Having visited these schools, I agree with some of your comments about these schools. I personally like the Jesuit philosophy of teaching and that is a plus for these schools. Both my daughters prefer the vibe and the campuses of Seattle U or Gonzaga anyday over LMU or SCU. The SCU campus looks very similar aesthetically to that of the high school one of my daughters attended (I think D’s school was designed to mimic it when it was built) so it was a no go from the start. SCU has the standard Spanish looking buildings…attractive campus but if anything comes across as boring to us and not ‘posh’ at all but that might be because we live in the land of a lot of faux Spanish architecture:) which tries to look good but is mostly a poor imitation of the real thing. Kids from our area apply to SCU and LMU because they tend to get decent merit aid if they don’t get into a more selective school, not because they are the rich prep school kids.
SCU has an endowment that is 2 to 5 times larger than any other Catholic school on the west coast which kind of puts it into a different league financially. And from what I could discern, it seemed to have a more affluent student body than the others, especially the PNW schools. It is the only Catholic school that seemed like sort of an outlier compared to the rest. The new STEM and engineering buildings they were finishing up when we visited last summer were quite impressive. And the food service is reportedly very posh. But yes, they certainly do the Spanish mission look and there are statues of saints all over the place, but you find that at all the Catholic schools.
D21 found the whole Santa Clara area pretty sleepy and boring and didn’t feel like it was a place she really saw herself. There isn’t much of a downtown or college scene anywhere, just the occasional ethnic restaurant and mini-mall complex scattered about the suburban landscape. She MUCH preferred the campus and neighborhood around Occidental in Los Angeles which was much more interesting and urban. Full of brew pubs and cafes and near other LA destinations. And frankly, the campus seemed larger and more impressive at Occidental even though the school has a much smaller enrollment.
My son dropped UP from his list because it seemed much more conservative and traditional than all the other schools he was looking at. He also much prefers a non-religious school. We live in Los Angeles so we visited LMU early his 11th grade year and it was initially on his list because the Jesuit schools don’t seem as “religiousy.” Their “religion” class requirements are more like social justice vs bible 101. He pretty much ended up dropping most of the CA schools on his list after applying to all the Pacific Northwest schools EA. He was just burned out and really doesn’t want to stay in CA anyways. He also originally had Seattle U on the list, but dropped it as well since he really just wants a SLAC and doesn’t really want to be in the middle of a large city. The outdoor programs at L&C and Whitman are big draws for him (he rock climbs) and Seattle U doesn’t have that.
Your comments are spot on. The new STEM building had not opened when we visited a few summers ago and all they talked about at the info session was the business connections so my Sci daughter was turned off. Yes, you find that mission look for the CA colleges and I don’t dislike it (I grew up on the east coast) but for my SoCal coastal kids, it’s just more of the same and doesn’t appeal to them.
It is amazing how the kind of tour guide and info session you get influences kid’s opinions of schools. My daughter fell in love with Lewis & Clark because she had an edgy LGBT girl tour guide who took the group to lunch afterwards sans parents to give them the “real” dirt on the school. On the other hand, our tour guide at the UO was a frat boy dude who spent way too much time talking about Nike funded sports facilities and campus amenities like the fitness center and climbing wall and didn’t take them to any real academic parts of campus. My very non-athletic daughter was very turned off by UO as a result.
When we drove out to Whitman she was extremely uninterested after the long drive through the eastern WA plains and by the time we were entering Walla Walla she was ready to just turn around and not bother. But she fell in love with the place once we got out of the car and she started meeting student tour guides and looking around.
A caution would be if the tour guide happens to be unrepresentative of the students generally, that can give a distinctly different impression of the school compared to what the student will actually experience if the student goes there. For example, only about 16% of male undergraduates at Oregon join fraternities.
In other words, be careful with impressions formed from a visit.
This can happen with online presentations too. My daughter scratched Caltech off her list due to the AO, that was clearly intimidated by math, constantly repeating that “if you’re not intimidated by these math problem sets you are all set to attend”. The student representatives did not help the cause and as much as my kid loves math she found the presentation too weirdly fixated on it.
Well yes, of course. I understand that as do I suspect most parents who have done their research. However we are talking about 16 and 17 year old kids who for better or worse, are much more impressionable. They really are influenced by those sorts of first impressions and it is an uphill battle to counter them. In our case I was happy she wasn’t that interested in the UO because it was going to be substantially more expensive than our in-state options in WA. So no big loss and I didn’t go to bat for UO. Even with a $10k merit aid award it is still nearly $20k more than UW and $25k more than the other state schools in WA.
As the OP I thought I’d follow up and bring this thread up to date. Last Thursday D21 received her next to last admissions acceptance, this time from UW. Apparently she had been following reddit forums and had been refreshing her UW portal on her phone every hour so I think that was a signal of her actual preference. She didn’t seem to care as much about any of the others. This weekend we drove back up to UW just to walk around one last time and take a closer look at the different residential dorm neighborhoods and science buildings and such and the deal was sealed. She is UW commit, hoping to major in biology. The deposit has been paid. Of the 9 schools that she applied to, the only one she hasn’t heard back from is Occidental, which apparently hasn’t released its RD results yet. But that was never her top school anyway and she seems to have forgotten all about it.
To recap, we visited about 20 different schools on the west coast, she applied to 9 of them, was accepted into 8 of the 9 so far, and has decided on UW.
