<p>I applied EA and am really nervous. <em>crosses fingers</em></p>
<p>Yeah I applied as a priority applicant and was accepted. Kind of peeved at the amount of merit I ended up getting, though, but oh well. (I'm horrible; I'm mad at the fact I didn't get more free money lol.)</p>
<p>GL!</p>
<p>Awww. Maybe they'll sweeten the package up with FinAid or something. Do you think you'll be attending?</p>
<p>Joycelene:</p>
<p>How much merit money did you get, if you don't mind?</p>
<p>I got my acceptance letter today! Wow! I didn't think I'd be getting one until the end of the month but hey, I'm not going to complain. :) I also got 11k in merit $$ per year so I'm def happy.</p>
<p>what were your scores on act and your gpa.</p>
<p>just wondering b/c i was not happy with my aid from Knox.</p>
<p>I didn't take the ACT but I got a 1950 on the SAT. I had a 3.7UW, good recs, good essays, and good ECs but nothing really spectacular. I think the fact that I'm from CA helped though.</p>
<p>My ds has 3.8 UW gpa and 28 ACT composite. He applied EA and received $11k in merit money also.</p>
<p>I ended up getting 10k. My stats are 3.6 UW, 29 ACT, 1900 SAT (yep my stats are not the best haha) and I'm from IL. I retook the SAT earlier this month and the ACT yesterday so scores should definitely go up. Ahh well. What I'm REALLY disappointed about is the amount of aid I got for my essay (I applied for the writer's scholarship.) I thought for sure that it was a winner!! <em>sigh</em> Apparently not... =/ That's what really upset me; it's making me doubt my ability to write! Silly, I know, but I can't help it haha.</p>
<p>And I guess comparing it to the amount of aid I'll probably get at Lake Forest College (at least 12k hopefully and maybe some more for my apparently not that great short story and a paper I wrote last year) makes me feel even more disappointed. I don't know. I'm odd like that. I just guess I was expecting more aid since I expect I'm going to get more aid at other schools but I guess I didn't take into consideration that Knox is more competitive than those schools I'm expecting more money from. That was dumb of me, lol.</p>
<p>Congrats to you guys though!! :D I'm glad at least you guys are happy w/ your merit aid packets XD</p>
<p>A friend of mine got in as well with merit aid.</p>
<p>I think the biggest factor for me is that Knox is now cheaper than a UC. When I applied, a lot of people doubted me, saying that it was foolish to apply to expensive, private schools when I had perfectly good UC schools to go to. I know I'm not going to get any financial aid so ANY merit aid is exciting. :)</p>
<p>Good luck with Lake Forest, Joycelene. I seriously considered applying there by Chicago really isn't my cup of tea.</p>
<p>My son was accepted but got no merit aid at all, which really surprised us. I don't take any issue with Knox for that because each school obviously has a right to set its own standards. Based on what's reported here I have to assume it was all about GPA. He has about a 3.3 taking the toughest classes at a good school -- but it's still a 3.3, I guess. (Actually it will be higher than that when he graduates because his senior year classes -- all advanced -- are right in his academic wheelhouse.) Otherwise, he had great ECs and recommendations and really high test scores (34 ACT).</p>
<p>We liked Knox a lot but to this point the similar LACs he has applied to clearly are taking a more holistic look at his record with respect to merit aid, given what they have offered. So it certainly doesn't look like he will be a Galesburger. Congrats and good luck to those of you going to Knox, however. I think it's a great school.</p>
<p>Milwdad, This is my pet peeve about merit aid. Some schools look at gpa and do not look at it in the context of a specific high school. We had the same problem with respect to merit aid at 2 different schools last year, although most of the other schools did look at son's holistic record, and he did get merit awards at 5 schools. One additional school did not offer aid as merit, but made up for it with a financial aid package was equal to a merit aid award, without the constraint of needing a 3.0 to keep the award (did not get this type of financial aid package at any other schools). The 2 that did not offer a good package (merit or financial), were just take off the table for consideration. I did call them to see how they determined merit aid. At both schools they used a chart using gpa and standard test scores. In both cases son made the cut for merit aid with his test scores by a lot, but not his gpa missed the mark b/c he went to a top hs and took tough classes. If we knew this going in, my son would not have applied to those schools in the first place b/c he could not attend without those dollars.</p>
<p>northeastmom -- I know how you feel. I enjoyed visiting Knox with my son, but if we had known going in that he would simply be outside the objective parameters for merit aid, then we would not have invested the time in visiting and applying. That may sound a little harsh, but there are similar great LACs, and the extremely substantial cost differential between (in this case) Knox and other schools that apparently have more flexible (or at least different) critieria for merit aid is not going to be overcome by the good feeling on a visit or the great literature. I just don't think it's credible to say that schools as good as the ones we're talking about are, individually, so much better than each other that cost becomes irrelevant. For most of us, parents and students alike, cost is never irrelevant. (I'll leave that kind of thinking for the poor folks who believe in their soul that an Ivy League degree is somehow a magic ticket to success unavailable anywhere else.) And this is particularly so given the very substantial cost difference between LACs and good public universities, a cost difference that merit aid at the LACs only ameliorates but almost never removes entirely. Maybe a simpler way to put this is that everyone has their breaking point. Most of us parents who are looking with our kids at good LACs probably have decided that the cost differential between a good public U and a good LAC that provides some merit aid is not the breaking point. But for many of us -- and certainly we are in this position -- the cost differential between a good public U and a good LAC with no merit aid is the breaking point.</p>
<p>Again, I don't want anything I'm saying here to be construed as a criticism of Knox. They have far more experience than me in selecting their students and choosing which of them deserve merit aid, and they certainly seem to have done alright for themselves. If I didn't think Knox was such a fine school I wouldn't be disappointed. Having said that, I have since found that some LACs do publish their outside objective parameters for merit aid. (An example is Beloit.) That doesn't tell a kid that he or she will get merit aid, but it at least tells you that it's possible. </p>
<p>I guess the good news is that this is our older son of two, and we are learning a lot of lessons we can apply to the process two years from now.</p>
