OP if there is dual enrollment option, do some of that. I agree with post 79 not to rush to graduate HS early. Can do some CLEP testing perhaps if no more AP or other options to fill some of your senior HS year.
OP, make your school choice based upon your own set of criteria.
My daughter attends a very competitive high school out of state. She was recently identified as one of the top twenty students in our state among all public, private, charter, and homeschool student, and she is the single top stats student from our state to be heading to the UA this fall. Of these twenty top students, our daughter was the only student who did not claim to be torn between several Ivy League schools. Yes, she received several odd looks and gasps from pretentious audience members during her interview as she announced that she would attend The University of Alabama, but she is secure in her decision. Not only is she a National Merit Finalist and Scholar with a very high score, but she also earned a 2380 on the SAT in one sitting and a perfect 36 in all but one category of the ACT. She is the valedictorian of her graduating class of over 500 students and holds many leadership roles. She has a weighted GPA of over 4.88 on a 4.0 scale and has never made anything less than 100 throughout her four years of high school. She will begin her college experience with more than sixty-three credits also earned with a perfect GPA. She’s certainly already proven she is capable of making her own decisions, and her academic performance would surely get her into more “prestigious” schools. She isn’t inclined to let someone else’s opinion about her college choice define her experience. Both of her sisters also chose Bama with impressive stats. Roll Tide!
Nice to hear, @bamagirls, and congratulations!
I wonder if any of the CC critics who ripped Ronald Nelson’s parents and guidance counselors for not having made sure he had “better” merit options than UA and its Fellows Prrogram will have the audacity to criticize you now.
Thanks. They can bring it, @LucieTheLakie. Roll Tide!
@LucieTheLakie
That thread left me ??? I would assume that most people didn’t even bother reading what UFE offers. I am also always amazed that so many posters talk about $200,000 like it is no big deal. I can’t even begin to fathom that sort of financial position.
Adults throwing subs? Really?? How mature.
The difference is, @bamagirls daughter wanted to go to Alabama and has sisters there. That’s different than getting into every prestigious school, and then being forced to choose your last option for monetary reasons.
Bama, congrats on your daughters accomplishments. You did a great job!
@Mom2aphysicsgeek Where I live, my household income is just barely above the median for my town. For the upper echelon of earners in my town, I am amazed when they talk about making $400,000 like it’s no big deal. It’s all about relativity. To those who live in Mississippi, a household income of $70,000 seems out of this world.
@CaliCash ??? I wasn’t addressing income; I was speaking to spending that much for UG.
He was interviewed today on the Today show. http://www.today.com/news/student-accepted-every-ivy-league-school-turns-them-all-down-t21546 I don’t hear anything about “being forced to choose” his last option for monetary reasons. He talks about being excited about the Fellows program. In fact, he wouldn’t even identify Alabama as his “safety school” – although almost assuredly it was his financial safety. Nothing wrong with that. It was for mine too – but when she had narrowed her choices down to the Trustee’s scholarship at USC, the Scott Scholars Program at Notre Dame and Fellows at UA, she picked UA for Fellows and for the individual attention she had already seen she would receive. (I cannot say what she would have done with some or all of the Ivies in the mix. She applied to Harvard, but was wait-listed). So far UA has proved to be a good choice.
I think prestige is bunk. That said, students may not be interested in the schools with the great merit deals. Both my kids were NMSF and could were not interested in schools in very conservative parts of the country that offered amazing financial aid. They wanted to live in cities. One went to school in the northeast and the other in upper Midwest in great schools that were great fits and which we could afford.
IMHO, some folks (including at least one professional college counselor) made a lot of assumptions after reading (half-reading?) that article and concluded that Ronald only chose UA because he had no other “affordable” options and that he would have received better, as affordable, offers if ONLY his parents and counselors had made sure he’d applied to a different set of schools. I think it’s entirely possible he DID apply to some of those places and didn’t get as much money as Bama was offering, or he just liked the University Fellows program better.
And it was pretty clear his parents could have sacrificed and taken out some loans if he’d felt one of the Ivies or other elite schools was worth the extra cost. Nowhere did it say that they would have been expected to pay full price. They were the proverbial “doughnut hole family” like a la lot of families here on CC.