SCHOOLS WE VISITED BUT DID NOT APPLY TO
University of Portland
Reed College
Oregon State
Seattle University
University of San Francisco
Santa Clara University
USC
Pomona (and the other Claremonts)
SCHOOLS SHE VISITED AND APPLIED TO
UW
Whitman
Gonzaga
Washington State
Western Washington
University of Puget Sound
Lewis & Clark
University of Oregon
Occidental
Why UW? She likes the big school environment and the fact that UW is far more diverse than any of the other schools we visited in the Pacific Northwest. She is a band nerd and wants to join the Husky Marching Band. She has been playing at Husky Stadium during Husky Band Day when all the regional HS bands show up since her freshman year. She has good friends going to UW and is hoping to room with one of her best friends from HS. She likes the location, far enough from home but not too far. It’s about a 3 hour driver or Amtrak ride from our home. She is impressed with the strength of the science programs at UW.
I’m happy because I’m a UW alum (from grad school) and now have a good excuse to drive up for games and such and let my purple and gold fly some more. And I’m very happy that I have in-state tuition payments to look forward to for the next four years. Some of the privates offered $30k or more of merit aid but they would have still been $7k to $20k more per year and we don’t expect need-based aid. We can send her on a lot of fancy study abroad and summer programs for what we will be saving by attending UW compared to any of the private schools or OOS publics.
Glad the process is finally over. Now it’s just the wait for housing lottery/signup, registration, orientation, and all the rest.
Happy to answer questions or give opinions about any of the above schools if anyone wants them.
Congratulations!
Thanks for the update, and congratulations to your daughter. It’s been really helpful to hear about the different merit awards your daughter received, and I’d be interested to hear the results from Occidental too when they finally come in.
Can a PNW local please comment on the climate difference (i.e., weather, precipitation) if any between UPS (Seattle metro) and Whitman (Eastern wash)? Thanks!
Very different weather. UPS is west of the Cascades so lots of cloudy days and drizzle most of the winter. Summers are glorious, it rarely rains.
Whitman is high desert plateau. It gets less than 1/2 the rain of Tacoma. It will have colder winters with more snow and hotter summers and more sunny days year-round.
So for those still following this thread and curious about the final bottom line for admissions and merit aid. D21 was accepted everywhere she applied and only two schools didn’t offer merit aid. This is the final range of estimated costs and merit awards. I sent an appeal to Whitman and they bumped up the financial award to be more competitive with the other PNW schools, but they did so by adding some need-based money based on additional information, rather than merit scholarships which I guess means it can vanish easier in subsequent years.
I expect this is a fairly representative spread in college costs for families situated similarly to us with upper middle class professional incomes and a good student who is maybe top 5% but not off the charts Ivy League material. I’m honestly happy that she didn’t apply to more “reach” schools because even if she had gotten in, they’d just be sitting up there with Reed and Occidental in the unaffordable range.
D21 will be attending UW and was also accepted into the UW Honors Program so we are all super proud and excited about that and completely happy this process is behind us.
Here is the final rundown of costs and scholarships for the schools to which she applied. I posted up a jpeg of the comparison spreadsheet that I prepared here: https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/51079639166_b9e4df5f4c_b.jpg
Lessons learned? At least in this part of the country it seems like comparable peer schools are pretty aware of what each other are doing and seem to be all fairly competitive with each other in each of their lanes. Merit aid is actually nothing more than a pricing mechanism that schools use as necessary to remain price-competitive with their peers.
For us, the difference in estimated college costs from cheapest to most expensive was a whopping $57,273, from $18,327 for Western Washington University to $75,600 for Reed College.
The update I just posted includes the final information from Occidental.
Wow, I like that spreadsheet! Very clear how her options have panned out, and U Dub’s in the sweet spot.
Your point about merit aid makes it clear why so many parents find that one kid’s merit offers may be so different from a sibling’s with similar stats and why schools are moving away from guaranteeing merit to keeping their cards close to their chests, as it were. Yield pricing.
Thank you! I’ve been following your DDs story all this time. We just finished our 11 day mom and son trip to the PNW to tour Willamette, Pacific, L&C, UPS, and Whitman. As of today my son’s 2 top choices are UPS and Whitman, as they both have everything he is looking for. I actually think it will come down to him either being ok with lots of rain in a small city, or him wanting less rain and being ok in a small town. We are at the airport flying home and plan to appeal both schools merit aid. I’m interested in how much grant aid Whitman awarded your DD? Was her Whitman merit aid amount $14k like my son’s? I would also be worried that they were front loading and that the grant would disappear in year two (this just happened to my friend’s DD who is a freshman at a private high school)!
I just checked her portal. Whitman bumped the merit award up from $14k to $24k after I appealed. And then included $7K of need-based grants on top of that for a total of $31,000 total grants.
I basically just sent them a detailed email including the spreadsheet that I just posted and copies of the actual aid award letters from all the other schools to back up the numbers and said “look, we really like Whitman but we aren’t made of money and you need to be more competitive with your peers if you want my daughter to attend.” A couple weeks later they just quietly upped her award in the portal but by then D21 had already heard from UW and committed there and was no longer paying attention to Whitman. So appeals can work if you have your ducks in a row. It netted us an additional $10k per year in this case and brought the bottom line into the same range as Lewis & Clark and UPS. But in the end, UW won out, not so much because of the bottom line, but because it was my daughter’s first choice anyway.
Oh wow, thank you so much! Getting an additional $10k a year in merit is almost unheard of, it’s usually no more than $5k. You give me hope! An additional $10k would seal the deal for us. We were really impressed with their Admitted Student Saturday and my classmate from high school is now a professor there and met us afterwards and gave us the insider info on the school for a whole 90 minutes!
Also, when you submitted your spreadsheet in the appeal did you include all the schools or just the schools that are peer institutions (small liberal arts colleges)? I wasn’t sure if we should include his packages from WWU or UCSC.