RE: #78 For that she would have to major in Math. Every decent school has at least one Russian-speaking Math professor 
Sorry, maybe I didn’t make myself clear enough…I was referring to finding a college or university that offers a major or significant coursework in another language that is considered more useful in terms of employment…
Finding Urdu is tough under these limits. And we went through the Arabic search and many colleges stop after just a year or two. I agree that even this sort of breadth up to a 200 level could be intriguing to some multinational companies.
But I’m still wondering if a kid with independent drive really needs to have an extensive range of formal classes or goes with intense summer programs at the highest levels. Three summers of a variety of experiences, including in Russia, could lead to a voila!
M2PG, this is tough. Even when I see top Russian programs, the OOS costs are still way high.
You should be looking at the Bamas of the world and slightly less competitive, nerdy LACs like Beloit that offer sufficient Russian. Check out the Honors Tutorial program at Ohio University; Barrett at Arizona State, etc. The University of Kansas has a robust Slavic department.
Yeah, in some sense you’ll undermatch, but that’s how merit aid works. I’m not concerned that you’re going to have lazy or unprepared students in Russian and French literature courses.
You may rule out Stanford because of cost but they give very generous aid. It was less expensive for us than all of the UC’s. But consider that they will work with your D on combining majors(language and Economics and\or others) which other schools may not have the flexibility for. She won’t even need to choose a major until the end of sophomore year.
Yes, our budget limitation includes no loans. If we took out loans for each of our kids, it would simply be debt growing on top of debt and it would be insurmountable. If we can’t afford it for the first one, we would have to borrow again for the 2nd one, then for the 3rd… then for the 8th. Not sure when we would ever be able to pay the loans back b/c we have non-stop college kids from 2007-2032.
My older kids have all faced the exact same limitations and they have all done extremely well for themselves. One thing we have done is to search out specialized honors programs. Our ds at Bama is part of CBH. 40 kids per yr are accepted into the program and the program is specifically geared toward preparing those students for research. It has been wonderful for him. We have found similar global fellowship type groups on different campuses that she is applying to.
Honestly, on a large campus and with many gen ed requirements already fulfilled before they enter as freshman, my kids have never had a problem finding a peer group or finding classes not meeting their academic expectations. But, it has also been easier to find schools with their majors b/c those majors are found just about everywhere. Russian is by far the biggest restriction. If she dropped Russian, it would open up a huge number of schools. (Can’t tell you how many times I have wondered why I let her talk me into letting her study Russian.)
In terms of GPA, I don’t think she will have any problems maintaining her grades, but she has absolutely 0 in-state good options,so we want to make sure that wherever she starts, she is able to finish.
She is applying for competitive scholarships, but I don’t consider that an application strategy. It is more along the lines of only applying to Stanford, Harvard, and MIT. Actually, worse b/c many of those scholarships are only a handful. So, she needs to have a affordable options. (My reason for starting this thread was to ask about correlating majors, not how to pay for it. 
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Sell our house? I am assuming that that family didn’t sell their house for 1 child at the expense of the rest of their kids. Even when this dd leaves for college, we still have more kids at home than the avg American family. How did we arrive at our limit? Simple budget with no loans. It is the most we can possibly cut out and not impact our other children’s lives and not impact our financial future stability.
Obviously I wouldn’t expect you to take out loans for each of eight kids! I was thinking more along the lines of your DD taking out the basic federal student loan for herself (for example to go to a school with a fabulous Russian program or to buy her own plane tickets for study abroad or something her parents couldn’t quite afford with that budget).
I thought the parents in that article were nuts to sell their house. Maybe the kid was an only or the last to leave the nest so parents could downsize. (If the article said, I don’t really remember.)
Anyway, thanks for answering on my tangent.
University of Washington’s website says that it offers four years of Russian, four years of Chinese, three years of Urdu, and a host of other Central Asian and East Asian Languages, plus majors/minors in area studies, international business, etc. Also, French, Italian, Spanish, etc. Have no idea about the financial aid though, and I do understand that’s critical.
