@greeninohio What I liked about your description of the scenario is that you always couched it in terms of being disappointed in the decision and never disappointed in your son. Sometimes subtle differences in wording speak volumes. 
Ever heard the saying âYouâve made your bed, now sleep in itâ This is what I would say. If the kid got into Amherst, Northwestern, etc, and has a parent on CC, his college decision was not made on a whim. Iâd venture to bet many hours were poured into the process. This was a calculated decision.
Ignore a little initial disappointment. Itâs cursory. Things will undoubtedly improve.
Actually, isnât this @greeninohio thread basically similar to @southernhope thread about having qualms saying no to the prestigious colleges due to financial constraints?
I would predict that there may be many parent/kiddos in similar situations.
Congrats to you DS for all his hard work to receive another impressive scholly to reduce his COA even more!
@greeninohio Congrats to your son. We are in similar boats. My kid is also NMF, and is getting a full ride instate (FSU) although he was accepted to several good OOS schools (UVA, Wake.) He really wanted to go out of state, but chose FSU for some of the same reasons you cited. He will be in honors and as a political âwonkâ likes the idea of a possible internship at the state capital. Although instate, itâs an 8 hour drive from S. Florida so logistically it practically is OOS.
Bottom line, we would have been âhorrifiedâ at the debt load resulting from an OOS choice.
@subtropicus , my son was born in Port Charlotte, FL. Was the NMF financial aid package similar between UF and FSU? Now that his enrollment is settled, I can spend my idle time wondering what might have happened if we hadnât moved to OhioâŠ
I didnât think of this before, but my nephew was accepted to Brown, Cornell, NYU and a few other top schools. He picked U Florida, and even turned down the honors college. Money was a slight factor, but if heâd wanted to go to one of the other schools his family would have somehow paid. He just liked it best. He wanted to live in a dorm, go to football games, just be a regular student. He didnât get full scholarships or even close, and I do think he was a little lazy in that area.
Sometimes a school just feels right.
@subtropicus, was FSU a full-ride?
NMF would get you full-tuition scholarships at both UAâs, OU, and ASU (among others). Theyâre arguably not higher up than FSU but they would be OOS (but granted, the panhandle is about the same as OOS to someone from SFla.)
"If one of my kids was interested in STEM and turned down MIT for Yale, I wouldnât be concerned; I would be ecstatic that he chose a first-rate institution with a bounty of resources for STEM students.â
-it heavily depends on a plans for the future. If a Med. School is in plans or engineering career, it absolutley does not matter where one attends, but rather what they do while there. Might as well attend in-state public on full tuition Merit (or any private with the similar offer) as I am sure that the kid who is accepted to Yale, would have great choices of full tuition Merit awards. In these fields, with the awesome opportunites everywhere, it makes no sense to spend lots of money on UG.
I need to comment on a rather disturbing trend in many of these posts to say that MSU, or other large public schools, are âperfectly fineâ and ânothing wrong with thatâ and the like. Thatâs a very snooty, conceited dismissal. Some posters are saying that a school that has too low a concentration of students with stellar HS grades and test scores is just not good enough for what their DC needs.
A research university has two purposes: to produce and facilitate academic research, and to produce educated graduates to enter society as educated adults. If viewed as a business, society would be the customer and the research and graduates would be the products. And frankly, the large public schools usually meet these purposes much better than the small schools (public or private) do. So ask: are they doing research? Are they educating and graduating students? Is there really any better way to determine whether one school is âbetterâ than another?
OPâs son will study engineering at MSU. He can do that not (only) because MSU is selling him an engineering education, but because MSU is doing its part to meet our economyâs need for more engineers.
Outside the classroom, there are huge differences among schools. A school with 30,000 students is going to have a lot more student organizations and clubs and activities, for every conceivable interest, than a student with 5,000 students can have. Students will probably do more networking, make friends, etc., by following their interests (and discovering common interests with like-minded peers) in those organizations and clubs and activities than they every will with someone who happens to take some of the same classes with them.
If the OPâs son decided for whatever reason he wanted to study engineering at MSU instead of NU, thatâs almost certainly based on outside-the-classroom considerations. There is no substantive difference between what you learn at the engineering schools in one college vs. another. In this case, the outside-the-classroom factors that OP saw as most important were apparently a little different from the factors that his son saw as most important. Maybe his son was right and MSU is really the better school, doing more of what a research university is really supposed to do. I donât know.
To answer OPâs question, I am not disappointed and in fact am absolutely thrilled at my childâs choice of school, a medium-large state flagship that does, in fact, do lots of research, graduate most of its students, and has plenty of organizations and activities for her to explore while sheâs there. I was less thrilled about several other schools she applied to (including at least one with a 4 year graduation rate below 50%). Youâd better believe I was ready to focus her attention on that low graduation rate if she had started to favor that school.
I do acknowledge that a lot of this has to do with money. Schools with substantial endowments simply have more resources to build classroom buildings and libraries and research labs, and to hire professors and build departments up, and to work with government and businesses to meet research needs, and to provide counseling and job search assistance and mental health care and student activities. They can graduate more students in part because they can afford to take care of their students, and better. Itâs more than simply saying a bright motivated student can/will do well anywhere she goes. Having a culture of supporting and advancing and graduating your students really matters.
The State of Florida offers has the âFlorida Incentive Scholarship Programâ (FIS), a merit scholarship for Florida high school graduates and later who achieved the National Merit or National Achievement Finalist designation.
