There is significant academic money yes and the athletic is almost equal and the fact that she is probably more capable academically is not lost on me… Like I said we are weighing all the options. She wants to play so we are seeing what other offers she gets.
@northwesty you make many incorrect assumptions. Believe me we are doing all of our homework for all aspects of the decision. I asked specifically about the HBCU part because that is one area we hadn’t yet encountered.
Also I know affordable is subjective. While I do well for myself as does my husband starting over financially at the age of 50 takes its toll. If she took the offer at DSU she would save 25k in GSLs and we would probably save $40-50k out of our pockets.
She is also being courted by ECSU a D3 in CT and our OOP there is probably 9k a year … Maybe 5k if she takes the GSL.
We are also trying to find a not too tiny school. Some of these D3s are so small. Her high school has 2500 students and some of these colleges have 1/2 that or less!
“Also I know affordable is subjective.”
Check.
One thing you haven’t mentioned is the types of schools your other children go to. My kids go to very different schools, especially in costs, but each got to go where she wanted. If your other kids are going to schools they consider ‘better’ than DSU, will your daughter feel she had to settle for something less? Mine had the same budgets, but they worked with the budgets, their academics and talents, and found good matches. As much as we try to prevent it, there are comparisons. My nephew is also in the mix as he’s the same age as mine, and is also in engineering like my D2. I try to downplay it, but the comparisons are there.
My nephew goes to my school, my daughter to my BIL’s, so that helps with the rivalries.
A college with 1,800 students will 'feel’s much larger than a high school - expect 40+ buildings, for instance.
Have you visited a Nescac school? Perhaps you should take her to one. 
@MYOS1634 we have been to so many because of lax lol… Sigh
And she doesn’t 'see’how much bigger than her high school they feel?
^^Yes and no. When they go to a school for sports, it may have more buildings than their high school but when they see the same 10 kids over and over during a weekend, the school seems rather small. What made it seem really small at a few schools was the listing of department members on a bulletin board. Five in physics, six in math, etc., seemed smaller than the high school. The tour guides would point to a floor of a building and say “This is the math department” and it looked so small.
After they look at a big university, the LACs seem tiny, with athletic facilities that may not be that nice. The smallest school we looked at had a pretty nice athletic facility, but the rest of the school was just too small. I knew it the minute we arrived. My kids’ first high school with about the same number of students, ~1000-1200 had nicer athletic facilities and newer, nicer classrooms. Crossed it off the list.
@MYOS1634 That’s me not her
Interesting thread. I went to a very diverse HS (35% white, 25% black, 25% Hispanic, 15% Asian). My colleges probably had 25%-30% non white pop. so it was definitely different but it wasn’t anything crazy or awful.
OP, I went to ECSU for a year & have many friends who gradutated from there - feel free to PM with any questions!
@PetulaClark while she seemingly aced the ACT I cannot say the same for her first two AP tests so smart she is but also not Infallible clearly lol
“My kids’ first high school with about the same number of students, ~1000-1200 had nicer athletic facilities and newer, nicer classrooms.”
Our local high school has around 2,300 students and quite of few them get football scholarships. Many of them go to small schools who facilities are not as good as our local high school. About 75% of those kids quit football and transfer to larger schools. They are use to playing in front of 5,000 fans. When they hit those small schools they are lucky to get 1,500.
@twoinanddone Re: post 79
Earlham won’t compete until 2017-2018 season, so she would get a shot at playing(as opposed to being benched 1-2 years) 4 years on a well funded team with a great academic school.
I second earlham, the level of d3 is really solid in most sports at the higher part and the chance to start a program can give lots of good leadership skills.
Also, if you apply to earlham they fly you out and pay for everything. For every admitted student. It’s not as intimate as a personal visit, but why turn down a chance at visiting a school for free and getting to meet some people and a possible incomming class.