Would a visit to some of the top language programs and making personal connections with the faculty help? It just seems that someone as unusual as your daughter, if she caught the attention of the right mentor, could be directed to adequate scholarships to see her through. I’m sure that’s tougher than I imagine, though…
According to the Boren Scholarship, possible related fields of study are listed here:
http://www.borenawards.org/boren_scholarship/preferences.html
(Check under the “fields of study” tab)
@inthegarden Definitely tougher than it seems. 
@aroundhere If our kids want to take out federal loans, that is totally up to them. My no loans comment only applies to us. She knows that her budget increases $5500 if she wants to take them out. Unfortunately, that isn’t anywhere near enough to begin to bridge the difference between our budget and non-merit $$ options.
If it were me (and I realize that it’s not, so apologies Mom2- I am in awe of your parenting skills!) I would back off the focus on the languages, desired fields of interest, etc. and tell your D that there are two columns on the board:
1- Affordable (which of course is a crapshoot until you have the offers in hand)
2- Meets her needs- academic, social, geographic, however SHE wants to define them
and remind her that no single college is going to have everything she is looking for. And then I’d bow out for now. I think you are trying to thread a needle which is too narrow for the thread you have. And continuing to pick away at it is likely going to raise the bar in your D’s head about just how suitable/perfect/incredible the combined language plus everything else needs to be.
I say this NOT because I think your D can’t find a college which you guys can afford where she’ll thrive. I think she can- she sounds fantastic. I say this because kids start to idealize college right about now anyway… and given the number of areas your D is trying to satisfy simultaneously, that tendency is only going to increase. At the end of the day- she needs to be happy at college. If that means coming to a realization that her Russian skills will plateau sophomore year- let her get there on her on. If that means going to a college which has the languages but perhaps not the social vibe she wants- let her get there on her own.
But continuing to chip away at a tough set of criteria can backfire. Somehow Mom and Dad are going to do their research and come up with “perfect U”. I don’t think there is perfect U. And the faster your D gets there, the more time she has for some horse-trading about what she’s ready to give up.
hugs. Your family sounds great!
There is no Nordstrom scholarship for 2016-2017.
I am thinking along the same lines as blossom. OP’s daughter has defined what she wants and is now trying to find a college that meets a very specific list of ‘needs.’ They aren’t needs, they are wants. Instead of asking a school if they can meet point or have that specific class, see what they do have. Maybe they don’t have an exchange program with a Russian college, but will they work with you to do it through another college? Maybe your instate flagship has a direct exchange with a college your daughter would like to attend, and she might be able to save a lot of money by registering for her year abroad through your state school and transferring the credits to the ‘chosen’ school through the instate school. A lot of schools not only have study abroad programs, but swaps in the US too. My daughter can do one or two semester at a number of other schools, and she pays the cheaper of her home school’s tuition or the tuition at the host school (which might be cheaper if she’s attending an instate-for-her school or just cheaper then the OOS tuition she’s paying). You can’t afford Middlebury? Maybe it is on the exchange list.
The big restriction for my daughter is that 30 of her final credits have to be taken at her university and at an upper division level. Your daughter would have to carefully select classes and her final year may not include any Russian language classes.
From schools OP has mentioned and the consideration given them, i just think she’s trying to optimize. And I think that’s fine. There’s no mania from M2PG about finding “the best.” It’s finding the right combination of plusses. Something many of us did. Her D is already advanced in languages.
My D1 had a similar issue, since her intended major was not offered at many colleges.
She’s a senior in high school? She doesn’t have to decide now. Let her continue to explore her interests. In her first year of college, she can take some classes that interest her and decide then. I didn’t decide what I wanted to major in until the second semester of my first year in college.
