Sorry you find yourself in this position and congratulations on apparently making well north of $100k. The “donut hole” appears to be an area of focus that is being specifically addressed by Ivies.
While I know it has been a challenge I know numerous families in a similar situation that have made it work. Once again good luck.
Yes, but not all. My 21 was accepted to need-based schools (she had high stats) and an almost full Pell, the meet-need schools she was admitted to included loans. It was a better option for her to go to a main state school on full tuition scholarship and Pell, where she can afford it with no loans. Need is also evaluated every year so if there is a bump in income, the overall cost will increase. I should add, she is also planning on Graduate school, so the name on that UG degree is not as important. It is important to get through loan free, because loans may be avoidable in the future.
Also when you run the calculators, make sure they aren’t putting in loans to meet needs. Although it seems it may have benefited some at the moment.
I wouldn’t be surprised to see this change over the next few years. Working for a T50 company we’ve made a number of changes to our recruiting practices to draw on a broader range of universities.
In my limited anecdotal experience (my kids and their peers), highly prestigious schools offer more advantages than just a recruiting upside in investment banking (and a few other select fields). These schools usually have larger per capita endowments and that usually is reflected in many ways big and small the can positively impact students.
Our oldest went to one of the top rated LAC’s and our middle went to a still very highly rated LAC but not as top. The latter had half the endowment per student as the former. Both were great experiences and colleges overall but there were differences. The less endowed school had far more visiting adjunct professors with limited teaching experience running classes. The better endowed school offered every single student on campus employment opportunities, paid on average 50% more than the other school, with no bias toward the need for FA work study, and also paid students for most time consuming campus-affiliated activities (working crew on a play, editing the school newspaper, etc.). The less endowed college froze out students not on financial aid from almost all campus employment activities and filled many extracurricular activities with work study students too, so that you could only get those experiences if you were on FA. They also paid no stipend for almost any activities no matter how time consuming (such as being editor-in-chief of the weekly newspaper).
It’s also been my experience that very rejective schools end up with competitive students who can raise the bar for their peers, for students who respond positively to that kind of pressure (not all do nor should they have to).
Just a couple examples; there are more.
To be clear, I think there are pockets of amazing educators in the full gamut of colleges, that students can get a great education at most colleges and that the right kind of student can excel and forge great opportunities for themselves at most colleges. It’s not that the top colleges are inherently better. But they do have advantages. Like everything else in our society, those advantages are not financially available to many.
I was on a college tour yesterday with D23. It was not an official tour since it was move in week, but a friend’s son agreed to walk us around. Without any prompting by me, he mentioned that some of his classes had been taught by adjuncts. What stood out was that he found the adjuncts far more engaging with the students than the full professors he had. He said in his personal experience, he preferred the adjuncts. I personally don’t see necessarily see adjuncts as a bad thing - they are often people working in the field with current, professional experience.
Yes, totally understand. TE is a weird thing. All these years we’ve kind of assumed that it was freely given but we were recently disabused of that notion. Spouse and I are lucky to work at 2 different institutions that offer full tuition remission, either of which our son would be happy to attend (they happen to have good programs in his interests AND are admission safeties). He’ll have “his choice” of schools because of that, because he’d be happy to attend literally any of the schools on his list, and because he’s only applying to safeties and targets (for admission). So we figure he’ll get at least one TE offer (one AO pretty directly told him he was a shoe-in and could expect to get an offer) and he’d be happy to attend at our employers if not. Our flagship is outstanding and cheap as well but he’s chasing the merit $$ so I doubt he’ll attend there if admitted.
The disadvantage of a kid that doesn’t have strong preferences for most things is that parts of the college search process have been a bit difficult. One huge advantage is that he is pretty stoked about any of the schools on his list and says he’d be happy at any of them. Which I think is true.
Teaching Professors (as many colleges have) are great for 1st and 2nd year classes as they concentrate on teaching and don’t need the defined expertise that a Research Professor has.
Speaking as an English department chair here: I resist any and all pressure toward hiring adjunct faculty, preferring instead to push for full-time hiring (whether tenure-track or not, though the former is preferable). I mean, there are some times when hiring an adjunct is necessary because it allows turn-on-a-dime flexibility (say, one of the regular faculty gets very sick to the point of needing to go on medical leave right as classes begin and we don’t have other regular faculty to cover those classes), but for the most part adjunct hiring in my field is a way for administrators to have classes taught by really, really cheap faculty (the hourly pay often works out to below minimum wage) who have zero job security.
But note that I specified that I’m chair of an English department—this is incredibly field-specific. In some fields (e.g., engineering, much of business, some of the medical professions) there is what I like to think of as “honorable” adjuncting, which is hiring adjunct faculty for what the position was originally envisioned as—hiring someone with relevant expertise from the community to teach students while building relationships with future potential employees, making it a win-win-win for the college, its students, and the adjunct.
So the upshot of it is that there are adjuncts and then there are adjuncts—some of them are an exploited educational underclass, and others are providing an enriching experience for students while having an enriching experience themselves. Unfortunately, neither the way statistics on faculty are collected nor the title itself provides any way to tell which is happening in any situation.
