Being a teacher is very noble and such a great career. They need to be appreciated more and paid more.
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Glad you are putting it all out on paper for her. Iâd suggest putting out what the monthly loan expenses would be, and what the median salaries are for teachers. Teaching salaries are all pretty close regardless of where you got your degree, so she really ought to see what the financial implication is going to be, what her monthly take home salary is going to be like, rent, etc⊠and then what adding a $70K loan on top of that will do.
If she can be happy at 2, and itâs a good fit, then it should be an easy decision.
Hopefully the effect wonât be to discourage her from being a teacher - itâs such a needed job, and everyone should be proud to have a teacher in the family. If she has no loans, you can have a very comfortable life on a teacherâs salary in many school district. Adding loans makes it so much harder.
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Although my son qualifies for my tuition remission benefit because I work at a Jesuit, the current financial state of colleges have them giving out few rewards. His lower gpa means this is even a lower chance. One school I had him apply to because it had a high number of awards according to the website. Getting free tuition at a school where tuition alone is 53k would be a dream! But alas, school emails out saying they had a super high number of tuition remission applications this year and my son only gets set rate which is 41k. I donât want to complain as that is still a HUGE bonus with tuition only being around 13k/yr and total COA around 24k.
UL (U of Louisiana Lafayette) is not on the tuition remission plan but they just gave him a scholarship offer that makes COA $8400/yr.
Fingers crossed he gets some tuition remission awards but he wanted warmer weather so hoping the offer at UL would interest him. This mom needs at least a few affordable places for him to choose from!
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We did discuss loan payments. Because of the agreement upon budget her loans wouldnât be $70K they would be closer to $15-18K. But with #2 she gets to keep her 529 for her Masters.
It is very tough to get kids to understand the real effect of what a payment of $400-500 a month does when you are young. Then add to that finding money for a Masterâs program because getting a Masterâs when you are a teacher is so smart with the increase of pay. But you have to front that money or take more loans.
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Thatâs a great price at Lafayette! Congratulations on the scholarship. I wish we had lots of options like you do. Iâm hoping we end up with three to really choose from, but most on our list will depend on scholarships and may not turn out to be actual options. My kid has been accepted to Colorado, which we can afford. Thatâs all we know yet. Iâm biting my fingernails!
Thanks for the info.
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Just a thought on the deaf studies. My SIL had her undergraduate degree in deaf studies with a teaching certificate. She found there were not many job opportunities in deaf studies anymore, partially due to the advances in cochlear implants and other hearing aid technologies.
She went back to school and got her Masters in Special ED with an emphasis on autism and the severely impaired. There are TONS of job opportunities in Special Ed with a large percentage of the kids having some degree of autism.
She has been out of school 10 years. She started out teaching in the classroom and she is now in charge of Special Ed for a large school district in the State.
Just something to consider⊠I would do my research on the placement of the deaf studies concentration or add something else to it⊠so not to get pigeon holed.
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UT Austin is 100 percent even though we got business honor programs at UH and Texas A&M?
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Houston is where we are located. We are open to any location in Texas. Is Business Honor (Texas A&M or UH) a more significant advantage than other factors at UT Austin (McCombs)?
This was exactly my thought! When we first moved to our current district 7 years ago, they had a staff member specifically for supporting students who were deaf or hard of hearing. However, in that time the number of students who fit that description decreased to the point where she was being required to do a significant amount of work that wasnât in her preferred area, and eventually they completely eliminated her position. On the other hand, the district cannot hire enough autism specialists to keep up with the caseload of kids with ASD, and theyâre having to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars a year sending kids to out of district placements.
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I think you have to look closely at what that âhonorsâ designation gives a student. Is it a club? Does the university just use it for recruiting high stat students? Are there perks? Dorms, classes, fancy seminars? Do those matter to employers or just the student? Is a student with a 3.8 in McCombs âregularâ business more employable than a student with a 3.5 in Mays Honors or 4.0 in Bauer Honors? I think if it gets to that point, most would say itâs a wash because theyâre all good schools. I would advise that the student drill down to where they want to live and what kind of community/ campus they want because I think generally if a kid is happier, then they make better grades and are then more recruitable. The end.
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My D is a freshmen at UT Austin McCombs. She was also accepted into Mays (but not Honors). In our situation, McCombs was a better fit since she canât see herself in College Station. Sheâs more of an urban city girl.
However, I want to warn you that the competition at UT is immense. Itâs competitive to just apply for an organization (any organization) that involves a lengthy application, then interview if you get pass the first round.
I have heard that Mays Honors has a lot of perks (like study abroad, 100% job placement rate). You can ask on the A&M forum. They have very involved parents that can tell you lots about Mays Honors.
Congratulations and good luck with your decision. All great options!
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Could have also replied to La Finalista as wellâŠtry to visit both (including business schools) if you are in HoustonâŠworth the time. Assuming costs are similar (not sure), which location/school vibe does your kid like better?
