<p>Might look at Holy Cross-great classics program and believe Holy Cross offers merit schollarships for students majoring in the Classics. Also HC is one of a few schools that is still need-blind for admissions. Holy Cross website is very informative.</p>
<p>From the Holy Cross website:
"The Department of Classics and the College of the Holy Cross offer competitive merit-based scholarships to outstanding high school graduates who will major in the Classics at Holy Cross. Each year we award two Rev. Henry Bean, S.J., Scholarships, which are four-year, full-tuition, merit-based scholarships. Candidates are expected to have a strong background (equivalent of four years) in Latin and/or Greek, and significant academic achievement in all other subjects and on standardized tests. "</p>
<p>D does not qualify. She has no Latin or Greek at this point.</p>
<p>Thanks anyway.</p>
<p>I second the College of Charleston. My D graduated from there with a Classics degree, and is now doing her PhD at Duke. How can you beat 4 years in Charleston SC?</p>
<p>Boston College, Fordham, Northeastern, George Washington, and American are all fantastic schools that offer the urban atmosphere and have the reputation and education you are looking for but the aid my not be there. You would have to look into that.</p>
<p>Turtlephobic-
My D wants to follow the path that your D is taking. How exciting. And what a good testimonial for C of Charleston.</p>
<p>informative-
I know she will not get merit money at BC. I can check the others. Thanks.</p>
<p>Terpreter,
My D went to CofC with a merit scholarship to the honors college. Not really knowing what she wanted to study, and bringing tons of AP credits, she almost stumbled into Classics. She had been a fan of history, but was counseled by yours truly that she needed a more realistic major. It turns out that CofC has a language requirement, and Latin is one of the choices. I told her that she could do the Classics stuff as long as she did her other major(math), and completed her pre-med stuff (organic chem etc.). While she ended up graduating with both a B.S. in Math, and an A.B. in Classics, Classics turned out to be her path.
The Classics department at CofC is really incredible. My D received a student research grant that paid for her junior summer in Rome (emphasis on the word “GRANT”). As a senior, my D won the Lionel Pearson Fellowship, the top award for an undergraduate Classics major in North America. The Pearson Fellowship funds a year of study at a British university. My D was admitted to Duke for her PhD, but deferred admission to get her MA degree in the “City of Rome” course at the University of Reading(UK), and the British School at Rome. She is now a second year at Duke.
To say we are pleased with her education at CofC is an understatement.
(all at a small fraction of the money the fancy privates ask).
…and did I mention my D had no High School Latin or Greek?</p>
<p>I’d suggest Macalester. Excellent overall academics, strong Classics offerings including language and archaeology, urban setting, good merit aid.</p>
<p>I don’t think you have to go to a “really good” classics program. A classics program at a good university will probably be fine, and there’s also the possibility she’ll change her major.</p>
<p>If she wants a PhD in classical archaeology, it will be fully-funded. So don’t worry too much about your finances.</p>
<p>Here are some suggestions</p>
<p>-SUNY-Binghamton (CoA for OOS students is $31,000 - a little over budget - but it has a variety of classics majors).
-Agnes Scott College (a small LAC for women right outside of Atlanta. They give good merit aid, and they have a classical civilization major as well as a classical languages major. The school does have an artsy/quirky vibe, and the campus is simply beautiful, with nice dorm rooms. It’s much smaller than she wants though.)
-Furman University in SC has a classics major and offers merit. Greenville’s a small city.
-Elon University also offers scholarships; Elon is a suburb of Greensboro, and is also not too far from the Research Triangle (Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill).
-Duquesne University in Pittsburgh
-Fordham University, in New York
-Loyola Marymount, in Los Angeles
-St. Olaf College, in Northfield, Minn., not too far from Minneapolis/St. Paul. St. Olaf also has the Great Conversation program which may interest your daughter.
