@JBStillFlying We are GA residents. Kid really wanted to go out of state in order to have a different experience. By no means I am trying to bash UM and for sure that was never my point. It is a great institution in a great city/State. I get the fact that UM wants to price themselves accordingly. and blah blah blah. However, the way they went about it is just plain wrong. The increases should have been much more measured. Perhaps a longer plan or time frame would have the right thing to do.
Yes, OSU was a no brainer when all things considered. Extremely generous with their OOS scholarships. For sure not as narrow-minded as what they are doing at the UM when it comes to their views of OOS students. Having said that, UM would have been an option at a small premium but with so many financial unknowns if no longer becomes the choice for many. By the end of the day, they all find their “home” and they all move on. My daughter is so happy with where she is at that I can’t imagine she even thinks about the “what if” scenarios. But I am now looking at ahead for my son and this little mailer was a reminder of what we went through just last year
@Setter4life - Surprised that your daughter would have come up here from GA! And we are sitting under about 10 feet of snow this year - very beautiful and Christmas’y. On March 2nd.
@JBStillFlying UM was not on the radar until doing a little research and finding out how good and reputable Carlson was. It seemed that there was a possibility of qualifying for some merit which would have made it an option. Once all the acceptances and scholarships were in place, it was obvious that UM was not going to come through.or an option
One of my best friends lives in Plymouth. None of his kids went to UM or UW. Two of them went to Indiana and one went to Kansas. It seems that those two schools were perhaps a little easier to get in and a little more generous with merit. Although, Indiana is expensive for OOS Students and not worth the money unless Kelley is the ultimate goal.
I really believe that it would be a win-win situation for all these state schools to make it more financially more accessible for OOS students to attend, especially when these students pay a small premium over the locals. Obviously, nobody wants to do this at the expense of the in-state students. However, many of the Flagships have become much more competitive to get it but at the same time due to budget cuts, they can use the extra revenue not to mention all the positives that come along with the more diverse student body. Our own UGA has become extremely competitive for admissions. Every year you are hearing how local kids with 32 to 34 are being waitlisted or deferred. According to USnews, UGA is now ranked 44 and it is now attracting a higher number of OOS students. I am not so sure many of these of these kids are not sweating it out due to the fact that schools such as Alabama, USC, Tennessee, and others offer generous scholarships to attract these kids. Clemson University is now seeing a tremendous amount of OOS interest due to the successful football team which is a very positive thing considering they in the middle of nowhere and had been known to attract just regional kids
@Setter4life Many state schools do offer generous merit to OOS so it might just be a matter of looking. In general, the higher the prestige the less merit one can expect. More families than ever are also willing to send their kids OOS to a “better school” (UVA, Michigan, Purdue - Engineering, GA-TEch, etc.) even w/o merit. IU and KU are fine schools but they are less selective than UMN - if an in-stater didn’t get in, it’s because someone else with higher stats - whether in-state or OOS - was selected instead. If they attended IU that might be the best school they got into. So it “might” be worth the money. Assuming that the Plymouth kids didn’t get into UW-Madison either, they are better off attending IU because it’s a much better school than MS-Mankato or the reciprocity schools NDSU, UND, USD, SDSU, etc.
There’s more to choosing a school than a strict monetary cost-benefit analysis. There are significant non-pecuniary costs and benefits which can prove more crucial. College is presumably a time of incredible intellectual growth. If that’s not going to happen at a free or lower-tuition school, then one might be better off attending a place where it will, even if that’s more expensive. The liberal arts component of UMN contains some top-ranked departments; nevertheless, it is dragging the university’s overall undergraduate ranking down. But, the typical student at UMN is STILL going to get a better education - be exposed to more accomplished professors, more rigorous courses, smarter grad students running your sections or TA sessions, and higher “quality” fellow undergraduates - than at KU or IU. Even UGA is not necessarily “better” than UMN, despite the higher USNWR ranking - student quality is similar and the latter is considered a more prestigious research university (Shanghai, etc.). However, it might depend on specific course of study. Over the long term, the better the research institution, the better the undergraduate program.
A state uni. would be better off using its money to build up the quality of its faculty and academic departments than attracting students with great football teams or steep tuition discounts.
Education is expensive. Chasing dollars is a good idea if you end up getting a good education for less. It’s NOT a good idea if you had a choice but opted to trade down in quality.
So we got the financial aid information today in the mail for my OSS (CA) daughter. Big fat…zero. Yep, full tuition…ouch. I can see why they are losing OSS…$48, 400 per year!