It pays:
Florida Incentive Scholarship Award = COA â (BF + NM)
BF= Florida Bright Futures scholarship
NM= National Merit; including the institutional scholarship
The COA is the total amount of cost to attend college full-time each term, and may include but is not limited to: tuition & fees; on-campus room & board; books;supplies; travel; and miscellaneous expenses.
http://www.floridastudentfinancialaid.org/SSFAD/factsheets/FIS.pdf
Itâs new and may or may not be funded in the future by the state legislature. If I had to guess, I think itâs safe for the next few years.
âSome posters are saying that a school that has too low a concentration of students with stellar HS grades and test scores is just not good enough for what their DC needs.â
No, some of us arenât saying âitâs not good enough for my darling child.â We are saying âall else being equal, that is something that we value highly in the college experienceâ (and are willing to pay for).
Kind of like how most of us likely had our children in honors classes of some sort. Because the more densely concentrated âsmart groupâ was a peer group that was more comfortable both socially and academically than just-anyone-in-the-high-school.
Large public state flagships have noble missions. They happen to be different missions from the missions of smaller private research universities and smaller liberal arts colleges. No one is critiquing the mission.
Obviously I donât use the word âhorrifiedâ in this context that seriously. (Well, obvious to me, anyway. Clearly not to others. 
)
But I would have felt a heck of a lot more than âdiscomfortâ if I had been them. Their son was turning down one of the best universities in the nation at instate prices not because he wanted a smaller school or it didnât have some program he wanted, but because he liked a baseball diamond at a lesser, more exppensive school?!? They were going to have to pay considerably MORE for him to go there? Apply whatever word you like.
@greeninohio @purpletitan Because of NMF, he received the Florida Incentive Scholarship, which pays everything above his other scholarships (FL Bright Futures, $500 NMF and FSUâs own $2400) so it is a full ride. We had no idea this even existed until well after he started his applications. Regarding UF, he was accepted and would probably have received the same $$, but preferred the FSU campus and the town. Also, FSUâs economics program appears to be on the upswing whereas they dropped the PhD Econ program at UF. They are planning to bring it back,but it sounds like itâs now in a period of transition.
âKind of like how most of us likely had our children in honors classes of some sort. Because the more densely concentrated âsmart groupâ was a peer group that was more comfortable both socially and academically than just-anyone-in-the-high-school.â
Funny, I never heard it suggested that âcomfortâ was a reason for Honors classes. I always understood the reason to be that it was a matter of teaching (slightly) more difficult material to more academically capable classes, rather than putting all levels of student in the same class and letting the teacher try to handle it. The reason was and is that the capabilities of the class are more consistently matched top to bottom to the difficulty of the material being taught that way. In some classes my child had, it was mostly the same core group of âHonorsâ students, and in some classes it really was âjust-anyone-in-the-high-school.â
What is your objection to âjust-anyone-in-the-high-schoolâ? This really sounds like a quality/value judgment, saying the âbetterâ kids shouldnât have to mix with the lesser riff-raff they are unfortunate enough to be stuck in the same school with.
âLarge public state flagships have noble missions. They happen to be different missions from the missions of smaller private research universities and smaller liberal arts colleges. No one is critiquing the mission.â
Okay, now Iâm curious: just what is the ignoble mission of the smaller private research universities and LACs, if not producing research and educated graduates?
@FCCDAD I guess itâs to produce super-research and super-educated people from the top 10% (for the sake of the argument, it could be another percentage) of students?
@FCCDAD, itâs not quite true to say that all engineering educations are the same everywhere. Yes, all ABET engineering schools would have to meet a minimum requirement to stay accredited, but some schools add more or offer more. For instance, NU has design classes for all engineers that few if any other engineering schools offer. Schools also differ in the breadth and rigor of the electives they offer. For that matter, the electives and requirements outside the ABET-specified curriculum would differ as well. For instance, are there MSU equivalents of the Entrepreneurship certificate program and Kellogg certificate program that NU offers? Is there something akin to the Kellogg MSMS (open only to NU undergrads) at MSU?
âWhat is your objection to âjust-anyone-in-the-high-schoolâ? This really sounds like a quality/value judgment, saying the âbetterâ kids shouldnât have to mix with the lesser riff-raff they are unfortunate enough to be stuck in the same school with.â
At an educational institution, I like to be surrounded by generally smart people.
I note that if there were a talented soccer player, for example, no one would question why he wants to be on the fancy traveling soccer team instead of the park district soccer team that accepts just anybody.
^ And then you enter the workforce. LOL
As one who has four sons whoâve participated in both travel and rec sports, I submit that there are benefits and drawbacks to each. The talented player whose aspirations only go so far might well be better served on a rec team. Playing shortstop or center forward with your friends might be more enjoyable (and better for your development) than playing right field or left back with a team of strangers whose parents are secretly rooting against you lest you take their childâs spot.
As a parent, would you be âhorrifiedâ if your child didnât want to play on the fancy traveling team? So the average ability on the park district team is less, across all players - so what? It doesnât mean he wonât get to really enjoy playing some great soccer games.
At any school, OPâs son will be taking classes at his own ability level, with other students at a similar level. Is the average academic ability, over the whole student body, higher at NU than at MSU? Probably.
Will that make for a better educational experience in this one studentâs classes? Maybe not. Presumably, those who are not able to handle the same academics wonât be taking the same classes with him.