<p>So…Where is D going to college?</p>
<p>She decided on Brown.</p>
<p>Oh…What happened she was always so smart.</p>
<p>Punpunan, for our family, education expenses is the biggest chunk of expenditure by far, second only to the mortgage. When kids go through the college process, a lot of family money is invested in the college education. You had better believe parents are interested in the process. I feel sorry for those kids whose parents are not involved, as many of them have parents who won’t pay out that kind of money. Had they become as emotionally invested as those parents who are scrimping, sacrificing, and saving for college, more kids would have more college choices.</p>
<p>My daughter spent her Junior Year Abroad at a universty in Spain</p>
<p>Aunt B: “Spain? Aren’t you afraid? You will most likely get assaulted on the street”</p>
<p>In fact, the crime rate where she went is probably 1/10th that of the average US city…</p>
<p>DD just added another one - got this more than once here where everyone goes to VA schools</p>
<p>So where are you going to school?
Rice
Where’s that?
Houston
Where’s that?
TX
Why do you want to go to some small town school in the middle of TX?
Well, it’s a top 20 university in the 4th largest city in the US and is on the coast. (smile and nod)</p>
<p>cptofthehouse, heck, at our house, college is double our mortgage (times each kid)</p>
<p>Smiling and nodding here isn’t for where our kids are going to college (though private is unusual), but rather about whether we can afford it. Smile…nod…there’s a reason we bought a starter house and haven’t added on like most of the neighborhood!</p>
<p>We’ d be better off if we were in your situation, Countingdown. We have a white elephant of a house right now.</p>
<p>We bought in 98 at the bottom of the last market decline. The kids were in elem school before we bought our first house, but as it turns out, the timing was great. I guess I can live with 60s Formica a while longer… :)</p>
<p>Hey - 60’s formica is retro. Retro is in. Ergo yours is all the fashion. :)</p>
<p>Well CD – you know I painted my formica counter aubergine. Unfortunately, although he did have a mortgage less than college tuition, we know have one the same. Sigh.</p>
<p>My D goes to a Florida State College - I get asked often “Why?, Why, she is so smart and has such great grades and scores, she could go anywhere”
Well yes, she is so smart that she is doing all her requirements in Florida and between bright futures and school grants we do not pay more that $ 2,000 a year. That leaves her college fund and any savings open for when she goes to OOS community college Moorpark, where she wants to study exotic animal training. That’s extremely clever in my book.</p>
<p>S got accepted at NYU Tisch (turned down at his safety school FSU) and has now decided to go and major in Theater at NYU Abu Dhabi, the new extension school of NYU.
For many people this means he will be studying terrorism, muslim religion, and gasp!!! not being able to drink alcohol. (Sorry to hear you are not going notamushroom!)</p>
<p>So I have given up explaining, unless someone seems really interested. Smile and nod, yes indeed.</p>
<p>We too have a very modest home and modest salaries to boot. Our daughter goes to Stanford, which is within an hour’s drive from our home. I usually say she is going to school locally, and let people think she’s at sfstate or sjstate. When people press and ask, they usually say, “Oh, my, how can you afford it? community college would be so much more affordable.” or “Why not a state school” never mind that the cost for us for her to go there is the same as it would be for her to go to a state school. So, it was her choice. A student who chooses to go to a cc, then a state school, and to live at home is choosing the more frugal option. And good for that student! I would never presume to judge that another choice would have been better for him or her. There is not a one-size fits all for life or for best college option . Smile and nod. I’m happy if they don’t ask further beyond the comment that my child goes to school locally.</p>
<p>I’m from the Midwest and going to Williams next year:</p>
<p>Them: So where are you going to school next year?
Me: Williams College
Them: William and Mary is a great school!
Me: It is, but I am going to Williams
Them: You mean Williams and Mary?
Me: No, Williams, it is in Massachusetts
Them: You will love going to school in Boston!</p>
<p>My friend’s mom: “My son’s going to Columbia University!”
Other mommy figure: “You’re sending him to south america?!?!?!?!”</p>
<p>Me: “are u living under a rock?”</p>
<p>…well i didnt say that, but I was thinking it</p>
<p>In my student days, while walking on the McGill University campus in Montreal:
Lost Tourist: “Do you speak English?”
Me: (smile and nod)</p>
<p>“Colgate? I didn’t know you wanted to be a dentist!” or “Oh a friend of mine went to Crest University! lolololol!” </p>
<p>Yeah, that’s so funny, especially for the 10th time. Sometimes I really wish they’d kept the name Madison University.</p>
<p>My D’s starting at Mount Holyoke College this fall. I’ve already gotten the LUG comment. However, most without college age kids, haven’t heard of it, like most LACs – they only know the big universities. Some think it is a Catholic convent. An admissions person at Bowdoin said when we visited Bowdoine last year, that most people likewise hadn’t heard of “Bough-down”. (Surprising, to me) So much for LACs and the general public.</p>
<p>There are around 3000 colleges and universities in the US. People who don’t have kids in the “college search” age, are only going to recognize a few, most likely only know the ones with big sports teams or ones they went to themselves. I was just telling DH that it seems utterly unreasonable but I place some weight on whether I recognize the name of a place, and the only reason to this point for name recognition is either the basketball team (Xavier, yeah, I’ve heard of them) or football (Trojans anyone?). I can see why schools pour so much money into their sports franchises as it can literally put them on the map.</p>
<p>One good thing about CC is that I’ve learned about a lot of other colleges, so I have at least some hope of recognizing a school. Even better is when I know someone whose S/D attends!</p>
<p>We had a lot of smile and nod moments when S1 would tell folks he really liked Harvey Mudd. Mudd was usually sufficiently distracting and off-the-radar that folks would forget to ask if he was applying to MIT, HPY, etc. – which was precisely the idea. Mudd is a terrific place and it was on the table until the very, very end.</p>
<p>^I completely agree about being able to recognize schools! The other day, I was talking to a junior in one of my classes, and he was saying how he was interested in Emory, and in particular this sort of other college where you attend for two years and then go to Emory…being a CCer, in two seconds flat, I went, “Oh, you mean Oxford at Emory?” Never would have been able to do that without CC!</p>
<p>^^ It’s actually Emory at Oxford, not the other way around :)</p>