If you were a high school senior now, would you choose your alma mater?

<p>(This is similar, but not identical, to the question <a href="http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/parents-forum/1554371-would-you-attend-your-alma-mater-if-you-had-do-again.html%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/parents-forum/1554371-would-you-attend-your-alma-mater-if-you-had-do-again.html&lt;/a> )</p>

<p>If you were a high school senior now, would you choose your alma mater? Assume similar level of high school achievement (and adjusting SAT scores for the recentering), similar parental financial means (adjusted for inflation), and similar preferences and academic interests.</p>

<p>Would you even have the choice now, given that many schools are much more selective and expensive than they were a few decades ago?</p>

<p>I didn’t choose my alma mater, my parents did. As I mentioned on the other thread, I would liked to have had a choice in the first place. As for my Ss - S1 attends my alma mater and loves it, but he chose it of his own free will. S2 is leaning toward it but I’m insisting that he look at at least two other places so at least he can make an informed choice.</p>

<p>All things being the same as what it was then, I would still be bound for the local cc right after HS. I would likely transfer to my alma mater because it is a reasonably priced private school and the instate tuition in my home state (Illinois) is high. I would be far more aware of merit aid availability though and that could make a difference.</p>

<p>My alma mater gave me a great and affordable undergrad education. I was the first in my immediate family to go to college. I was proud to attend, and proud to graduate…and I donate money every single year to my undergrad school.</p>

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<p>Institutional financial aid at the top privates also is a lot more generous. Today, I might have received a package from the Ivy I got into that would have allowed me to attend rather than heading off to one of those “better directionals” someone defined earlier this week.</p>

<p>Yes, I would have made the same decision.</p>

<p>I would likely have made the same choice. The Us I attended were affordable OOS Us where I received a great education and met many wonderful people. I believe I would still be welcomed at both Us with my stats from decades past. ;)</p>

<p>My kids were happy at their respective Us, tho neither chose either of my alma maters. Two of my nieces chose my alma maters and are happy alums.</p>

<p>Only if I weren’t admitted to one of the peer institutions that probably would have contacted me now that weren’t yet in the competition for applicants game back then. Certainly I would have had an even larger stack of junk mail in this day and age.</p>

<p>Yes, I believe I still would have the choice. I also believe I would be on a full scholarship instead of full-fare. There is no way my family could afford full fare nowadays. In my opinion, it is demeaning to accept the fact that we afforded full fare back in my day and would now be dependent on the charity of others. This has everything to do with governmental policies and tuition outstripping inflation for far too long. It is disturbing to know that I would be at the mercy of my alma mater’s financial aid office today whereas I could afford to write the check a generation ago.</p>

<p>Well, if I were a senior in high school now with the same stats, I wouldn’t get in to my alma mater (Whitman) , but I would still love to attend. I had a 3.2 grade point average (PE and math dragged it down - all A’s in English, history, foreign language) and a really lopsided SAT (pre- centering) 700 verbal - 425 math. I was waitlisted for the college I attended my sophomore, junior and senior years - but transferred in after a successful freshman year at another college. </p>

<p>I was from a poor family, and was able to afford Whitman with some loans, which were paid off within 7 years after graduating. </p>

<p>One of my kids was accepted at Whitman, with much better stats (3.9999 unweighted gpa, salutatorian, 30 ACT) but we wouldn’t have been able to afford to send her there. She got much more financial aid at another school with a lower cost of attendance, where she is very happy. </p>

<p>I would have liked one of my kids to attend there, though, as it would have been an excuse to visit beautiful Walla Walla. And if they were involved in theatre, even better.</p>

<p>Woulda, coulda, shoulda.
I live my life forwards or at least try to.
:)</p>

<p>I could have applied to elite private schools. I could have listed my #1 choice for NMS later, perhaps getting a four year scholarship at the same U. I likely still would have attended my flagship U. I may have chosen grad school over medical school now that Chemistry has many more apparent connections to biological sciences than back then. Hmm, but the tedium of getting data points to make conclusions with biological compounds is still there…</p>

<p>No, I would not choose my alma mater today. Firstly, I am not sure I could get in today (its a UC and the competition is much stiffer today) and secondly, the school has doubled in size which would have and would still make it unappealing to me. Being a Californian going to college in the 80’s most of us thought there were only CC’s, CSU’s or UC’s. I didn’t know anything about LAC’s and I have to say, if I had I might have gone for one of them instead.</p>