They weighed the overall value of what was being offered by all these schools and, in the end, Ronald chose UA and its Fellows program.
He wants to go to medical school and he’s clearly been blessed with some uncommon common sense. He doesn’t seem to me like a kid who was “trophy hunting,” and I’m guessing he applied to all those Ivies and elites because they would all provide an excellent education and were the most likely to offer him a generous FA package. Maybe his parents were left to pay $25,000 a year (an as much as $35,000 after the other child graduated from college); that’s a terrific price for one of those schools. But it’s still $100,000+ out of pocket BEFORE he would be confronted with financing his M.D. And who’s to say he WOULDN’T have chosen an Ivy or Stanford or Hopkins if he hadn’t been accepted into Fellows?
For some people, the idea of attending a school where you might sit in classes with students who are not of similar academic achievement is just a complete turnoff. (Although you have to wonder how many engineers and premeds at Bama couldn’t hold their own at most of these elite schools.) Others believe it’s just not possible for UA to challenge any student “smart enough” to run the tables on the Ivy League. But which is harder, majoring in chemical engineering at Bama (a common premed major) or majoring in chemistry, psychology or biology at an elite? My guess is that it would be a toss-up.
For anyone wondering just how “smart” some of the students at UA are…tune in to the CBHP Presentations streamed live each year and prepare to be amazed.
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Adults throwing subs? Really?? How mature.
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What is that in reference to?
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addition, Tuscaloosa County, Alabama is arguably less conservative than Orange County, California, which surprises a lot of people.
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Very true. I lived for 40 years in O. C.
For the kind of CC high-acheivers who plan on going on to grad school, UA is an especially good proposition. There is no sense blowing $200k on a BS if your plan is to go to something like med/dental school. I bet the majority of people in six-digit debt from their educations wish they had made different choices.
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bet the majority of people in six-digit debt from their educations wish they had made different choices.
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I’m sure that some who blew their college funds on their undergrad, when there were good-but-cheaper options, wish that they now had those dollars to put toward med/law/grad school.
Many parents who like prestige eventually give up when their children has to decide their destination. I know plenty of ASIAN parents in Oregon who settled with their children going to state schools with financial aid even though the parents had been willing to take out loans to send their children to higher ranked schools like USC-SoCal or Georgetown University.
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This is exactly our rationale for not even considering the elite schools that don’t offer Merit Aid. We can help our kids a good bit, but we aren’t actually made of money (despite what the EFC calculators imply), and our kids will be much better served by saving some/all of the “Bank of Mom and Dad” support for grad school than blowing it all on a school with a fancier “label”.
In our family, we don’t buy clothes, cars, or other consumer items based on labels, and we aren’t buying college for the label either. We’re looking at content/quality/etc, not labels . . . And, on this big an investment, it makes sense to put in a good bit of time/effort really evaluating the quality and value offered by the various schools. (That research is how I found UA here on CC!) I’m not concerned about the prestige factor. Even if we cared about prestige, it is my belief that it is a very rare career path in which the undergrad school matters if one completes grad/professional school. Since it is my expectation that our kids will do that, it makes absolutely no sense to blow resources unnecessarily on undergrad.
Well, DS has no plans to go on to grad school, and we are still very pleased w/ UA, and I expect him to get an excellent education and exposure to an entirely new environment.
At the recent Honors night, he was the only one going to UA. His one AP teacher asked him to meet w/ him to congratulate him and asked him how he found out about UA and the incredible scholarship offer. Well, of course, he had to admit it was “mom.” 
& mom2collegekids as well, of course!
The valedictorian in his class ended up at Penn State, yawn, like so many kids in that school. Having his name listed under the University of Alabama might encourage some of the kids to look beyond Penn State and the local feeder schools, which seem to be the only ones of which the GC’s have any knowledge.
I believe my son was one of the first at his school that went to UA. I heard about it when I was researching NMF schools for his older brother, but really didn’t consider it because it seemed so far away. It stayed on my radar so when my second son was a NMSF, I had him and my husband take a tour. They were sold. He was a high achieving student interested in CS and his guidance counselor kept pushing him toward other schools, and at first didn’t understand why he chose UA. She must of looked into the school more, because the next year she started suggesting her students take a look there and since then several students have or plan to attend. The word has gotten out!