We just went through this and he didn't apply for early decision anywhere. My thinking was why not see who will give you more money.
I tried to get him to apply to Middlebury because I want an excuse to go to Vermont.
Some of the Ivy League schools used to offer Early Action. Harvard dropped it and then brought it back. You did not agree to go if you did that. I got in to Yale early but ultimately went to Harvard. Our college counselor encouraged us to drop some applications. So, although I had prepared applications to Smith and Bryn Mawr, I did not submit them. I did apply to Wellesley. I got rejected by Princeton. Back then, the Ivies colluded in that they shared who they had accepted early, so there was a greater chance that you would not get in to another school. So, in some ways it may have been effectively Early Decision.
But I did know twins at Harvard. One had applied early to Yale and the other had applied early to Harvard, but Harvard's financial aid package was much more generous (and these were fairly well off kids who had gone to private school in DC), so they both went to Harvard.
We only went places for college visits in 2023-2024.
I got rejected from Brown early action.
4: Google tells me your town is 62.8 likes from mine. We should have a summer meet up this year.
You should hike to each other and meet up in the middle!
Only once on a college visit did we get far enough east to see a WaWa. They do have better sandwiches than Sheetz.
Here's what we won't do: Legislate national rules that govern admissions. Our systems are decentralized and it would take a miracle for Congress not to make things worse.
Amazing. Two sentences to rule out the only possible workable solution, one that actually works very well in many civilised countries, and the argument against it is "LOOKS LIKE THOSE CLOWNS IN CONGRESS ARE AT IT AGAIN. WHAT A BUNCH OF CLOWNS."
I also tried to get him to go to school in Cleveland, but after he got all his results, he just ruled out anything in a city.
My kid applied early decision to Penn, no aid. Penn is distorted by Wharton, which he describes as a cesspool of heirs. Wharton wouldn't let him take an econ class they offered.
Wawa is basically a subculture there.
They were out of eggs and still made a better breakfast sandwich than Sheetz.
Miles. How autocorrect turned that into "Likes" I don't know.
10: and yet the journalist isn't wrong.
How about national rules that govern admissions only for colleges that get federal support? Oh, wait.
What's behind the Justice Department throwing out the old rules? The article made it sound like it was a cooperative agreement between nonprofits in order to best serve students, not a collusion to drive up prices.
18: Sounds very much eye-of-the-beholder. And being a nonprofit doesn't exempt you from anti-monopoly law.
Under Trump, the Justice Department worked to make it easier for rich people's kids to get into college. That's not any kind of surprise.
Google tells me your town is 62.8 likes from mine. We should have a summer meet up this year.
4 wasn't me, but I do want to hang out. Maybe a meet up at my lake house is the way to go.
There is another family lake house, close to ours, that is currently not booked for any of the weeks in August, if someone wanted to make a proper vacation out of it.
being a nonprofit doesn't exempt you from anti-monopoly law.
No, but I'd think the content of the agreement - which didn't appear to benefit the colleges - would have exempted it. I was wondering if there was something more nefarious that also got thrown out because it was genuine collusion of the kind that would bother me, that the article should have explained, or if it was strictly what Moby says in 20.
18: IDK, but vaguely in the same general area the FTC has lately made a number of attempts to apply antitrust law creatively against big tech, with mostly poor results. Relying on lawyers to run the country with 130 y.o. laws Congress never gets around to updating possibly has downsides.
I don't know about the FTC, but there's so much oligarchic collusion these days.
For one thing, the tech companies were colluding to keep wages down.
21: That's not far from the town I bought furniture in. Would definitely be fun.
Meanwhile, T-Mobile bought Sprint, significantly reducing competition in the telecommunications sector, and Trump-era antitrust enforcers didn't do shit.
idk, having covered North American mobile in the 2010s, I consider Sprint's exit both a net *increase* in competition and an inevitable *consequence* of competition, it was the most incompetent bunch of overpaid idiots in the industry and that was before Softbank got involved.
more interestingly, 21 suggests that Spike has moved the vision of Halfordismo substantially closer to its realization.
21: It would be good, but I'm not able to travel far right now.
I think I'm going to Dolly Sods the first long weekend I can leave Pittsburgh.
Going through it a second time which is very different from first time because this kid is an athlete. Rules around athletic recruiting are another whole wacky set of path dependent regulations about who can invite you for a visit, what kind of admissions support you'll get, and deadlines.
