I never understand this. Does she not like anyone at her high school? Does she even KNOW 50 kids from her school who go to Iowa other than as a statistic? My nephew graduated with about 225 and I’m sure 50 are at CU (some directly, MANY transferred after their OOS or LAC schools proved too small, too far away, too expensive). He knows several hundred more from prior grad years, youth sports, girls (he went to an all boys school), etc. He’s a social guy. He took a random roommate his first year just for something different. His girlfriend is not from here (I think she’s from your kids’ high school!)
I just don’t get the worry that out of ~23k students at a school like Iowa, she may know 50 and even run into 2-3 per day. I understand she may not want to go to Iowa, but the reason shouldn’t be that she’d run into past classmates or fear that it will be just like high school.
My S21 has really changed his mind about size - and definitely a school’s proximity to a city seems to matter more than actual enrollment numbers. We went to UC Berkeley to look at it for his older sister and he left insisting he wanted a small school. We’ve visited a few that were a quarter or even a fifth of that size and if they were urban, he still didn’t like them. But University of Florida- which is slightly bigger than Berkeley “felt” small.
In general size has become much less of a concern for him, as the availability of continuing his extra-curricular has become more important - which I never would have guessed when we first started talking about schools. As major isn’t the focus, perhaps strength of an extra-curricular may matter to your daughter if she’s passionate about something?
@twoinanddone her no for Iowa and IU is more around how many they accept from our school. She’s a strong student who has a very rigorous schedule and does not want to go to college with kids she’s known since kindergarten who blow off academics and are bad students. Judge her if you like but this attitude is one that most of the top kids have here. She’s worked so hard and wants to be somewhere with academic peers. And yes I know there are smart kids at Iowa and IU but, when they accept kids who she knows personally who have way lower grades and no rigor, it’s a turn off.
I find it interesting that people are listing schools as conservative schools(Wake, Davisdon, Richmond etc.) In general college campuses are usually somewhat liberal. My S is a at Wake and he has never commented on it feeling one way or another politically . Lot’s of kids from the North East at Wake who are more liberal and we are from CA which is very liberal. I would say don’t judge a college by what you think it is or the location. All people should go to college and be able to have political discussions and come away understanding how the other person feels whether they feel the same way or not. There are certain colleges that label themselves as conservative Liberty University for example. Other than that I’m not sure its really fair to say. That being said there is a place for everyone!!
@lookingforward To each his/her own. UMass (attended in the 80s) is tiny compared to large state Us in the south. UF would be more like the UMass campus and a good chunk of Amherst itself. It’s not just actual size, but more importantly layout. One thing you see at a school like UF is bikes and electric scooters (look like mopeds) EVERYWHERE. They’re popular for a reason. It would take forever to get across campus on foot. Probably popular on lots of campuses today but I would still consider UMass a walking campus.
Labeling schools as conservative can be a bit confusing since it can be unclear if the label is being applied in a relative sense or in the conventional sense. When I refer to certain schools as conservative, it is as compared to other schools–even though there are some extreme examples such as Liberty University.
Accordingly, I view WFU as conservative as well as Davidson College, Alabama, Pepperdine, Notre Dame and many other schools.
P.S. Am a bit surprised at some of the LACs recommended in this thread. a day or two ago, an article on the internet listed the top 50 colleges that are poor investments (in terms of tuition cost versus grads earnings 10 years after graduation). Most of the LACs mentioned in this thread made the list. (I’ll try to find the article & share some results here.)
Also important to consider is OP’s daughter thoughts about drinking to excess. Very hard to avoid at small, rural LACs.
Oberlin, however, is on the list of “50 Top Ranked Colleges That Pay Off The Least”. (Oberlin College was rated as the 8th worst return of top ranked colleges, if I recall correctly.)
The list, however, refers to full tuition versus average earnings of graduates ten years later. Therefore, best to attend these schools only with a heavy discount. Bates, for example, is known for awarding substantial discounts to those demonstrating financial need. Another list has Bates College as a top return on one’s investment, but assumes that students are only paying $12,000 to under $13,000 per year–which represents a very large discount.
A lot of those 50 colleges are not what I’d call “top ranked.” How many offer engineering? And I should say, I do mind ranking them by salaries. You could put the time and less $$ into a pre-professional or directional college (or trade school, lol,) if all college means is income.
And rickle1, you now stand out as the first who’s said to me that UMassAmhers isn’t really so big. I’ll remember that and take a look, sometime. Btw, BU’s size drove D1 away.
I don’t take those “least likely to pay off school” lists too seriously. But we do look very closely at the career centers and ask a lot of questions when we visit about what kids do with their majors. Haven’t done that yet with D but asked a lot of questions with S19. He’s more of a math or physics kid so we were very comfortable with what kids in those majors were doing after college. Even some on that list had impressive results for math majors (Grinnell and Kenyon and Carleton.)
^ BU and UMass are quite different. Far more than size, the setting is polar opposite. Can’t imagine a kid really liking both. BU is defined but urban. Campus is one long line (Commonwealth Ave I think). I think there are two T stops (subway) on campus - that’s how long the line is. I remember our tour quite well. It was so loud with normal city traffic, the guide had to use a headset / loudspeaker / microphone setup. It was tinny and I could barely make out what she was saying. Not her fault. Just a lot of commotion. Was apparent the only thing S really liked was its proximity to Fenway Park which is literally right there.
UMass is in a bucolic setting in western Mass. Amherst itself is a quaint town. Picture front porches with pumpkins in the fall. It’s really like that. Has an institutional feel as most state flagships do but the layout is much like a bullseye: campus center / pond in the middle, ring of academic and admin buildings, ring of dining hall and dorms. I recall walking from one end to the other frequently.
A little anecdote, just to show how this can be hard. DH was fixated on Carelton, so we went to a road show. An adcom and two local recent grads. Someone asked about career services and the adcom choked. “Um, I think they’re building a new career services office.” Then she had the girls speak about their success with career services. One was a nanny, the other unemployed. I think they both said they hadn’t used CS. Say what?!
But a few years later, I caught a Carleton video about seniors’ post grad plans. Phenomenally impressive, whether work, internships, non-profits or community programs, more learning, grad school, or the equivalent of a post-grad gap.
@Publisher The “study” compared the income of students who received federal aid (pell grants?) ten years ago to the listed tuition and fees of 2019. Already not a random sample. No attempt to correct for the fact that none of these people paid the list price (if they were eligible for pell grants, they probably got significant need based aid), or to account for different choices in career path (e.g. a school which specialized in early education is not going to have a high median salary). Using the list price insures that public schools, with lower tuition/lower aid look better than private schools with higher tuition/higher aid, and using median salary punishes LAC which don’t turn out hordes of engineers.
The people who wrote this study would have failed statistics at any of these 50 schools, and rightly so. But maybe they would have gotten an A in Online Marketing, since we are all talking about it:)
I have a son at Lafayette and that checks most of your boxes. I don’t recall it coming up upstream (although it must have) but Tulane strikes me as being very similar to Wake. It’s about the same size, has liberal arts focus, has a collegiate sports culture, Greek life, a nice walkable campus with Audubon Park next door. Stats are close. My S19 will start there in August. Wake is D20’s leading choice at the moment. Both have good career services and internship opportunities. They really are very similar in many respects.
@lookingforward Carleton and other LACs have really stepped up their game when it comes to developing career services. Those top LACs with half of the families paying full freight know it’s becoming more and more important. Many top LACs have been updating their career services websites so that we can all see exactly what’s available to the students and then exactly what graduates are doing after graduation.