<p>It’s a really tough question for me. At the time, being the top student in my class at my school meant that I could go anywhere I wanted, and my parents pretty much made clear that there were only three colleges I would be permitted to want. (Yes, those three. I was explicitly prohibited from considering the S college. If I had shown any real interest in my father’s alma mater, Wesleyan, that would have been OK, too, but my mother did an excellent job of making certain that’s not how I thought.) In the end, I only applied to two of them, and I had a clear preference from the outset, so I never really thought too hard about it. In three of the four fields in which I was interested, one was the center of the academic world and the other not really first rank, and it was easy to justify my choice to anyone who asked. Plus, as a boost, it made me unique in my larger extended family, while going the other way would have made me one of the crowd.</p>

<p>I know it would be a tougher choice today, because I spent several hours last spring with my college best friend and his child talking over the same choice for a student with interests much like mine. In the end, the kid made the same choice I had, but I think it was a knife’s-edge balance. You can still make an argument for academic superiority in the fields we care about, but it’s a much closer competition, and the Other College has the advantage in recognizable-names-on-the-verge-of-retirement. Now it would come down to better social environment (and dorms that have been renovated recently) vs. a better location (something I appreciate much more at 50-something than I did at 17).</p>

<p>In reality, if I were me today I would have had to apply to many more colleges, and I likely would have been just as happy at a whole bunch of them. My kids’ double-legacy status and excellent (though not quite as excellent as mine) stats did not get them into my alma mater, but the college where both of them went provided, if anything, a superior academic experience, though less of a sense of empowerment than my wife and I got at our college.</p>

<p>One important difference: My parents had no accumulated wealth, but between them earned a very good living, in the upper range of the upper middle class. My college, all in, four years of tuition, room, and board, cost less than a quarter of their annual pre-tax earnings at the time. My wife and I aren’t doing that much worse than they did, but each of our children’s college costs represented a much, much higher percentage of our annual income. Today, I might very well fall into that zone where I would be full-pay but full-pay would be an unsustainable burden for my family. The today version of me could easily wind up in a search for the best merit scholarship, not the best X department.</p>

<p>My story is sort of an odd counterpart to JHS’s–as the top student in my class at my school, the normal thing would have been for me to go to U.Va. But because a friend of mine had gone to P the year before, I also applied to “those three” and ended up at one of them. I really knew little about them, and didn’t really know much about applying to them, either. I think a high school senior today who was like me would have much better information, and might cast a broader (or different) net. He might still end up at the same place–if he could get in.</p>

<p>It would be tough. Cost when I started in 1976 for OOS tuition was just over $1800 per year. That cost is now $28,000. It’s still a great school, but because of the huge price tag there would be more shopping around. Was back there recently and ready to re-enroll, at the right price.</p>

<p>I would like to think I could attend the same school. No way in the world could my folks afford the school now even if my dad’s salary was prorated.</p>

<p>I would apply again, but I wouldn’t get in now, and if I did, my family wouldn’t be able to afford it as they could then. US applicants who work hard, get very good but not perfect grades, have a distinctive and focused EC activity (for me it was leading what is now Glee - the guy who wrote it went to a neighboring HS) now get crowded out by too many foreign students with dubious 4.0’s whose country will pay full sticker price to get their students a US education and then bring them home. Because of this and state legislatures that don’t adequately fund their university systems, “need blind” is now a lie for the middle class. I’m more convinced than ever that the playing field has really become tilted in the past few years. So yes, I’d apply, but now it would be a super reach. Sorry but that’s how it looks to me.</p>

<p>If I were a HS senior now I would not apply to college. I would prefer to find a beautiful girl and marry her.</p>

<p>Well it’s hard to say whether I’d get in. Back then in a class of 80 - 6 went to Harvard, 4 to Yale and 2 to Princeton. Now they are lucky to get one each. I don’t know if I was the best student in my class because we had no ranking - but I was a good student, taking more APs than most (4 all senior year), and had some decent extracurricular activities. I’d probably choose it again for all the right and wrong reasons I did back then. I’d still be cross I couldn’t reuse my essay for Yale and refuse to apply.</p>