It's tough being an athletic supporter.
It's depressing. I couldn't afford early decision 25 years ago, and it's only gotten worse.
I didn't know it existed when I was applying.
There are also additional flavors now. There's rolling admission where you can apply anywhere in a time window and you'll usually get an answer in a defined turnaround; early action which is nonbinding; restricted early action which is nonbinding for attendance but you can't apply to more than one early; ED1 and ED2 which is two different deadlines for early decision rounds. Some clearly benefit the college in helping them hit enrollment targets or locking in people they want, some of them I don't understand the purpose.
I'm sort of despairing about higher "education", I'm not sure I can handle 20 years more of insanity and decline.
We barely survived freshman year of high school. It was far rougher than I expected, due to (mostly) kid-specific reasons. If next year doesn't go significantly better, I don't know what the hell to do.
I found the first year to be the worst, but that was also the covid year.
I looked at the early decision/early action rules, couldn't remember which was which, and decided to go with the public flagship in town that had already guaranteed admission through a program I entered in my senior year in high school.
That program was based heavily on grades and test scores. I don't know if they still have it or what the wealth distribution was among students. There was no obligation to attend, you just didn't have to go the full application route. It was pretty clearly aimed encouraging local students who might be competitive elsewhere to stay in town. I probably should have gone elsewhere just to live somewhere else, but I stand by the quality of the courses.
I did apply to Harvard, but I don't remember the exact result. Probably waitlist? It wasn't outright rejection, and it's hard to believe it was some kind of acceptance where I had to defer a year, but it was definitely something where I needed to reply with a choice. I didn't reply.
My dad was convinced we couldn't afford it or any private school. That may have colored my thinking more than I realized at the time. I was also lazy, and not having to fill out applications sounded pretty good.
The admissions people were dropping all kinds of hints about how many AI-written essays they got and how easy it was for them to tell.
39: Harvard definitely offered slots to some people and told them they had to defer a year. Though during COVID, they probably told some people well let you in only if you agree to matriculate fall 2020.
And if you asked for a definition of "matriculate", they voinked the offer.
But said by a guy with a strong accent.
Who says you have to stop matriculating?
Northeastern has this obnoxious thing where unless you read carefully and check the right box you have to start out at an alternate campus freshman year. I've heard of people doing their first Northeastern semester in CA or Greece.
A little known trick for Harvard admission is that the acceptance rate for Cambridge public schools is higher than any school system in the country. Hard to know if this is a concession to the city, a lot of kids having connections to the university (family employment, taking Harvard classes while in HS), socioeconomics, or what. Fortunately I don't think there are crazy people moving to the city just to get that admissions bump.
I have a draft post about post-election emigration (people seem more serious this time, even if absolute numbers are low), and after reading that article the prospect of international university study for our kid seems very refreshing. I'm glad your various offspring are getting through the U.S. process, though.
37: so much sympathy. This (7th grade) has been a rough parenting year for us too, wow.
10: what's strange is that the author goes on with a list of "shoulds" that only make sense as a matter of national regulation, but I guess in their mind it's the Dept of Ed and not Congress? Who knows.
College applications are still more than seven years away for Atossa (probably roughly), and I'm glad. Not looking forward to this when it's our turn.
From right after the line quoted in 10:
But here's what we can do: Hold the schools accountable for their processes and their decisions.
Institutions that receive federal funds -- which include all elite colleges -- should be required to clearly state their admissions criteria. Admissions as currently practiced are designed to let schools whose budgets run on billions of taxpayers dollars do whatever they want. ... Colleges should also not be allowed to make anyone decide whether to attend without knowing what it will actually cost, and they should not be allowed to offer better odds to those who forgo that information. They should not offer admissions pathways tilted to favor the rich, any more than they should offer pathways favoring people who are white.
The first part seems pointless. As far as I can tell, colleges could admit or deny whoever they want if they included "performs well in the interview portion" or something like that among the requirements.
The second part would be awesome but seems contrary to how basically anything in America does anything at all. From local laws/policies on tipping in restaurants to hidden fees in airlines to simply posting prices in retail stores without including taxes to prices for medical care with or without insurance, getting accurate cost information for anything more than 5 seconds before buying it (or even after) seems like pulling teeth. I guess it would be great if some policy aimed at university pricing had downstream effects throughout the economy, but I'm not holding my breath.
