@WIS75 thanks for your input, daughter is too busy with her various summer internships and told me to run the net price calculator. She is more focused on pursuing her interests in various fields including math and science.
@wis75 My eldest daughter told me this when she was only 15 years old and read Charlie Munger states few golden rules
“What good is envy? It’s the one sin you can’t have any fun at.” It’s 100% destructive. Resentment is crazy. Revenge is crazy. Envy is crazy. If you get those things out of your life early, life works a lot better.”
I am not saying that you envy me. I am not interested in debate as I feel my daughter are more on adulthood path as they start making their own life decisions when they left home to go to boarding schools. I am more interested in searching for a fair deal on a fair price.
To answer an earlier question, yes, Rice gives merit aid.
Have you looked at Vanderbilt ? They are need blind and will meet 100% of need.
@svcamom yes looking into their scholarships, daughter has final say but we want to prepare a list of 20 to 30 college list where we can afford to send her, have not met the school guidance counselor yet and have no idea where they will recommend. this all can change but just looking for other parents helpful hints and really appreciate if people give feed back.
Based on your previous statement about being stretched very thin over $20,000, all of the above would be unaffordable with just admission; she would have to try for large enough merit scholarships, which would likely be reach to super-reach at most or all of these schools.
Do you think your daughter will be a NM finalist? If you are hunting for generous merit aid, your D may be eligible for an automatic full-ride, plus study-abroad stipend at UT-Dallas, which is known for CS/engineering. Even without NMF status, she could get a score/GPA-based full tuition Academic Excellence Scholarship. But with her background/stats, she should apply for their McDermott Scholars program, which offers additional benefits and opportunities on top of the full-ride.
Sometimes you get what you pay for. Please consider the caliber of the school and not just the “best deal”. Some schools are generous with merit aid because they want to improve the caliber of the student body. Others do not need to do this to attract top tier students. All college classes in any subject are not alike. A math or computer science class may cover a lot more material in a course at a top tier school than at others. It is not a bargain if your D does not get the same education.
CS and math go hand in hand. Your D should look at courses required and available at various schools. She may discover other majors while in college. Remember her path will not be etched in stone, even when she has a degree in hand.
I haven’t read the whole thread, so perhaps someone already suggested this, but Northeastern is a wonderful school for computer science and they have very good merit aid. My son’s best offer was from them. They also have a good reputation for setting kids up with some lucrative co-op jobs on the off semesters that could also help with costs.
I find that’s not usually the case. One of the reasons so many people with CS backgrounds insist your school isn’t that important is because they’ve observed that in a work situation, the people coming out of top-tier schools are pretty much indistinguishable from people coming out of lower-tier schools.
I got my CS degree from the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, and noticed that when it comes to basic CS, what I was taught isn’t that different from what students at Stanford and Cal get taught. The main difference might be that my classes rarely had more than 25 students, and half of the students at UAF were sleeping through class.
The Ivies , Stanford and MIT offer aid based upon what you can afford to pay. If you are lucky enough to get into one of those schools the question is whether you are willing to pay what you can afford to pay.
While there is some overlay between math and CS they certainly do not go hand in hand. Math and Statistics or Math and physics may go hand in hand but not math and CS
You are right, I may end up paying more or end up taking some loan for the third daughter.
I hope so as she has very nice scores in 7th grade SAT exams.
While the basics are covered at all schools, elite engineering/CS programs do cover more material and go into more depth theoretically than less elite programs.
An older cousin who spent a year at a Federal Service Academy as an EE major and finished at Caltech found the latter school to have courses/expectations which were more academically rigorous, covered more material at a quicker pace(Even the intro courses), and went into more depth than was the case at his Service Academy or the engineering schools his brothers attended(UMass to RPI).
Is that based on your personal observations, or are you saying it because that’s what your cousin said?
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It was based on his experiences not only as an undergrad student, but also as a TA while an EE PhD student at a top 8 EE program and a stint as a tenure-track/tenured EE Prof before he opted to leave to co-found an engineering technology startup with other co-founders.
It was also corroborated by his fellow engineering major siblings who attended respectable/elite engineering schools ranging from UMass to RPI and his own father who admitted his own experience at Columbia SEAS wasn’t remotely comparable to his son’s experience at Caltech based on what he remembered from his undergrad days and later experience teaching as adjunct engineering faculty at a university which is currently in the top 60 while continuing his work as a professionally licensed engineer.
In many ways, the fact a family…especially a group of siblings were engineering majors attending colleges ranging from an in-state public flagship(UMass) to the very elite(Caltech) around the same time meant they were able and did compare notes on their undergrad experiences…including academic rigor, quantity of workload, and academic expectations.
That’s interesting. Now I’m wondering why so many actual, working engineers here on CC advise prospective engineers to go to ABET-accredited state schools for engineering rather than “elite” schools? (And how did this go from a CS thread to an engineering thread?)
Sometimes explanations are so perfect that I don’t know whether to believe them.
Seems to me RPI or WPI are your best choices with RPI being the better of the two.
RPI will give her a lot of merit aid and since you stated that she is high in SAT and GPA that she should get very very very high merit aid from RPI. RPI is rated very high in Computer Science and is even rated higher in Engineering than Yale, Brown and Dartmouth to name a few.
If I had to guess she may qualify for a full ride to RPI and since RPI is rated so well, it is an opportunity you should consider. Good luck!
Realize that Caltech is an outlier in terms of course rigor generally (“drinking from a fire hose”), even among schools that have extremely selective admissions.
However, it is sometimes the case that similar content will be put in fewer courses or credits at some colleges than others. At the colleges where the content takes more courses or credits to cover, the student may have to take more courses or credits to cover the same material as part of his/her curriculum (but then each course or credit may be “easier”). But checking how true this is between any two colleges means evaluating them individually, rather than making assumptions based on admission selectivity or other factors.
It’s a good question that people should ask about any piece of advice. What is the source and how reliable is it.