Shelley

* Auburn University in Alabama
* Baylor University in Texas
* Brown University in Rhode Island
* California State University, Fresno
* College of Charleston in South Carolina
* Cornell University in New York
* Delaware State University
* University of Georgia
* Kansas State University
* New Mexico State University
* Oklahoma State University
* Sacred Heart University in Connecticut
* University of South Carolina
* South Dakota State University
* Southern Methodist University in Texas
* Stephen F. Austin University in Texas
* Texas Christian University
* University of Tennessee, Martin
* Texas A&M University, College Station

Good luck to her in her quest to find just the right school!

Linda

I hope she finds the school of her choice.

SharonCb

Best of luck to her on her school choices, if she can get one with an equestrian team, that would be an awesome bonus!

Annie

Ann

You took a beautiful photograph as well.

Brenda

And her list is impressive!

Wold be fun to go back and talk about how old they all were when we first started posting.....or maybe not! LOL

As an aside, I was in your shoes this time last year with my daughter looking at about 15 schools. I just wanted to recommend a site called College Confidential, and I linked the parents forum below. You may have already used this site and know that some forums about specific schools are extremely competitive, etc. Although I never participated, we found out a lot of information regarding scholarships, financial aid, dorm stuff, etc. One sage parent wrote that if your child calls upset about something, give it 24 hours (if appropriate). She may have resolved the issue 5 minutes after hanging up, while you fretted the entire night:) One thing that never crossed my mind was to check out the infirmary availability.

Enjoy your time with Alice and the process. I'm happy for you both.

Cathy in SWPA (sorry so long!)

I'd also like to pass along a few college-related tips and web sites that my son and I found very helpful when searching for the best college for him. (We seem to have found it!)

The one piece of advice we found most helpful (by far) was to actually go and visit the schools in question, because there's simply no better way to get a feel for the school and whether or not it's a good fit. Statistically, a campus visit is, by a wide margin, the most succesful predictor of student happiness at college.

Now with that particular list of schools, visiting all of them is clearly not a possibility. The geography alone... But you can visit some schools close to home plus perhaps a few that are relatively close together (Baylor, TCU & A&M) to narrow down what works and does not work for your daughter, then eliminate some and follow up on the ones that look best. (And by the way, why isn't UC Davis on your list?) Anyway -- some of the things we found that turned out to be very important to my son were size of student body, size of the campus, diversity of the student body, architecture and geography of the area, urban or rural location, religious/political/party atmosphere, Greek system. Essentially, you can find the 'type' of school that best fits your daughter (and narrow down your list) by visiting other schools of that type to see what her personal 'hot buttons' are.

Sure - academic programs and activities are important, but I could hardly imagine two schools that are more different than Texas A&M (huge, very conservative, fairly homogenous) and Brown (small, diverse and very liberal). Odds are, your duaghter would feel much more comfortable and do much better at one of those schools than at the other.

I didn't have much luck with College Confidential, but found the qualitative comments on Princeton Review to be very illustrative. I also really liked StudentsReview.com, and for narrowing down a list, MyPetersons.com.

Hope this helps --