A propos of nothing, I appreciate that one of the kids in the article is named "Ivy".
Heebie U is one of these tuition exchange schools, and while a lot of the list is solid, there are not many prestigious schools on the list.
The more I dwell on the process, the more I just want to steer the kids to stick with the list. First, obviously, for the free or partially free tuition, but also just as a way to sidestep all the drama of prestigious schools.
I can recommend applying to prestigious private schools, not getting in, and then attending good state/Canadian government schools as having worked out well for both my kids. Not saying it was a tightly planned process, but apparently it didn't have to be.
51: I hear good things about the American University of Nigeria.
I am seriously hoping generative large language models kill off the culture of bullshitty personal statements. If there's a tap on the corner, they're all worthless, so there's no point having them.
That said I went through *our* process in the belief that if you had the famous two offers you couldn't go elsewhere if you beat the grades involved; going into clearing was a mark of defeat and humiliation.
*That* said, had I been cursed with enlightenment I would not have met the opinionated academic!
Seriously, though, a lot of the schools on the TE list are legitimately very good.
All offers are made on the same day including details of cost and scholarships offered; all offers have the same window of time to accept or reject; and then some sort of clearing system for places that remain unfilled - sounds like a pretty simple process and one that would make life much more straightforward for the universities as well as the applicants...
What's the point of a system if it can't be gamed in the pursuit of reproducing existing status hierarchies?
56: oh for sure!! It's a really solid list. I just meant that the schools are not the kind of fancy label that the NYT article is talking about.
58,59: Also BYU and the special needs imposed by the mormon mission year keeping those kids from straying. Lots of schools still have scholarships for descendants of the class of 19xx ?
50.last- Also a good name for a fourth child.
applying to prestigious private schools, not getting in, and then attending good state/Canadian government schools
Also worked out just fine for my oldest.
50 61.last- Also a good name for a fourth nineteenth child.
Test scores are going to drop now that Panera is removing the charged lemonade. It only killed two people.
If you're dumb enough to use the zinc straw and the copper at the same time you have only yourself to blame.
The "charge" was caffeine. I guess the Panera legal department figured that it only killed two people "so far" and that they took all the good sandwiches off the menu so they couldn't keep settling suits.
I have concerns about your study habits.
People talk about the young people as having problems because of covid or social media or all the school shootings or whatever. But I think the problem is White Claw. Beer and seltzer water were not meant to be combined.
What's the point of a system if it can't be gamed in the pursuit of reproducing existing status hierarchies?
The system in 57 got me into Oxford. I assure you it is doing just fine at reproducing existing status hierarchies.
But I think the problem is White Claw. Beer and seltzer water were not meant to be combined.
Wait. There are people who drink American beer and think "if only there were a way to make this more fizzy"?
52, 63: That was our strategy, and so far it's working out well. Except we mostly skipped the part about applying to prestigious schools.
72.last s/b "if only there were a way to make it more fizzy and weaker"?
I thought White Claw was more like a spritzer? It doesn't taste like beer at all.
Yeah. It's only brewed like a beer for tax reasons.
It's kind of a pain to take care of spam from my phone, at the orthodontist office. :(
Anyway, the college application process taught me lots of things, like how manure is transported in Ohio and where our would-be fascist leaders have their office and what a Wawa chicken biscuit tastes like.
52: or getting into the prestige school & turning it down to go to the state school! worked great.
The in-state tuition at our local state school is high enough that it wasn't close to the cheapest option for us.
30: I think I'm going to Dolly Sods the first long weekend I can leave Pittsburgh.
You're not going down there for the hiking are you?
The unexploded ordinance is the attraction.
I just want to say that I went to a public state university before it was cool.
I went to state school and went with half of my high school class. We snuck Keystone Light into dorms and we liked it.
30: Ah, one of my favorite places.
You might consider doing the area south across the road from the Dolly Sods Wilderness. In the vicinity of this "trail" which runs in part through the Roaring Plains West Wilderness. The SE corner of the trail goes through the open blueberry meadow where we encountered bears*/snakes but grass probably not as high and critter-hidey early in the season. Great campsite on the eastern edge overlooking the Allegheny Front. Recommend going a bit further west than the trail they show. Side trip (without pack) to Mt. Porte Crayon possibly worth it. The views are not quite as good as they were 40-50 years ago as vegetation has grown up in most areas of the plateaus.