@Mom2aphysicsgeek Forgive me if this is a naive question, but what intellectual goals does your daughter have for more advanced study in her target languages? A deeper understanding of the languages’ underlying structures? The ability to dive into more complex literature? Flawless verbal fluency? All of the above? As somebody asked up thread, is she deeply fascinated with Russian and French society/culture/politics? I’m assuming her interest is somewhat extrinsic to basic fluency; pinpointing those goals might help to answer questions both about curricula and possible careers.
As I read through the thread I began to think along the lines of @inthegarden Maybe adding critical languages to those she already has might be another strategy she could contemplate?
As for career, I wouldn’t worry too much about that just yet. As others have said, I could see her working in government, in diplomacy, for the UN, for an NGO, in high level translation, in high level tourism, or in a multinational corporation. There are degrees/certificates in translation studies, which is a field that can be quite lucrative. Or I could see her on a path to graduate school as a scholar so she could offer deep coursework in Russian to a girl like her in 10-15 years.
My D, for what it’s worth, also has facility and interest in languages (although not as well developed as your D). Trying to identify schools with deep offerings in Arabic was an illuminating exercise! She’s also interested in how the brain organizes social categories, which will probably lead her to less marketable majors like psychology, sociology, or anthropology. I think that grad school is likely, whatever she ends up choosing.
Finally, I recently encountered a young couple at a social event. The young man had a BA degree in Latin American Studies and his girlfriend had studied Anthropology. Both were gainfully and happily employed in jobs that were tangentially related to their choice of major. Your D sounds smart, capable, and academically well prepared; I’m sure she’ll land on her feet.
Thanks @mamedefamilia She loves languages, literature, and cultures. Her personal goals are to definitely improve her language goals. If we could afford a flagship, her goals would be superior. She would still like to achieve advanced-high.
I don’t think I articulated my thoughts well in this thread, probably b/c I am just as confused as she is.(My question was really just about the majors of IR/IS and business vs pure language/literature/culture major.) She knows she has language goals (which encompass in language literature and culture), but it is the additional directions that she can take that love of those languages that she is unsure of. Reading the threads about the uselessness of IR/IS and business degrees is what prompted me to start the thread bc I was wondering if there really is no difference in what the UG major actually is. (A point I am not sure I agree with, but hey, as I said, all of our older kids have gone to college with a career in mind.) She doesn’t have an actual “career” envisioned; she just has vague ideas. I obviously think that is fine as a high school sr, but the “other” factor will play into her college selection.
Anyway, since I started this thread, she has spent quite a bit of time researching different areas and understanding the different types of course work involved in the different majors, and I think she has decided that IB is an area that she will start off exploring to see if that is the direction she wants to go.
First off I’m sorry you need to chill out a bit. Your kid is in high school and your having a panick attack about her major, when she hasn’t even picked a college! Also it’s HER major, and she will be an adult. Also kids don’t all go into college knowing exactly what they want to do with the rest of their lives. Many people go undecided for a year+.
@futuremed17 I have not having a panic attack. Nor am I trying to decide her major. She is my 5th high school sr, so I do have an idea about parenting young adults. Our kids do live their own lives and make their own decisions. But, they also talk to us, ask us questions, and what we think.
No one in our family or extended family really knows anything about these sorts fields (except for 1 and she is working part-time and could be the feature in the current trend of magazine articles on college degrees and debt.) I am simply asking questions about those areas in order to help answer the questions our daughter has.
Say she tries one IB, finance, or econ class, likes it enough to pursue more. Great. Say she doesn’t enjoy it, she can still try another of the above, for the different perspective. Or maybe she realizes they aren’t it but social sciences/IR is her gem. Or even, she takes IR and then realizes it’s poli sci that rings her bell. In addn to laguanges.
Too much was made of IR being useless. It’s right next to policy, public policy, which in turn can lap into urban studies, and more. PP can be equally interdisciplinary and enhanced by skills in language and cultural awareness.
Btw, in my grad school field, an obscure subset of anthro, the primary academic writings were in German and Russian.