-Santa Clara University
-Lawrence University in Appleton, WI
-La Salle University
-Hofstra University (they have the Trustee Scholarship program)
-Siena College</p>
<p>Wellesley also gives good need-based merit aid and has a classics program.</p>
<p>Also, if you’re in Illinois, check out your Illinois public universities. Aside from UIUC, UIC also has a classical studies major. Southern Illinois-Carbondale also has a classics major.</p>
<p>The Kiplinger’s LAC page shows about 20 schools in the $40K-$45K range for full COA. They all offer merit aid, most of them to more than 50% of students, typically averaging ~$15K. This should get you close enough to your $25K mark to make up any difference with “self help” aid. Example: Centre College (KY).</p>
<p>These schools are in the right selectivity range for likely admission (if not for the most generous merit grants). Most are not urban. You’d have to comb through the course listings to see if any of them offer adequate coverage in Classics.</p>
<p>There is a similar cluster of schools on the Kiplinger’s Private Universities page (~$40K - $45K for full COA). Many of these schools appear to be Catholic universities in more urban areas.</p>
<p>A bit off topic, but TurtlePhobic - what a great kiddo you have! She’s a fascinating-sounding Renaissance woman. Congrats, mom :)</p>
<p>
Well, to my mind a good classics program offers:</p>
<p>– Both intro and intermediate Greek every year
– Both intro and intermediate Latin every year
– At least one advanced Greek and Latin course a semester
– A decent spread of courses in history, religion, art/archaeology, etc.</p>
<p>I’d say those are pretty essential. For archaeology, you also want access to an archaeological field school. Availability of funding is especially critical…they often run upwards of $6000 for the summer. </p>
<p>Things that are useful but not essential include a classical art collection, a classics library, special collections (papyri, coins, squeezes, etc.), and courses in neighboring cultures and languages.</p>
<p>PhD programs in the humanities tend to be much less egalitarian than the sciences, and it’s not uncommon for a program to have a certain set of feeder programs from which it usually draws undergraduates. That’s not to say a student from, say, Skidmore can’t attend a top-flight classics program; students from weaker programs do fare well in admissions sometimes, particularly if they work around their college/program’s limitations (e.g. studying abroad at Oxford or CYA for a year, doing a Fulbright, writing an excellent senior thesis, etc.). A student from somewhere like Michigan typically holds an inherent advantage, however, due to the significantly greater number of resources and big name professors, whose letters of recommendation can easily make or break an applicant. The level of competition for graduate school is extreme; the best graduate programs at Penn, Brown, Berkeley, etc. have upwards of 50 applicants per spot, and many of those applying are hyper-prepared applicants from the UK, Germany, and other countries that take classics very seriously. </p>
<p>I agree that she may well change her mind. Many students decide to switch to other fields of archaeology; classical archaeology is a heavily saturated field, and Greece is fairly unfriendly to foreign missions relative to other countries (Italy is less so). Still others decide archaeology is not their thing at all. One poster on this forum switched from archaeology to soil science, and I know of another archaeologist who moved from classical archaeology (BA) to Meso-American archaeology (PhD) to genetic engineering (current research).</p>
<p>Thank you for all the feedback.</p>
<p>We will be investigating these suggestions. Some schools were already on our list. Some we have never heard of. </p>
<p>She realizes that she may change her mind. This past summer she worked at a field school in Portugal and loved it. But she did hear the reality of the “heavily saturated field.” Many of the other people on the dig were grad students and gave her a realistic vision of the future. </p>
<p>She loves the humanities in general, history specifically. And wants to start with Classics so the door is open to Classical Archaeology if she should chose to continue down that path.</p>
<p>Warblersrule-
We did not know what qualities to look for in evaluating Classics programs. Thank you for that.</p>
<p>We did some digging regarding Furman. From other CC posters, it appears that merit aid would be around $12K for our D. Not enough for our budget with COA at around $54,000.</p>
