required a 3.25 to keep, and after her first semester sophomore year she had a 3.2. She wrote a letter explaining extenuating circumstances and they gave her one semester to get the gpa back up, but she did even worse second semester. In a way it didn't matter since she was seriously considering transferring anyway, and losing the scholarship made the decision easier. She transferred to a school closer to home and commuted to make up the money, and she probably would have made the decision to do this even if she hadn't lost the scholarship. If you are planning on merit money I would recommend you save some "easy" classes for your kids for freshman year and don't AP or dual enroll out of everything. Starting out with a high GPA can provide a buffer. But the bottom line is it is somewhat of a risk, and something like a badly timed case of the flu can torpedo a semester quickly even for the best student. In our case we know we can afford for our kids to live at home and commute to the state school, so the kids know they have a backup plan if they lose the merit money.

Well my husband is a CS graduate from SUNY Poly so obviously they hire them. :001_smile: They interview and hire more from Oswego though, although I don't why, it could just be a numbers thing. Or the fact that living is Syracuse is less of a hard sell after a few winters in Oswego.

Another thing I wanted to mention is it depends on what he wants to do after graduation also. If he plans to stay in the Northeast and especially in upstate NY then a private school like Clarkson isn't going to get him places he can't get from SUNY Oswego. If his dream is to work in some place like Silicon Valley then the name recognition of RPI or RIT maybe could help, just because I doubt Silicon Valley firms recruit much at Oswego. My husband works at an engineering company in Syracuse, and he recruits from Oswego all the time, it is one of their top schools for CS. And the kids that are hired get paid the same, whether they graduated from RIT or Oswego.

My middle daughter has 9 credits left to finish her BSRN. She really, really wanted to finish this semester, but since she is also working full time as an RN we convinced her to spread the credits out and she will graduate in May. After she graduates she is planning to go down to part-time work and start a nurse practitioner program right away, so I guess she will be applying for those soon. My oldest daughter finally got a full time zookeeping job this summer. She has been doing lots of seasonal and contract work since she graduated, since zookeeping is hard to break into. She makes minimum wage, but she loves it.

My son took AP Calculus BC at PAH this year and honestly I wasn't that thrilled with it. He is sure he got a 4 or 5 on the test, so it was thorough, but not a great experience. A lot of the class was just "read this, do these problems." The teaching for the class is mostly in the notes she posts daily, but that is just more reading. She posts links to videos sometimes, but they are free ones on youtube, not her teaching. Also she never gave feedback on whether the kids were writing enough for the free response problems, they were just supposed to read the solutions and figure that out for themselves. Mrs. Gilleran got very sick and was basically missing for about a month, which didn't help, but we weren't happy with the class even before that. ETA: He did get a 5 on the exam. I'd still rate it as a mediocre class.

Merit at the SUNYs varies by school. Some have automatic, some have competitive, and some have none, there is no state wide policy. And you are better off with merit than the free tuition, because of the requirement that you work in NY state or it all converts to a loan. My oldest applied to colleges a few years ago, with good stats (29 ACT, 3.9 GPA, dual enrollment) and there was no private college that even came close to the cost of a SUNY with a scholarship. She was very disappointed that she ended up at a SUNY, and I regretted letting her apply so broadly. My youngest applied this year with better stats (NMF, 34 ACT, 3.9 GPA, APs) and the only colleges that ended up cheaper than SUNYs were the ones that offered him National merit scholarships. If you have free tuition or close to it at a SUNY it is going to be hard to beat that. I'd suggest having him research and apply to multiple SUNYs so he has a choice to make in the spring, and not throw too many applications at financial reaches.

My son decided on Michigan State University, studying mechanical engineering. He received a bunch of different scholarships (including National Merit) that all stack to cover most of his costs. He especially likes the chance to do paid research starting freshman year and the opportunities in the MSU Honors College. In the end he picked mainly based on his gut instinct - MSU just felt the best to him out of his affordable choices, but there was no one big driving factor.

For my kids who are going into STEM majors I had them take a lab science class as a dual enrolled student. One took Environmental Science, one took Anatomy and one took Chemistry. I think getting some college level hands on lab work can help STEM bound homeschoolers in the college admissions process, even if they end up not using the credit or re-taking the class.

I think this would be supplemental for the high school level. There are some neat experiments, but nothing that ties it all together in a systematic way. It does include textbook links for some texts (mainly Apologia I think) so it would tell you these are the experiments that correspond to Chapter 2 of Apologia Physics, but you'd need to add the book to really cover the material at high school level in my opinion.

I agree this year's challenge was much easier, last year was ridiculously hard. Our team qualified for regionals this weekend, so it went better than expected.

I claimed the tuition and fees deduction for my son last year when he was dual enrolled. It just automatically came up that way when I entered the information, so I assume it is ok.

I agree with everything snowbeltmom said about Calc BC at PAHS, except it takes my son much longer per day. He rarely finishes in less than 2 hours, and it is frequently about 3 hours per day.

I think a lot comes down to knowing how your child learns best, because asynchronous courses can be more difficult to learn from. My son is in AP Calc (Gilleran) right now, and I agree that the daily notes provide a lot of teaching. But it still is self study, so it comes down to read the notes, read the textbook and do the assigned problems. There are videos once or twice a week. My son would learn better in a more interactive class. I usually sit down with him and have him work through the examples in the book on a white board with me so he can talk through the problems because that is how he learns best. He needs that interaction to fully understand the underlying theory and be able to do the homework. If I didn't have a good handle on calculus he would be struggling and spending much more time on the class. As it is it is a hugely time consuming class, but thorough and I feel confident he will do well on the exam by the end. He and I both knew that a dual enrollment class would be a better fit for him, but there was no way to fit one in our schedule. So I don't regret signing him up for the class and think it was worth the money for us, but it I wouldn't rave about it either. It is important to understand going in how a class is run, and how your kids learn to avoid disappointment.

For biology I'd add SUNY ESF in to your Syracuse visit. And maybe take out Le Moyne unless you have a specific reason for considering it. It doesn't seem to fit in with the rest of your list, a kid who would be competitive for Colgate, Hamilton and Cornell would be over qualified for Le Moyne, and it doesn't offer great merit aid that I have ever heard of.