I sent the whole spreadsheet as you see it along with the actual .pdfs of the award letters from every school so they could see I wasn’t just making the numbers up. And basically just wrote a nice letter saying. Look. We are obviously an upper middle class family of some means. But these are the numbers we are currently looking at. Our daughter likes Whitman but you are not being price competitive with the other private liberal arts schools in the Pacific Northwest. I also talked about some special private circumstances for why the FAFSA EFC is not truly representative of our actual ability to pay that I don’t want to get into here. But I expect every family has their own stories and circumstances.
I did drop Reed off the spreadsheet and didn’t mention Reed at all because they obviously don’t do any merit aid and to some extent Whitman sees Reed as a peer institution as well. But I kept all the public schools and sent those award letters too. Because obviously Whitman is competing with them as well.
Thank you! So helpful! And did you send your appeal to financial aid or admissions? We already have a spreadsheet all made up so just need to upload each individual award letter.
Sent it to the head of the financial aid office who’s name and email I found on their web site. She said they have an appeals committee and that she would forward the material to that committee.
My son was admitted to Willamette and Lewis & Clark, in addition to UPS and Whitman. We visited all 4 in the past 2 weeks and UPS and Whitman became his top 2. He is most interested in studying Japanese and possibly doing a Japanese major in addition to a second major and/or minor. UPS and Whitman rose to the top because both schools had EVERYTHING my son was looking for. He’s a rock climber and although Willamette has climbers on campus, they don’t have a dedicated climbing club, team, or gym and my son didn’t like the local climbing gym in Salem. My son also really wanted to be able to live in a dedicated Japanese living learning house, which both UPS and Whitman have. Willamette doesn’t have living learning communities and L&C only has a Global Villages house where all different language majors can live together. I think all the schools are great academic fits, so my son’s final decision is based more on social stuff and activities at each school. He also preferred the 50% less rain a year at Whitman! We’re from Los Angeles and it rained the whole time we were in Salem, Portland, and Tacoma! Which also effects him being able to climb outdoors. UPS is our cheaper option but we just appealed our merit aid at Whitman 3 days ago asking for more and they said they’d let us know within a week. In a twist of events, my husband’s mother contacted me and said she wanted DS at his first choice school, regardless of price, and has offered to pay for Whitman!!! Whitman had been what my son was leaning towards all along for the past few months but none of us wanted to get attached because we knew it would probably be the most expensive option. If we were paying on our own he’d probably be going to UPS as they are closest to our budget. So my son is pretty much 99.9% committed to Whitman and we’re super excited!
Whitman would have been MY first choice for my daughter had she not ultimately been accepted to UW and the Honors College at UW. What I didn’t fully realize during this process was that UW was her very clear first choice all along and she basically tolerated me dragging her all over to check out other schools knowing they were all 2nd choices. She knows her own mind and did her own thing and basically just tolerated my meddling. I never even saw any of her essays, for example. But she obviously knew what she was doing. She has at least 4 other HS friends who are UW bound, and a couple more who are headed for Seattle University. So the epicenter of her life is basically just moving 3 hours north to Seattle.
Had she not gotten into UW I think either UPS or L&C would have been HER next choice. She is kind of an urban LGBT kiddo who never took to the remote farm town vibe of Walla Walla and wants to live in a larger urban area. I think she would have been happy at either one and it is hard to really parse the differences for a future bio major. Western Washington would have also been in the mix. She really liked the campus and the programs there.
Thank you so much for your extremely detailed account. My class of 22 will be applying to several instate options, both UCs and Cal States, but she rather likes the idea of the PNW. She spent her first 5 years in the mid Atlantic region before we relocated to Southern California and misses having real weather. I think Whitman would be too remote for her liking, and the Washington publics would be out of our financial reach as well. UPS, Lewis and Clark, U of Oregon are definitely in her initial list.
What an amazing gesture from your husband’s mother! My son will be a freshman in the fall, and is very excited to attend. He much prefers smaller towns over big cities. As long as there are a few pizza/burger places and ice cream within walking distance, and a nice group of friends to go with, he’s happy. Good luck with your decision!