<p>By the way, the GPA issue vexes us too because we simply weren't aware of how much importance was placed on this by colleges, and while we always encouraged our son to get good grades, we didn't think there was anything healthy about being obsessed by them, and a solid B+ average, given the coursework, didn't seem like an issue to us. We are a lot more interested in broader learning, and our son is the kind of kid who spends a lot of time in the evening reading historical books, literature and news and political periodicals that have nothing to do with his coursework. That manifests itself in his standardized test scores much more than in his GPA. </p>
<p>I have since come to appreciate (maybe appreciate isn't the right word) that a lot of gamesmanship goes on from high school to high school because of the apparent importance of GPAs to colleges. My son goes to a very good public HS. I went to a college prep school, and recently I learned from a close friend whose son goes to that same school that it is not uncommon for the counselors to recommend to students, late in semesters, to drop courses in which they are not excelling so as to (artificially) boost their GPAs! The idea of that would have been preposterous when I went to school. But that was a time when, as a friend of mine was recently quoted in a headline story about our flagship state university, one only needed to walk upright to be admitted.</p>
<p>Milwdad, Sorry this happened. Our experience was that out of 10 schools, 5 came in financially doable for our family. This gave my son enough choice, and he is happy at an OOS public university. I hope that your son has as much school choice as my son had when decision time rolled around. It sounds like your son is a wonderful young man. I wish him all the best.</p>
<p>First time dad here, with a senior son applying to a handful or so of the region?s better LACs being commonly discussed, including Knox? which he hasn?t visited yet but where s was accepted with modest merit $. It occurs to me after a few visits, lots of off & on campus interviews, and 4 acceptances so far, that each decision by a school is not easily analyzed in terms of statistics. My son is getting different treatment everywhere, and it seems to me that it correlates more with the tenor of the interviews (which differed from one another) and inclinations by the respective schools to react differently to various narratives present in different parts of the Common App. It seems like it might be chemistry between admissions reps and students and their narratives as much as anything. It?s my impression that more than lip service is being paid when all of these schools give the admonitions about challenging courses. I also believe that admissions offices have fixed ideas about the differences in the college preparation in different types of high school. One thing that I have concluded is that admissions are unpredictable and certainly not a cookie cutter process. It?s hard to analyze only on statistics?I think it gets subjective. (And that?s not a complaint.) </p>
<p>I?m glad to hear such good things about the quality of Knox. We chickened out of a trip out there last weekend because of weather.</p>
<p>bigpicdad -- You are right that there surely must be some degree of art to this science. In the case of Knox, however, our reaction upon learning there would be no merit aid was along the lines of "how could we have misread those signs?" (It's a reference to a great line in an early Woody Allen movie -- Play it Again, Sam.)</p>
<p>The visit went great, the interviews (we thought) went great, the communication was frequent, the encouragement sincere. Now you're right that I can't say I know how the admissions counselors or staff reacted to the application essay, for example, but it seemed pretty good to us and the feedback my son received from other colleges suggests we didn't have rose colored glasses on when reading it. And the fact that there was no merit aid offered at all strongly suggests this was not a situation grounded in a less enthusiastic reaction to the "soft" parts of an application resume (which, in any case, I believe were quite strong), but that instead there was a sine qua non for merit aid that my son's resume was, in fact, without. I simply cannot imagine what that could be other than a higher GPA. And again, I have no problem with any college establishing a floor number for GPA or standardized test score or the number of consonants in the applicant's last name, for that matter. It would just be nice to know what that floor is before deciding whether to invest the time and emotion into applying to a particular school.</p>
<p>MilwDad-- I certainly can relate to the investment of time and emotion. I empathize-- it's been a long year already, and I cannot begin to predict my son's destination. And, I do know the movie line-- from my college days as I recall!!! I hope all of the kids find what they seek. Cheers.</p>
<p>MilwDad, sorry to hear about merit aid issue. I think several factors came into play this year, most important that last couple of years Knox got biggest classes ever so this year it was bound to be more strict to keep yield in check. Last year they had about 100 more people that was expected and for small school like Knox it means a lot. Another reason I could think of is that Knox is big on diversity and has been deservingly more popular at other states and person from WI might have not been as attractive as someone from CA all other things being equal.
Director of financial aid and her team are amazing at Knox so if there any issues they are more than willing to work with you to make it happen. If Knox is still strong for your son I would advice to talk to fin aid people and admission people again and see what happens in the end- it is long way till actual matriculation yet.
Also from personal experience with my D I would say she would have been happy at number of schools she applied. She was blessed that each school gave her about same aid so in the end money did not become an issue.</p>
<p>lindalana -- I am sure you are right. I'm glad Knox is getting so much interest as it is a very impressive college. My gripes above really are not about Knox, just about the frustrations of the process and the cost of our own naivete. I'm sure the same issue arises at many places. As I said, this is our first experience and we are learning. We'll know a lot more when my younger son is ready to start the process in a few years. As for my older son, he has very good alternatives so all will end well. The irony is that my younger son is a little bit of a prodigy, who had college test scores as an 8th grader last year that are easily above the averages for the most selective colleges in the country, and whose personality is such that he will get very high grades in high school because he wants to. But we can already foresee that he will have little or no interest in attending an LAC or a selective private university where merit aid would come into play. He'll be perfectly happy to go to big state U. Oh well -- the whole point is just to find the right match for each kid.</p>