S23 took a half-dozen schools off his list today, as the school made clear in a workshop that it would not send more than 20 official transcripts, no matter how he applied (Common App/Coalition/website). I think this is bad form, though I guess I understand their reasoning.
He seemed fine with it. I was surprised. Then I discovered that the reason he showed so much equanimity was that he wanted to add CWRU and Cincinnati! Augh.
I certainly don’t intend to malign adjunct teachers. There are many great adjunct professor. But our experience has been a great deal of inefficiency in curriculum from the college using so many. My daughter has taken many classes in her major that end up overlapping similar material and in general didn’t always feel she got a lot out of the classes that she didn’t already have. That’s more an indictment of the college than the teachers. This is ultimately about the schools saving money – adjuncts are much cheaper and then they save money by not providing a lot of oversight, coordination or training.
Overall, beyond the impact on students, the increasing trend of using adjuncts that they intentionally only keep around 1-2 years as a way of decreasing costs is not a positive development. It’s deeply unfair to these professors who have fewer tenured or well paid opportunities and are treated effectively as permanent grad students (another long exploited group).
Since both of my older kids went to LAC’s, this was not their experience. The entire college is geared for undergraduate teaching and student-led research. At both schools the tenured professors were extremely attentive and available to students and had a focus on student development. They got to know their majors’ professors personally. At the better endowed school two different professors proactively sought my son out offering paid summer research opportunities and in one case the ability to help do the early work to establish a new class. This is one of the benefits of a good LAC.
Totally agree here depending on the call, what you may want to ask is are any classes taught by teaching assistants. You see this in some of the larger public colleges with big grad programs. You may have a weekly lecture by the professor with recitation run by a grad student.
I’m not sure this is an accurate statement, and it might mislead someone. As you mentioned in another thread, it’s always good to get more information. My suggestion on this topic is to dig in a little more. We were/are (unapologetically btw) full pay, so I claim no expertise here. My kids attend/attended very selective schools and their social circles have run the socio-economic gamut. Off the top of my head, parents who worked in the not-for-profit world, prep school administrators, a nurse/middle management combo, a few teachers, an ACLU lawyer, a county prosecuting attorney, and several others I’m not going to remember. And, sure, there were very wealthy people, including some pretty big names.
I think there are more in the middle than many may think. It may be that the schools provide more aid to them than is often understood, and I suspect there are many who are there on various combinations of school, family and private scholarship support. And, of course, it depends on the school. See the Harvard example above.
My current experience is informed by the school that in your neck of the woods apparently is not deemed good enough by some. My Brunonian has friends from all kinds of socio-economic backgrounds. Probably more middle class than super wealthy or poor. This is very consistent with the experience of her siblings.
But all of them are, by some measure, very accomplished. The thing that gets lost in these discussions and the generalizations that often accompany them is the individual student and what they’ve accomplished to make it in to these places. Of course, it goes without saying that there are many kids who don’t make it in who are just as impressive as those who do. But that’s a different perspective than the one you’re sharing. If you don’t think Harvard, Yale or MIT represent some of the smartest student bodies in higher ed, I suggest, again, you follow your own advice and dig in a little deeper.
@dfbdfb I totally agree with your points. I agree one needs to take a deeper dive into how adjuncts are being used, but just offering my perspective that adjuncts are not necessarily always a bad thing. I found it interesting that this particular student found his adjuncts to be a positive part of his experience (he is a poly sci major with a minor in environmental science with an interest in sustainable urban planning). We didn’t get into specifics about how many or which courses were taught by adjuncts.
Oh, totally agreed! And even in fields like mine where reliance on adjunct faculty is usually exploitative, there are exceptions—for one specific example, there was an introductory course on Alaska Native narratives that we were able to offer a couple years ago because a Native Alaskan alum of our program who had gone on to graduate school and now has a pretty important quasi-governmental position was willing to teach it.
We’ve got nobody in the regular faculty who could have done that the way that individual could have as an adjunct, and the students, by all accounts, greatly appreciated it and found it useful.
Yep - aunts, uncles, grandparents…(especially if they haven’t had any experience in applying to college in the last 20+ years) think that all the kids with “great grades” are going to get a full scholarship and “they’ll get in anywhere they want to go.”
I think that’s right insofar as you’re talking about 100% need blind. But as it’s been explained to me by a few AO types, it’s not a toggle of 100% need blind or 100% need aware. I think there are a lot of schools that are close to need blind, meaning that for 95 or more % of the class, need is not considered in the admissions decision.
Now, as to how one winds up in the small % of those whose need is considered at those schools, I don’t know.
The punchline is figure out which schools are need aware and then ask to what extent.
There are schools that accept self-reported scores, actually, I thought the Coalition app was self-reported. Those final transcripts do not need to be sent until after you committed. It may be a way around your 20 limit.
Thank you… from an adjunct who also hires faculty. In my school’s field of cinema, TV, and radio production, it is extremely important to have adjuncts connected in these fields. You cannot work on movie sets for extended periods of time and teach full-time at a college. The expertise and connections they bring are priceless.
How about the LORs? I know for our HS they all come together in a package.