But a D3 still can’t give her athletic money. Earlham might have plenty of merit money, I don’t know. The question is how much they’ll give to OP’s daughter, and OP states the family won’t qualify for a lot of need based money.
A new team is risky as it is impossible to know how the team recruiting will go, with a few exceptions. ASU will be strong right from the start as it already has 30+ pretty good recruits. Colorado had one 50/50 season and then clicked liked a team with more experience. CU also had a coach from an NCAA championship team, and recruted for 2 yeas before starting to play D1 , so had some upperclassmen on the team. Most new tears arent starting at the top, they know it will take years to recruit a solid core, to get the right mix to form a team. My daughter went with a new team and the team quickly overtook 2 teams in the conference, but the other two will take years (one is ncaa champs this year). The only reason her team is as good as it is is because of an All American who transferred to the school. The coach lucked into her. Honestly, some of the recruited players aren’t that good, and in a few years when our team builds some cred, those same players wouldn’t get scholarships. This will be the third recruited year and the team is much stronger than it was the first year. My daughter now spends most of her time worrying about her starting position because of two new recruits.
Yes, lots of playing time on a new team, lots of chances to shine. That is not different than the DSU team she’s considering. On the DSU team, OP’s daughter would play all the time as the team only has 15 players. With a short bench, everyone plays. Lots of playing time and a full scholarshipare two of the things the OP’s daughter likes about DSU. She’s trying to beat that offer.
How is it not realistic? If NH is super white and some towns are nearly 100% white, think about a middle-class or lower-middle-class student who never really got the chance to travel outside of NH or the whiter parts of New England. It’s probably uncommon, but it’s not unrealistic.
Take the town of Pembroke, for example, which is over 97% white and has just under 6,800 residents. There are less than 150 people of color total in the town. I think it’d be really easy not to know those people of color. Chichester is even whiter - there are only about 41 people of color (out of over 2,000) in the entire town.
It doesn’t strike me as completely impossible that a sheltered college student who doesn’t travel much outside of her home region maybe has never met a person of color, especially if by ‘met’ we’re talking about having actual meaningful interactions and not just ‘saw at a distance’.
@juillet
People can’t survive without regularly leaving Chichester.
My town has fewer than 2,000 people and is over 97% white. But it also has no middle or high school and the only businesses are the general store, a real estate agency, and some home contractors. Tiny towns can’t be considered on their own because if someone lived in a tiny town and was mostly isolated from the rest of the world, they would not have a regular 21st century life.
Interesting that @juillet chose Pembroke, because that is where a sibling of mine lived while her son was growing up. @usualhopeful I am here to tell you that absolutely people from these small town have a “21 Century life” without leaving much, and without ever really knowing a person of color. There just aren’y many of them, and a lot of these small-town residents keep to themselves. My sibling, despite her upbringing in a larger city with accepting parents, is one of those, along with her H, who often PROUDLY use the Confederate flag as part of their FB feed, as do their friends. To them, the big cities in southern NH are liberal, dangerous places, and the idea of setting foot in Boston is scary, and not just because of the traffic.
You may feel that it’s not realistic that no one in NH is isolated and doesn’t know people of color-but believe me. they exist, and they see no reason to change. This sibling’s son has joined the military and has already been to several states and while he is conservative, his views on race have radically changed to be more accepting and inclusive since leaving home.
And I think there is a big difference between seeing people of color and interacting with them, ‘knowing’ them’. I grew up in a small town of about 20,000 that had a small university. The town was all white, but the university had an exchange program with a few African countries and Vietnam Nam. I happened to go to the university lab school so I saw some of these student, but I did not interact with them (I was 10, they were college students). The rest of my family probably rarely saw them because they weren’t on the college campus. I had no friends who were minorities, no classmates, no neighbors.
@twoinanddone Earlham gives huge merit scholarships. I got 21k and I fall in the 30-40th percentile of applicants. I know other athletes that got as much as 38k a year.