Of course the stuff in Dolly Sods itself is pretty great. Often pretty busy on long weekends. Contact me if you want any further details or discussion.
*Have encountered bears many other places up there as well.
I'm taking just a knife and stuff PBR pounders.
Anyway, thanks. I may email, but I don't really have an specific time in mind. If it's Tuesday and the week looks slow, I'm just going to try to sprint away on Thursday.
I went to state school and went with half of my high school class. We snuck Keystone Light into dorms and we liked it.
Labatt's was really big in Michigan, IIRC.
I like either Labatt's or Molson. I can't remember which, but I don't like the other. So I never order either.
My kid just got a 35 on his ACT and was rejected by Pitt. The system is pure insanity.
Yeah. Mine got into Pitt with a lower score. Part of it might be that we're local.
Standards for in-state students are always lower. Conversely, standards are much higher if you're from say NYC. Still though, above 75th percentile at a school with a 50% acceptance rate seems like a weird reject. Maybe they're yield-hacking, and decided the odds of acceptance was too low?
Conversely, standards are much higher if you're from say NYC.
Still kind of glum about this, even though any relevance to my own kids is well in the rear view mirror.
Yeah, it's a little weird, why do schools care so much about geographic diversity? I think for Harvard it's that they want future senators and it the bar is way lower to be a Wyoming Senator, but less clear why Pittsburgh cares. Something about advertising maybe?
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NMM to Steve Albini. Guitar god and one of the greatest recording engineers ever. Way too young. This one hurts.
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98: People from NY bring their cars to Pittsburgh and some of them drive like shit, but their license plates say "Excelsior" and that means I need to make lots of sarcastic comments.
Something about advertising maybe?
Schools do like to say they have students from all 50 states, so there's that. Also, racism.
I like either Labatt's or Molson. I can't remember which, but I don't like the other. So I never order either.
Molson is the better one.
I'll have to confirm, but if so, I'll add it to my calendar reminder that I like Ezra Brooks. Every time it comes up, I move it ahead six months so I can always just search my calendar.
Oh, the Ezra Klein-David Brooks mash up? That does sound good.
I don't think "racism" without further elaboration explains anything here. They could find other ways to distinguish white New Yorkers if they wanted to, and desiring geographic diversity and racial diversity are pretty clearly driven by the same thing.
A more specific argument around not wanting Asian students (and possibly Jewish students) may have some merit though.
I see the advertising benefits of having someone from all 50 states, but colleges seem to take geographic preferences further than would be needed just to achieve that goal, and I'm not sure how much advertising benefit like a 20th student from Iowa instead of a 100th student from California is giving you.
It started as a way to limit the number of Jews and continues as a way to limit the number of Asians. Sure, there would be ways to do that by making finer distinctions, but general demographic patterns make geography an easy first cut without running afoul of any laws against explicit racial/ethnic discrimination.
So on your theory we should expect students from Hawaii to be the most discriminated against? Is that true?
Like obviously racism in some sense infuses everything, but I think it has almost no explanatory value here. They really are just preferring people from places with fewer high academic achievers in a pretty uniform way that's not driven by racial patterns.
No, we would expect students from California to be most discriminated against, because it's the largest state. The discrimination is geographic even if the reason it exists is something else. (Take that, Stafford Beer!) The discrimination will occasionally result in an advantage for students from the discriminated-against minority in unusual situations like Hawaii, but the net result will be more white students than a purely "objective" system would produce.
Like I'm not saying individual admissions officers today are actively trying to limit the number of Asian students and deliberately using geographic diversity as a means to that end. I'm sure most of them have a hazy sense that it's beneficial in its own right and that plus status quo bias is why they continue to use it. But the reason it was initially put in place was an underlying sense that the elite colleges were being overrun by Jews from New York, and the reason it hasn't been abandoned is that there is still an underlying sense that they're being overrun by Asians from California. This is implicit in that hazy sense that geographic diversity is somehow just good even if individual people in the system aren't explicitly thinking it.
So what are the actual admissions people thinking? That's what's relevant if we want to understand why it continues to happen and whether it will end.
Presumably they are now worried about having an alumni speaker at graduation who sucks so hard that everyone notices it was a bad speech even at a ceremony with a death.
