there’s a kid on this forum this year - @secretslytherin - she had similar stats I believe, wanted business i think - and is a good, interesting writer; midwest kid I am guessing. I think i saw she mentioned a full ride at creighton, full ride at IU, good options at notre dame amongst many others. check out her posts; maybe she will pop by here.
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Look at the MIS degree at U of Alabama, especially if she’ll be NMF.
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My S23(Junior now) is going to UC Davis over the weekend for a conference. Is it possible for me to do a tour(guided or self)? If its self-touring, I want to grab a brochure and walk around campus.
According to the tour calendar, the tours are filled however if you show up at the visitors center, they may let you tag along on one of the tours.
Unexpected twist. By chance, we reached out to a few rugby coaches at some of the schools S23 may be interested in. I had no idea how quick to respond they would be.
There are not full scholarships but some of the colleges do give some athletic money. Practices would be about 3 days a week with games on some Saturdays. Not sure if its totally possible if he chooses a vocal music major but kid seems interested to find out more information.
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Definitely stop by the Welcome Center. They might not have room for you in the info session but you should be able to tag along on a walking tour. Warning, it is a long tour with a lot of walking. Wear comfortable shoes and bring water.
Today is Aggie Day for transfer students so the campus will have a different feel than normal.
Enjoy! 
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Hey! I’m from the Midwest and have similar stats to your daughter, applied for business, and am attending Indiana University this coming fall on a full ride through the Kelley SOB. Feel free to shoot me a PM and I can explain some of the schools I applied to/what I would recommend. I placed merit scholarships high on my list of criteria for all the schools I applied to, and was able to get full tuition +stipend/extra money at some out of state publics as well!
Your daughter would be a direct admit to Kelley, which is a fairly strong program. I’m attending in the fall, so I might be a tad biased, but it’s #8 on US News and has a lot more majors (majority ranked) than other business schools. Outcomes in terms of salary are similar, even to schools like Notre Dame. Investment banking for example would be better and yield more lucrative opportunities at ND and comparative schools, but for all other sectors I can think of at the moment, Kelley is just as strong. My guess is your daughter would also be highly competitive for the ACE program, which is a select program for incoming freshmen where you take honors level versions of courses in your ACE cohort (these classes are actually easier than their non-honors counterparts), and then you automatically go to business honors your sophomore year. ACE is the top 4% of all direct admits.
She could also be competitive for Creighton’s Scott Scholars program. They give 5 to in state students, and then 10 to out of state students. I’m out of state so I’m not sure if it is a lot easier in-state, but I would imagine she would maybe have a chance. It’s an extensive application process, one of the most tedious I did.
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@bgbg4us Thank you so much for connecting me with @secretslytherin. I was out the past few days but I see she has responded below.
@secretslytherin Thank you so much for willing to help out and share your experience & knowledge. I will get in touch soon.
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I certainly agree that there are many amazing colleges that get overlooked by those only focused on rankings and I believe kids can find great experiences, education and success and most colleges.
But I would say that most of the top schools on the USN list also have a couple advantages that aren’t just due to their rankings, but probably contribute to their high rankings. One example of several is endowment size by per student. The top schools have amazing endowments and it often shows in the resources students get. I’ve had one kid go to a top 5 LAC and one go to a top 15 LAC. Both great schools and great experiences overall. But the one who went to the top 5 had which has an endowment at least 2x per student as the other one literally got paid and trained to do stuff he did for free as an extracurricular in HS. That school guarantees every single student jobs if they want them, regardless of their financial aid status, and pays for most activities. More importantly, because of that policy, absolutely no job is reserved for those on financial aid. He got paid to work tech and stage manage shows, DJ in the student lounge, etc. He loved it and it was a core part of his experience. He became a certified lift operator and commercial van driver as part fo training they paid him to take. He was regularly offered free trips to meet with professionals at major companies and was proactively offered multiple summer research and job opportunities from the school without even applying. Pretty much everyone who wanted summer research got it, all funded by the school.
By comparison, our daughter at a top 15 LAC was shut out of eligibility for almost every job on campus because she wasn’t on financial aid. This didn’t just make it hard to earn money but prevented her from getting many of the interesting jobs that would have provided great experience. They limit non-work study jobs to calling alumni to solicit money and working in the cafeteria, and only because those jobs can’t attract enough people without opening it up to everyone. When it came to summer opportunities, she had to do the applying and it was far from a sure thing. She ended up alright but not all of her friends did, because there were far fewer opportunities than students. And even once she got something it paid about half the rate as her brother’s school. (But to be clear, we’re still grateful for her outcome and the school’s professors have been great.)
