Best colleges for exploring multiple fields? (creative writing, linguistics, computer science) [WA resident, 4.0, 1530, needs full merit ride]

College Search & Selection
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This is a serious disconnect that a lot of parents have—they think that because they were able to pay their own way through college, that their kids should be expected to do so.

However, inflation in college cost of attendance has exceeded inflation (and not just by a little) for several decades now—and by the miracle of compounding, that means that college is way more expensive in real terms than it was when today’s parents were attending.

It is, quite simply, effectively impossible for someone to “work their way” through college. (Or, if they do—speaking here from direct observation as someone who’s faculty at a place where we have a solid chunk of students who actually do take classes as they save up money for them—it takes 10 years or more. Not really a cost-effective use of time, if you run the numbers.)

This is even the case for public institutions, and in most states even more so for public institutions, because state appropriations for higher education have decreased—steeply in most jurisdictions—in real terms, and in some places even in nominal terms, over the past several years.

So it sounds like your parents are operating under severely outdated assumptions about college costs. I honestly don’t know the best way to inform them, but it sounds like it needs to happen, for your sake and for the sake of your younger siblings.

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Yep - many do well at Miss State - it’s popular in Nashville. It’s a beautiful campus btw and I like how you have to drive into it - like a Disneyland vs. having it in the middle of town.

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This is a great thread!! Trying to summarize for parents who may read this and haven’t been following the changing landscape of college expenses (all you other brilliant CC folks, help me flesh this out and correct it):

(1) Beginning in the 1980s, state appropriations as a percentage of students’ expenses for public colleges began to decline rapidly, with the rationale that rather than taxpayers supporting kids going to college, the kids themselves (and their families) should take on a bigger portion of the expense of a college education. Classic example: University of Michigan, 1960 - 78% of operating expenses were paid by the state. In 2023, 13% of expenses were paid by the state.
The difference is partially covered by federal research grants, but much of the costs are now pushed onto the students. Scanning the web, 28% of the University of Maryland’s budget is paid by the state of Maryland. It looks like around 15-18% of the University of Alabama’s budget is paid by the state of Alabama.

States blue and red expect students going to our public colleges to pay for it, in a way that was simply not true in the post-WW II golden era of public higher ed. (and I didn’t even get into the GI Bill)

(2) Over this same 40 year period, universities began competing for students with nicer dorms, dining halls, student life features, and a much more robust support staff for students. All of this costs $$, and it was not coming from the state! You many not care if your dorm or dining hall is state-of-the-art, or if there are dozens (hundreds!) of tutors, writing coaches, counselors, etc, but they are there and are built into the cost of modern higher ed. You can’t opt out of that built in cost.

(3) Partially as a result of (1) and (2), inflation in college costs has been astounding over the past forty years.

(4) The Lure of the Full Ride: everyone has heard of this, and many aspire to it, and some get it … but:
(a) NCAA athletics is a semi-pro setup at this point that doesn’t apply to 99.9% of us here on CC;
(b) A few schools that are aggressively trying to increase their ranking profile offer celebrated full-ride scholarships, often correlated to National Merit Finalist status (is Alabama still the no 1 NMF school? I think Oklahoma was at one point); these are typically large state schools but also include places like Tulsa
(c) However, for most students, the best scholarships at state schools cover at most tuition (and usually a bit less than this), leaving room, board, and fees to the families (and this can easily add up to $20,000/year. Very few of the nation’s elite college offer a “full-ride” merit scholarship, and receiving one of those is like winning a lottery. It simply cannot be planned for or assumed, given even acceptance to these factories of rejection is unpredictable for even the most over-qualified students in the world. Washington & Lee is the outlier in the size of their merit scholarship program, but it is still hugely competitive.

(5) There are full-rides that parents hear about, or read articles about, at all of our nation’s elite universities – as when you read about student XYZ who was admitted to Harvard, and has a full-ride. But these are need-based - and the articles typically don’t mention this out of respect for the children’s privacy about their economic situation. My children’s high school does this: they brag about the size of scholarships earned by students at the school without ever mentioning that the scholarship sizes were often determined by need, not merit. I understand why they do this - but for casual observers, it gives the impression that there are lots of full ride scholarships out there.

A this point, many of the nation’s “elite” schools have abandoned merit-based aid completely in favor of need-based aid, out of a sense of equity. The idea is that everyone who goes to XYZ college should pay what they’re able - that’s what’s fair.

(6) But then there is tuition discounting … widely discussed in news articles, many private colleges will offer additional aid, beyond need, to lure students to their school. (The likelihood of this occurring is tied to the ease the school has in attracting students who will pay anything to go there.) This discounting NEVER leads to full-pay situations, but rather simply drops the price a bit.