If you are CA residents then you should most definitely look into the WUE program which provides tuition discounts and sometimes full in-state tuition for residents of most western states. The top most popular flagships generally do not participate in WUE like UW, UO, and all the UC schools. But many of the other regional public universities do, like Western Washington, Washington State, Portland State, etc. As well as the public universities in the mountain west states like Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Utah, Colorado, etc. A lot of students in this part of Western Washington head out to Boise State or Montana State because it is basically in-state tuition. Likewise, a ton of Alaskan students head down to Western Washington for the same reason. Save On College Tuition | Western Undergraduate Exchange (WUE)
I just wanted to say THANK YOU for your detailed account of your Whitman appeal! We attended Whitman’s Admitted Student Saturday in person 2 weeks ago and then immediately came home and drafted our appeal. My son wrote a letter basically saying what drew him to Whitman (including specifics from attending the Admitted Student Saturday), told them that our budget all along was the price of a UC school (we’re in CA) but that a small liberal arts college is what is the best fit, and that Whitman was his first choice but the most expensive choice out of the 8 schools he had gotten into. We included a comparison spreadsheet of all the current colleges’ net costs and attached the aid letters of each school he’s been accepted to. We just heard back and they gave him an additional $16k a year in merit (on top of the $14k he received initially), bringing the total merit to $30k a year! That puts Whitman squarely in our original budget! Even though my in-laws have offered to pay, getting the price down to our original budget is huge because if anything goes awry we can still afford it all on our own! We’re ecstatic!
Thanks again for this thread. My daughter is a junior and she’s interested in many of the same schools that your daughter considered. I am curious to hear your thoughts about a few more California schools: University of San Francisco, University of San Diego, and Loyola Marymount. You mentioned that your daughter found USF too cold and urban–what did you think of it? And did she consider the other two schools? Thanks!
We live in Los Angeles and my son and I toured Loyola Marymount in person pre-covid (fall 2019). It’s a great school and my son really liked it. The only issue we had is there’s nothing within walking distance of campus and the second you get off campus with a car you’re stuck in horrible LA traffic. My son is a rock climber and we check out the local climbing gyms on every college visit we do. The one closest to LMU was 8 miles away but we were in traffic for about 30 minutes trying to get there. They do have an LMU shuttle that takes students within a few miles of campus so they can get to the beach, Trader Joe’s, etc. In the end my son didn’t consider CA private schools because he wants to get out of CA and the private schools in WA and OR were more affordable.
We didn’t visit San Diego or LMU. The LMU campus was closed last summer or we would have. Our CA road trip took us to USF, SCU, Stanford (quick peek), Occidental, CalTech, and the Claremont Colleges.
One of the strikes against CA in my daughters mind was the fires. We drove down in early August and got caught in the first big wave of fires last summer. Lots of dense smoke chasing us all over, we had to detour around one fire near Santa Rosa and San Francisco was covered with smoke when we were there. She wasn’t particularly impressed. Of course the next month we got absolutely hammered with wildfires in Oregon and Washington so there’s that.
USF is kind of concrete and has a lot of 1930s to 1950s brutalist type concrete buildings that aren’t particularly pretty. It’s not all leafy and green like some suburban campuses, but also not modern and glass like some newer more urban campuses such as Seattle University. It’s sort of in between. Almost feels like a giant 1960s era community college in some ways. It was just kind of “meh” feeling when we explored the empty deserted campus and D21 didn’t really take to it. This is basically what it looks like. You can street view around the place and see what it really looks like vs the super staged photos with the city skyline in the background that they put on their web page: Google Maps
By comparison, SCU was much prettier and more curated with all the mission style buildings and more elaborately cultivated landscapes. It had a more moneyed feel to it and more signs of recent construction and investment. But honestly Santa Clara was surprisingly bland and suburban. There just wasn’t much there within walking or biking distance of campus except some California style upscale strip developments that you see everywhere with the requisite Thai restaurants and burrito places. And lots of nondescript bungalow homes that have clearly been gentrified.
By far the favorite campus we visited was Occidental. which is not only the prettiest campus we saw in CA in a hilly residential part of north LA with lots of eucalyptus trees, oaks, and palms and a very coherent campus. But also by far the most interesting urban neighborhood with lots of interesting cafes, breweries, restaurants, and such. It was really the only campus that D21 really liked and could see herself at. The strike against Occidental for us was that it seemed on paper to be more humanities and social sciences oriented and less devoted to the hard sciences. D21 wants to study biology and molecular biology. And while they certainly have decent science programs at Occidental, it seems less of a focus compared to peer schools like Whitman. Strike 2 was that the only offered $10k of merit aid compared to $30k at the comparable PNW schools and was more expensive to start with.