These are the kinds of differences that almost no one would think to research before picking a school. Certainly when you consider the up-front cost differences for families for state schools or schools with considerable merit aid, it more than worth it versus these advantages. But for those who have a choice, economically as well as admission offers, there are definite tangible benefits to top schools that go beyond ranking bragging rights.
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I agree that the way a university is willing to spend its endowment on student experiences can definitely make a difference. Would you be willing to give an approximate price range of the endowment/student at your son & daughter’s colleges?
For reference, here is a list of 500 colleges’ endowments/student. There are some surprises in the rankings, though I also think it’s very important to look at the size of the institution on the whole. Sometimes a very large endowment/student can mask the fact that a school might be having some severe enrollment issues.
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The response I provided was related to cost of attendance and whether there are schools that offer merit aid. Most LACs and top schools do not offer merit unless you can do cold fusion or stop the plague in your spare time.
It is hard to compare an LAC to a state school but I can tell you that NCSU engineering has state of the art facilities that surpass about 99% engineering schools across the world. Now they don’t pay students to study abroad but the COA is ~$20K. Average out of pocket is ~$11K for NC residents. It is not a popular school among tiger parents and their children and gets very little love from USNWR.
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First: I don’t think it’s reasonable to say that “almost no one would think to research” the sorts of things you list—for those students who are applying even relatively widely (remember, most college-going seniors apply to just a very few and often precisely one colleges) and their families, the sorts of factors that you mention are generally at least implicitly included in decisions.
But it’s worth remembering (as alluded to in other replies) that not all colleges spend their endowments the same way. Consider that Georgetown (#23 USNWR national universities) and St Lawrence (#57 USNWR national LACs) both have roughly the same endowment per student, but—looking at financial aid here, because that’s an easy point of comparison—Georgetown funnels returns from that money into meeting full need and allowing for need-blind admissions, while St Lawrence doesn’t guarantee meeting full need but has a rather generous merit aid program; in addition, St Lawrence has stronger experiential learning funding streams—though arguably Georgetown doesn’t need that as much, being able to offload some of that onto its physical surroundings near the halls of political power.
Depending on the needs of the applicant, one or the other approach is better, but there is no way to say that Georgetown’s approach will work better for most simply because its USNWR rank is less than half of its competition.
I mean, I’ll readily allow that colleges that rank higher in things like the USNWR lists have some advantages—in the modern higher-ed system, one of the basic truths is that the rich tend to get richer. However, a high-achieving student may be much, much better served in terms of opportunities by the advantages accruing to being in the honors college of a university ranked, say, #150 or so than being just another kid going to a T5—while for a different student it may be the precise opposite.
Generalizations are generalizations, but students (and their needs) are not terribly generalizable.
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Utah re-figured its merit for the 2021s. My DD received half of what she would have the year before. They are banking on changes in residency to make it affordable.
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It’s an interesting move—rather than not allowing college students to establish in-state residency, Utah is explicitly encouraging it. (Though, last I looked, not for WUE students—not sure why, unless it’s that part of the WUE agreement is to not poach.)
It’s a pretty aggressive anti-brain-drain move, really. I’ll be interested to see how it works.
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Yes, definitely now more complicated for many high stat people from the Midwest and East Coast. And virtually no chance for OOS applicants to get the Eccles full ride (which is what D18 had).
OTOH WUE is supposedly easier to get for applicants from the Western states, and staying for the summer to get residency has always been a big thing (most of D18’s friends did it because back then it was much cheaper than WUE).
Yes WUE is conditioned on not becoming a state resident wherever you attend, it’s not something unique to Utah.
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The Your College-Bound Kid podcast did a profile of UIC in the last few weeks, would be worth a listen. They have all their profiles on their website ycbk.com
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It looks like the URL has changed to https://yourcollegeboundkid.com/, but either way, I’m not sure whether to thank you or curse you for giving me Yet Another College Rabbit Hole to go down.
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Son’s is ~$1M/student; daughter’s is ~$450K/student.
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Definitely a rabbit hole! Their weekly podcast is a good listen too, covering a wide range of topics in college admissions.
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