TL;DR: Given larger social dynamics impacting higher ed over the last forty years, any family with an income in excess of about $65,000, or with measurable wealth in home equity or savings, should assume that they will need to contribute some money to their kid’s college education, at a rate that grows proportional to growing income and/or wealth. While “full-ride” scholarships can be applied for, they are so rare as to be impractical to be planned on as part of a rational college search strategy.

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Excellent summary. I will just add that many parents are shocked to discover that the amount of loans their kids can take is capped. And so the strategy “he’ll borrow what he needs” usually does NOT cover what he needs. And taking out a HELOC, Parent Plus loan, early withdrawal from a 401K, borrowing against an insurance policy- all of these which are POTENTIAL parent financing options- come with risk. And for a family which has been unable to save for college, the likelihood that the parents can pay down a loan… eeesh. That’s painful AND risky.

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My son did receive Live Oak at ULL. We toured the school. It’s quite nice. The people were all very welcoming. As in, talking to me personally and giving me their number to call them “Call me, don’t email, get me directly.”

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I’d add one thing: Since the 1980s, the growth in administrative positions has grown much faster than faculty or staff positions (and in many cases, the number of administrators has grown from staff and faculty FTEs have actually declined). Some of this is due to various mandates—e.g., the federal government requires that actual attention be paid to sexual harassment and assault, and the reporting, investigation, and enforcement requirements really do effectively require a new administrative arm—but often it’s due to simply splitting what had been the responsibility of one position into two or more, or moving a position from lower on the administrative ladder to something higher, and thus higher paid (e.g., a Director of Student Affairs being reformulated into a Vice President for Student Affairs).

Since upper administrators are, in general, paid more than faculty and much more than staff, this has become an additional cost driver.

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I love this.

Rejection is indeed a product certain schools intentionally manufacture. The factory owners increase their thoughput by certain reliable methods. Then at the end of the manufacturing cycle, they release an annual production report bragging about their ever-improving rate of success in manufacturing rejection.

(But to bring this back to topic – my advice to the OP is to remember that a lot of what goes into “prestige” is a manufactured sense of exclusivity and scarcity.You can get an excellent education at many non-famous schools.)

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OP, this could be worth sharing with your parents.

“Colby aid packages contain grants and work-study aid—but not loans. While our admissions process is need-aware, we’ll meet 100 percent of your demonstrated financial need if you are admitted. More than 90 percent of families with a total income of $200,000 or less have qualified for some form of financial assistance in recent years, and families with a total income of less than $75,000 and assets typical of this income range will have a parent or guardian contribution of $0.”

You may be able to get some FA at some schools to close the gap. There’s also a difference between getting grants and loans. It sounds like you are on the right track in focusing on cost first, and getting some early reads on FA, as suggested above, may help your parents understand the landscape as well.

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You don’t need a liberal arts college to do that. In fact, due to small size, these colleges tend to have very limited options available to explore, because there’s just not enough students to have a wide variety of majors. The best type of college is your state university. You’re going to get a school that’s generally much more diverse with much more opportunity to explore.

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I disagree. Larger universities tend to have more fixed general studies requirements, and they often want you to choose a major earlier. Doing so boxes you in. They often have much larger pre-professional programs that limit exploration in other fields. LACs are founded (for the most part) on a philosophy that supports exploration and learning for the enjoyment of learning. You choose your major later, and you’ll be more likely to have broad-field core requirements than specific ones, so you can satisfy requirements with courses that interest you. Unless you are going into a pre-professional major or a technical major like engineering (for which a larger department and university’s resources would be helpful), a LAC is a great place to explore broadly before settling in. They have smaller departments, sure, but they also have smaller student bodies. They also have more flexibility. I haven’t heard too many complaints from LAC students about a dearth of opportunities. And for students who value mentorship from their professors, LACs give you so many more chances to build those relationships. Meanwhile, I think it’s more common to take longer to graduate at larger universities than at small colleges because students often can’t enroll in required courses (lack of space), finish their majors, switch majors without delaying progress, and so forth (I don’t have numbers to prove that - just observations).

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That said, of course you can get a great education at a larger university, and upper-level classes in your major can put you in close contact with professors. It’s just that those universities are not the easiest settings for free-ranging exploration of new disciplines.