The Claremont colleges were the last stop on the trip and D21 was tired. But also didn’t really thrill to them. The campuses are pretty enough in a very country club sort of way. Almost too curated in the sense that you wonder if you belong there wandering about. But the town was very suburban and car-centric. Too much like the upscale suburban parts of Texas such as Plano and Frisco that we left behind when we moved back to the PNW 5 years ago. Compared to Occidental the Claremont college seemed a less interesting place to go to school in D21’s eyes.
In the end UW was the winner and all the road trips were really just humoring Dad I think and exploring for second choices. I wasn’t always in the loop with all her thinking as she is a pretty private kid. But when I found out she was refreshing her phone about every 20 min on the UW portal the week that they were making admissions announcements I pretty much figured it was a done deal. She was ambivalent about every other admissions letter and every other school also admitted her. She has a whole cadre of good HS friend who are all UW bound and she is already all into the purple and gold and getting ready to try out for marching band so all the others are just distant seconds. She told me that if she hadn’t gotten into UW then either UPS or L&C would have been the next choice rather than my preference of Whitman. But would have been OK with WWU as well.
Camasite, I’ve wanted to ask you this for a while…when you did your self-guided tour of USF, did you see the Lone Mountain portion of campus? It’s separated from section you linked to by a block of beautiful, very SF-style townhomes. The Lone Mountain buildings sit atop a green hill with lovely landscaping and are Spanish revival in style. It’s also where the new dorm and cafeteria are located. Much of Lone Mountain has stunning views of the Golden Gate Bridge, downtown, etc. It still may not have been you or your D’s ‘thing’, but it has an entirely different appearance than the other part of campus. Some people don’t realize it’s part of USF.
In retrospect I don’t think we actually did. We parked next to the big church on the edge of campus and just walked around the central campus but didn’t cross over to that other area.
Honestly USF wasn’t ever really high on the list to begin with. We stopped in San Francisco because my wife and daughter needed to renew their Chilean passports and ID cards at the Chilean Consulate (they are all dual-citizens). So while we were waiting for our afternoon appointment at the Consulate which is next to Union Square, we drove over in the morning to take a peek at USF since we were nearby anyway. Of the Catholic schools on our list to see, SCU was the one that D21 was most interested in checking out. I think because she perceived it to be higher rated and more selective and better in STEM.
@Essnce629 , Whitman participates in a fantastic Japanese language program in Kyoto. My D was friends with the Whitties she met there. I don’t want to derail this thread so I will message you.
I thought that might be the case. I asked because having read several posts from people who did self-tours during Covid, I had the feeling they have only been seeing half of USF’s campus. Like any school, it’s not for everyone, but for some students (like my son) it’s the perfect fit.
I’m glad your D has found her perfect spot and I hope she has a wonderful experience at UW.
Yes. I don’t mean to diss any school at all. We didn’t visit any schools that weren’t worthy of consideration. I am mostly trying to paint a picture of D21’s impressions and reasons for choosing one school over another.
I tended to agree with most of her impressions except for those of Whitman and WSU which she downgraded mostly based on the eastern WA locations. I would have picked WSU for her as the best second choice in public schools if she didn’t get into UW while her preference would have been WWU. And I would have picked Whitman for her as the best second choice for private schools while she would have picked UPS or L&C.
But honestly I think she would have been fine with any school that we visited. There was no place that I would have vetoed for any reason except price.
Just wanted to say thanks for sharing your (your daughter’s) journey! It’s so helpful to read. I’m a Seattle area parent of a S21 and we are so completely behind on everything, mostly because he really just couldn’t think about college last year. The covid isolation hit him hard in the spring. He seems back to his normal self and says he wants to study something STEM. We are looking at WSU, OSU, CU, ASU, maybe some of the UCs and State Unis, though they are SOOO expensive for OOS. Based on your thread, we’ll look into Occidental, Whitman, WWU, maybe also L&C and UPS. Thank you again for sharing your experiences!
Thank you so much for your extremely detailed account. My class of 22 will be applying to several instate options, both UCs and Cal States, but she rather likes the idea of the PNW. She spent her first 5 years in the mid Atlantic region before we relocated to Southern California and misses having real weather. I think Whitman would be too remote for her liking, and the Washington publics would be out of our financial reach as well. UPS, Lewis and Clark, U of Oregon are definitely in her initial list.