It might help to remind yourself why you applied to Vassar in the first place. I assume that there were things you loved about it. It’s a great school with a great rep and I bet you can
have a great experience. UCLA seems fun, but soooo big and impersonal.Good luck
I’d take out UCLA since your parents won’t pay for it. I also can’t see paying OOS rates for UCLA. Go with either Scripps or Vassar – and personally I’d choose Vassar.
Go to Vassar. In a few years, you’ll most likely agree with your parents (and thank them) that they were right. I as a parent find your parents’ tactics disagreeable and even unpleasant, but I do agree with them for their reasons and their choice.
I know UCLA gets a lot of “dream school” love, but honestly, it’s not worth full-paying OOS COA, especially when you’ve got great options like Scripps and Vassar that will truly invest in you as an undergraduate. Why pay all that money to compete for resources - for grades, for course registration, for housing - for everything"…? If you’re getting off waitlist, then you obviously won’t have Regents or athletic priority. It will be “get in line” for everything. For in-state students, that can be a fair trade-off, but for OOS full-pay? As a parent, I would be reluctant to take the strong-arm approach in *refusing to pay, but I get why they’re doing it and would at least consider doing the same in their position. (Ideally, they probably should have vetoed UCLA before you even applied, given the near-nonexistence of merit aid there, but we’re all on a learning curve as we move through this process!)
As for Scripps vs. Vassar… that’s really a matter of personal preference. How much do you think you’d be availing yourself of 5C’s Consortium resources at Scripps, and can Vassar match the offerings of the whole consortium (as well as in comparison to Scripps alone) in the areas you care about? If you like Vassar better and there isn’t a prohibitive cost differential, then go for it. Just try to make sure you’re not being swayed by the fact that one school played hard-to-get while the other admitted you up-front. Evaluate them on their merits, for your particular needs, make your best call and don’t look back - there’s no bad decision to be made here. Good luck!!
Thinking about it, I think the real problem with your parent’s was that they allowed you to apply to UCLA in the first place.
I thought some of the best advice we got from my son’s HS guidance counselor was to be clear with my kids upfront about any parameters we had (ex. location, price, anything else) and to not have them visit or apply to any colleges we were not willing to send them to.
I agree 100% with @happy1. We are from Oregon, but we discussed that fact that paying for a large OOS school, with large lectures, and TA instruction, didn’t make much sense, when his state flagship for engineering was pretty decent and MUCH cheaper than say, the UCs, Michigan or Illinois from OOS. We also felt that privates that didn’t offer merit were not very smart either, as there are lots of very good engineering privates that do.
That said, where did he end up, at a California public.
He is at Cal Poly. CSUs are quite a bit cheaper than UCs and a good value OOS. Rather than 2-2.5x the cost for an instate student, with merit aid he pays about $40k more than CA residents. That’s not a ton more than OSU. Cal Poly has small class sizes, a great ME program, and is 100% professor taught, so it was worth the differential.