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In addition, at most large universities, you apply to a major or a college, or you can apply undecided - and these are different “silos”.
For this student at UW it would block them from the capacity-constrained majors because admission is freshman-year only (or made very very difficult afterwards, requiring one to focus on the pre-reqs for that one major rather than exploring).
Finally, it’d be easy to combine some majors but not others (for instance, Data Science in Geography and Linguistics would be possible, but not CS in COE with a major in Humanities).
Most LACs are “whole college” - you’re admitted to a major but can switch to another.
Some universities also function like that, such as Case Western Reserve, but few publics, bc they need to manage enrollment.

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At most LACs, you’re not admitted to a major at all – you choose my the end of your sophomore year. You might express a preference in your application, but it’s nothing more than a preference. At large universities, you’re often admitted to a major, as you said, though sometimes applicants to the main Arts and Sciences college (called different names at different schools) are not committed to a major right away unless it’s an in-demand major housed in that college.

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My issue with universities and their “offerings” and I don’t know if it’s widespread or not - but what’s in the catalogue isn’t necessarily regularly available.

My daughter at her school needed a 2nd major and picked it out and it’s interdisciplinary no less - but in looking at the offerings of the last two years - there was no way to make it work.

And she was warned by a prof not to choose that major and it has less than 40 students in it (I spoke to the director).

I do worry a lot of these schools market - majors, classes, study abroad - and a lot are actually not viable (my daughter had her study abroad in summer cancelled at her school and the one we signed her up for at Case Western as well. I looked at the UC study abroads as I was trying to save her experience - and they had a ton of cancels.

I’m not sure if any correlation to a small, mid size (hers is 10K or so) and large.

But that’s my concern when choosing any school but not sure if there’s a way to figure that out up front - other than asking a lot of questions to a school itself and doing a lot of previous class searches. I don’t think you can take anyone at their “marketing” word because that’s what it all seems to be - marketing.

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That’s going to be true of a lot of places, but it is more apparent at universities because there are a lot more faculty, so there are more courses in the system. Basically, this is what happens – any given faculty member might teach a rotation of 5-10 courses (or more). But they might only teach a fraction of that in a given year. Some will come up more often (required courses for the major, gen-ed courses), and electives will be taught more rarely.

The catalog is not the same as the class schedule. Getting a course in the catalog requires a long bureaucratic process, so once a course is in there, it stays – even if the prof doesn’t teach it often, even if the prof who’s primarily responsible for that course leaves, even if they have a very low teaching load, etc. Departments and colleges tend to keep those courses in the system unless there’s a good reason to take them out (my department just “cleaned house” and updated or deleted a bunch of obsolete courses from our catalog offerings because the people who taught them are no longer here, but we haven’t done that in years). The best thing to do is look at the class schedules for the last 4-5 semesters, to get a sense of which courses are offered every semester and which ones rotate less frequently.

Again, this is likely to happen at a LAC, too, but not to the same degree. But even in these schools, professors can go on leave, or get reduced teaching loads, or retire, or rotate through electives and special topics courses, and courses might stay on the books even if they’re not taught.

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This is a huge issue at UW, one many consider the extreme downside of attending, unless you know what you want to major in by November of senior year in HS, and then get accepted direct-admit into the major. No chance to explore, which might work for some students but definitely not for others.

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More worrisome to me: I knew what I wanted to major in when I was 17. 100% sure. Life mapped out.

I was wrong. Fortunately went to a school where I could transition easily. I thus feel that for my children I wanted them to have flexibility in case they changed their understanding of themselves and their future, sometime between 17 and 20.

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Yes this. Or something else pretty common where I live: parents choosing a major for their kid because of return on investment (“You WILL study Engineering or CS”). I really feel for the humanities kids.

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LACs small total size reduces the risk of any one major bring overloaded – although it has happened with CS at a few LACs.

Also, changing major (at any college) means having taken the prerequisites to the new major previously, or having to “catch up” on those prerequisites or delay graduation if not.

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We are also in Washington state.

I encourage you to look into the Honors Colleges at state universities. They often provide a smaller community with a LAC-style academic approach within a larger institution, even a more science-oriented institution.

Large state universities offer the advantage of LOTS of majors and are also more generous with granting credit for AP classes and dual credit classes taken in high school, which can be a big money saver. UW has a reputation for many capacity-constrained majors and difficulty getting into and switching majors, but it is much easier at many other state schools.

Washington State University has some large scholarships available, particularly if your school administrator nominates you. Look at their Honors College. Also look at the Honors College at every WUE school (“Western University Exchange” schools offering discounted tuition to Washington residents). Keep an open mind. My child ended up going to the last school she visited because she didn’t think it was focused on her desired major or was what she imagined she wanted, but she completely changed her mind after visiting.

Good luck!

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