117: For those who have no idea what Moby is talking about
Neil Armstrong, Barack Obama, John Glenn, Spiro Agnew, Sherrod Brown, Dr. Anthony Fauci, and Woody Hayes are some of the historical figures that have delivered Ohio State's commencement speech over the years.
Chris Pan, an alumnus whom Ohio State describes as a "social entrepreneur, musician, and inspirational speaker," joined that storied list on Sunday in what many attendees described as "the worst commencement speech ever."
And that, sadly, had nothing to do with the tragic death of the yet-to-be-named person who fell from the Bell Tower End of Ohio Stadium shortly before the graduating ceremony began.
-- https://www.rooster.info/p/ohio-state-chris-pan
I might have been talking about something else.
119: How presumptous of me! I apologize.
I mean, you were right. But what if you weren't?
118 and I thought ours this year was bad. It started "I didn't prepare anything to say tonight..." and went downhill from there for almost ten excruciating minutes.
Bitcoin didn't exist then, so it was hard to be that awful.
Apparently Chuck Schumer routinely barges up to speak at commencements uninvited, and it's almost always an identical story about how a woman broke up with him early in college but he persevered.
123 this year Moby, at the university where I work.
118 and 122 and 124 are all amazing, in different ways!!
All I've got is my tired old story about how Kevorkian was going to be the speaker at my brother's graduation, but then Michigan canceled him due to cancel culture, and came up with Cathy Guisewite - author of Cathy comic strip - as a substitute. Still love that swaparoo though.
Ack-Ack Macaque
On topic because I'm a good follow on Bluesky.
Stafford Beer
How does that compare to Labatt and Molson?
Standards for in-state students are always lower.
Do you mean in your state? Because this is definitely not even remotely the case in every state.
How does that compare to Labatt and Molson?
Cybernetically.
Was the geographic diversity thing just about Jews from NY and Asians? I also got the sense that some of the Ivies were very much regional schools in the beginning, and they desired to have greater influence by being national and even international schools.
going back a few years, the uc syx was admitting more & more out of state bc they pay more but the state leg said no fucking way dudes, but i'm not sure any of it resulted in higher or lower standards for any group given the demand for spots at uc schools ( maybe merced is easy to get into? don't know).
i've heard from several sources that otherwise similar applicants from e.g. lowell vs other sfusd high schools, the non lowell students have an advantage.
I knew someone who was a UNC grad and a Virginia Theological seminarian who said he got in to UNC because he was in-state and never would have qualified from out-of-state. And he felt super lucky to get that education.
At my college graduation the speaker, talkshow host Dick Cavett, made a joke that was so offensive to women that one graduating senior jumpstarted her carreer by getting an article into a major magazine about how offensive it was and What it Means about the Patriachy, and a few yars later expanded the article into a non-fiction bestseller that some people on this site have read, evewntually developing a 30-or-so year career as a feminist writer and political advisor, out of being offended by the graduation speaker. In recent years she's moved on to being publicly outraged by other sorts of things.
Link to one recounting of the joke, and the surprising identity of the very ambitious offendee: http://www.feministezine.com/feminist/postfeminism/A-Womans-Place.html
If Naomi is Klein, you're fine.
If Naomi is Wolf- oof.
Dick Cavett was born about ten miles from where I grow my corn. I didn't know he told that joke, but I'm not surprised.
139 paralyzed me for a moment because I couldn't tell if it was referencing the book about how everyone confuses them, or if I had invented the existence of the book. But it exists - Doppelgänger - and I haven't read it.
I appreciate that you took the time for the 'ä'. I was just reviewing a paper where my coauthor took the time to do that and I can't recall seeing that in a draft before.
138: That's great because a little twist in Klein's book about Wolf is that K in younger days - I think in college? - met W at an event who said something rather messed-up to her - if edgy in a way that K accepted at the time without being offended. You can find it on Metafilter.
Stafford Beer
How does that compare to Labatt and Molson?
Very well, I should think. Staffordshire is the heart of English brewing, though the breweries are more likely to be around Burton-on-Trent (see below) than in Stafford itself, which is more of a heavy industry town. "The purpose of this pint is what it does" would be a good slogan for the Stafford Beer Company, were there to be one.
Say, for what were hop-yards meant,
Or why was Burton built on Trent?