<p>Lots of great information here! I wish I found this site years ago when my kids were younger. Our daughter is currently in one of the so-called top PhD programs in classical archaeology. She attended a college in Massachusetts but not where I work as a non-academic staff member (Brandeis). We were disappointed when she did not attend Brandeis like her brother and take advantage of the tuition break, but she ended up coming here later for her MA in classical studies. We can’t say enough good things about the program. I’m not as familiar with classics as people like warblersrule, but Brandeis seems to meet many if not all of his characteristics for a good program. They run their own archeology dig, have their own artifacts collection, and my daughter learned all her languages here (her college did not offer them in house and it was inconvenient taking them down the road - be wary of such resources as it’s better in theory). I know there is merit aid here. If you’re checking out Holy Cross and BU, take a look!</p>
<p>My d is a Brandeis alum and while not a classics major or minor, she did take two electives in that department and enjoyed them both. Several of the classes are cross-listed with other departments and meet university requirements.</p>
<p>My colleague’s husband is an archeologist who is a British citizen. I don’t know about his undergrad but he got his Ph.D at Oxford… however he is employed by the University of Texas on a long-term dig in Italy and previously in Libya. You might want to check out their website. It is selective school for out of state, Austin is a hip place, maybe not the definition of urban your d is looking for, vegetarian and vegan dining options all over the place… but the school is really large so maybe not the undergrad experience she is looking for.</p>
<p>a caveat for the OP: many many students who enter classics departments without any experience of either Greek or Latin end up leaving Classics. The languages are the litmus test of commitment for the classical archaeologist–which is not to say she couldn’t find a marvelous career in archaeology outside of the Roman and Greek classical period. I’d be careful about hanging my hat on classics when archaeology seems to be just as important if not more.</p>
<p>I don’t doubt this happens. In my daughter’s case, she did work her tail off with the languages. It was just about all I ever saw her do. I believe she also did summer classes in languages at Harvard and did independent studies. In the end, it evidently didn’t hurt as she got into most programs where she submitted an application. She focuses much more on the archaeology now, but it sounds like she still takes a language class here and there. Maybe she got lucky, but I don’t think you need numerous years (4+) of both languages. It sounded more like a beginning advanced level if that makes sense (2-3?).</p>
<p>I’m not sure how up to date it is and I won’t post a link since I know some forums don’t allow it, but you can look up a list of PhD programs that these MA students attend (my daughter’s is up there!). I think the program is less than five years old (which worried me), but it’s not too shabby.</p>
<p>Boston University: Department of Archaeology</p>
<p>University of British Columbia: Department of Classical, Near Eastern, and Religious Studies</p>
<p>Brown University: Archaeology of the Ancient World</p>
<p>Brown University: Department of Classics</p>
<p>Bryn Mawr College: Department of Classical and Near Eastern Archaeology</p>
<p>CUNY: Graduate Center Classics</p>
<p>Harvard University: Department of Comparative Literature</p>
<p>University of Illinois: Department of Classics</p>
<p>Princeton University: Department of Classics</p>
<p>UC Santa Barbara: Department of Classics</p>
<p>UCLA: Department of History</p>
<p>You all are wonderful to continue to offer help and ideas based on your experiences. I will share your thoughts with D.
jkeil911, I know that leaving Classics is a possibility. To me it seems overwhelming to imagine starting two languages in college but she is excited.<br>
birdback, thanks for the story of your D.<br>
bookmama22, I think that UT Austin will be on the list for later. </p>
<p>Right now we are in the throes of college acceptances (no deferrals or rejections). Thank goodness no decision is needed yet since it seems it will be difficult. She has been accepted to every college and has received merit money from all that have made awards at this time. As expected, some are not enough merit money. She is proud of her 100% acceptance rate (at this time) though. Right now she is most excited about Beloit and College of Charleston. CWRU did not offer enough money. Still waiting for others. I know the picture will change.</p>
<p>Will keep you all posted.</p>
<p>I’ll look forward to hearing, OP. </p>