Oh many a peer of England brews
Livelier liquor than the Muse,
And malt does more than Milton can
To justify God's ways to man.
Ale, man, ale's the stuff to drink
For fellows whom it hurts to think:
Look into the pewter pot
To see the world as the world's not.
There's got to be someone on twitter with a craft brewery who might be persuaded, surely. And good lord did Beer himself have a stereotype real ale guy beard.
141: or if I had invented the existence of the book. But it exists - Doppelgänger - and I haven't read it.
At some point last fall I was going to use an excerpt of the book published in the Guardian as a part of the basis for a guest post working title of either "Is Our Fever Swamps Festering" or "Through the Looking Glass and What Naomi Found There." DO recommend reading the excerpt. not sure I'd be up for the whole book, however.
One arresting bit.
There was even a moment, while reading an article in the Guardian about her being arrested at a protest in New York, when I experienced the unmistakable chill of the doppelganger, an uncanny feeling Sigmund Freud described as "that species of the frightening that goes back to what was once well known and had long been familiar".
"Her partner, the film producer Avram Ludwig, was also arrested."
I read the sentence to my partner, the film director and producer Avram Lewis (who goes by Avi).
"What the actual fuck?" he asked.
"I know," I said. "It's like a goddamned conspiracy."And:
140:There was also a Nebraska joke in the speech. I don't remember the joke, but a friend of mine who was the only graduating senior from Nebraska took offense. He apologized to his parents, but didn't turn it into a career.
Nebraskans tend toward boring careers to offset L.Ron Hubbard.
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Two from the US Supreme Court today. A civil forfeiture case on just what sort of due process a state has to give -- facts weren't all that good, and the court ruled 6-3 for the state. Gorsuch has an interesting concurrence basically saying that civil forfeiture as currently practiced isn't that well supported historically, and is prone to abuse, but the facts of the case don't really raise those issues. Case was 6-3, but with the right facts it might have gone 5-4 the other way. Once again the limitations of calling balls or strikes on a non-randomly selected 1% of pitches thrown is shown. The second case is even weirder. Some circuits strictly construe the 3 year statute of limitations for copyright infringement suits, while others apply a discovery rule. The question was, without resolving which approach is correct, circuits in the latter group should imply a damages cap, limiting damages to just the last 3 years. 6-3 Kagan for the majority, no. Gorsuch, in dissent, says that application of a discovery rule is wrong, and that it's silly to take a case where that isn't the issue.
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I've read a fair amount about the Klein book, and it seems like a really interesting investigation into what causes people like Wolf to go fucking nuts.
Also: I have been cured of my own tendency to confuse the two of them.
Seriously we used to have a joke in school where you put your hand, fingers spread, on someone's head and said "brain eater!" and then flip your hand over and say "oh it died of starvation" and between RFK Jr and Trump everything is just reliving elementary school shittiness.
I liked the one with the chicken butt better.
I read the whole Wolf book and it took me ages, which was annoying. I'm not sure it was worth it versus just going for excerpts, really.
Mara has two more years of high school. Their language is still idiosyncratic and weird, but they have free tuition at any state school that will take them as part of their adoption agreement, and our local university has just started a program that automatically admits local students with grades above a certain point. Will theirs be that high? Will they be willing to go? Who knows? I'm trying to get them to at least visit the state HBCU and the small school that's tuition-free, has been racially integrated for ages, encourages the study-abroad they claim to want, and has a huge art and craft focus that would be perfect for them, but of course they think this is the worst idea in the universe. Their school has increased its "college and career readiness" program to funnel kids who choose the first track into taking college classes during high school and kids in the latter into more practical program. Mara chose something about childcare and family services and apparently that means they'll do 40 hours of training in a daycare and graduate with some level of certification there and the first steps toward an Associate's Degree there. I have absolutely no idea what kind of career would be good for Mara, but at least that's something. (Nia will turn 18 this summer and at this point is back to planning to go to an independent living program in a third city, not the one where her residential campus us or where we are. I'm good with that plan. She is not likely to ever be qualified for college, but her program may require her to make progress toward a high school degree rather than drop out at 18. She'd been trying to work toward a GED but quit because the work part was too much for her to manage at this point. Her options are always going to be tough. And because she's in state care now, I'm not part of making any of the decisions and only get to hear about things after the fact, which is also tough.)