Someone else could probably elaborate on honorsâŠam sure it is great for student and has some perks. From a recruiting perspective, this isnât something we look at closely but maybe some value to certain companies. We look at individual qualifications/interview more closely than honors designation.
At end of day, vibe of school/locationâŠwhere will your kid be happiest? That is probably where they will do best. Both paths will offer great outcomes if your child works hard. I left out UHâŠothers can probably comment more there.
Workâs been crazy, so I didnât see this until yesterday, and so now Iâve read the report and, well, I have some serious methodological concerns.
First of all, the data comes entirely from self-reports. This isnât a huge concern, but especially in recent years, when the entire system of grading has been in flux, it is a potential issue.
The much bigger issue is that the sample is non-systematic andâparticularly of concernâthe makeup of the sample changes over the study period in ways that do not match changes in the population. The sample is those students who (a) took the ACT and (b) self-reported grades. Of particular concern is that the sample got progressively more affluent (probably better: less poor) over the study period, and did so in a strikingly large way, which introduces a really, really big confound.
That is, since (as weâve known for a long time) high school GPA positively correlates with household income, the fact that the report finds an increase in high school GPA over the study period must be called into question by the confound that the change in sample composition introduces.
This also underscores that the population taking the ACT has shifted (which, if they had reported on that, would have made for a very interesting discussion, though I recognize that it is reasonably outside the scope of this report). It is unclear whether this is the result of a increase in test-optional college admissions policies, but whatever the reason, it means that it is impossibleânot just bad practice, but impossibleâto draw firm conclusions about both high school GPA trends and abilities of high school students to score at a particular level on standardized tests based on the sample available to the authors.
And yes, the authors did make efforts to adjust self-report GPAs for the changing demographic characteristics of the sample, but without transcript studies to norm against, theyâre honestly just guessing. While demographic gaps in all measures of high school achievement have remained stubbornly constant over the years, the details of those gaps have changedâand so there is no good reason to assume that a constant level of adjustment will result in anything beyond a first level of approximation. Good on the authors for stating their assumptions directly, but they seem to be working under the deeper assumption that a model that works for 2012 has to be valid for 2021 (and vice versa), and I question that.
Further, the correlations between ACT scores and self-reported grades are problematic, because they selected only some ACT scores for those students who took the test multiple times (which is a sizable minority). Since test scores on tests such as the ACT do not remain constant for test-takers, this is a questionable methodological decision unless there was a check to make sure that it isnât biasing the results in one particular direction, or if itâs based on previous work showing that itâs a statistically reasonable approachâbut even if that was the case, there is nothing in the report saying that they did so.
In short, if I were a peer reviewer for thisâand it isnât my field, but my field does involve developing statistical models to explain the messiness of human behavior, so I like to think I have some transferable expertiseâI would have recommended publication after revision to (a) acknowledge the methodological shortcuts that were made and giving justification for them, even if the justification was just that the sample used necessitated them, and (b) in light of that, add some appropriate hedges to state the conclusions less definitively. Also, I would like a better explanation of why the early years of their results appear to deviate from those in the most recent available years of transcript studies (and I would recommend that their model find a way to adjust for that difference in some way).
(Also, just from the point of view of recently having become the editor of a scholarly journal, Iâm more than disappointed by the lack of a conflict of interest statement. I mean, Iâm not saying that there is a conflict of interest, but acknowledgment of the potential conflict of interest inherent in conducting a study that has the potential to harm or benefit the funding source and/or employment has become the normâand this studyâs conclusion is that there is unique and increasing value in the products provided by the sponsoring organization, so, um, yeah.)
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We have definitely started that and started research. We had her talk with her ASL teacher and others teachers to get their opinions.
I think I am going to go at this with the idea of hey you can get your teaching degree and ASL minor for free and have your 529 still intact. Then after that you have options. Maybe find a graduate program that leans to Deaf studies. If you go the other route you will have to start working right away.
There is nothing quite like the freedom of not being in debt.
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My cousin did the same. His daughter is brilliant and did not apply to any early rounds for the same reason. Good luck, and let your son know it will be worth the wait.
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ULL is great! Several of my friends have current students. They are very generous with their merit scholarships and Lafayette is the cutest town! Good luck with his decision!
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Deferred at U Minn. Kid is not sure he wants to put effort into the music audition if he wonât get in academically.
Acceptance at St. Lawrence as a Momentum scholar (highest merit), but awarded TE scholarship set rate of 41k plus an additional 9k per year making it just 5k short of where we need it And coincidentally right at our EFC which is also 5k higher than we need it.Only one other school we are waiting on has merit, the rest are meet need, so weâll see how generous they are. Hamilton has reached out twice for more financial documents. Which may be a sign that she has a good chance at acceptance?
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Sign language (sometimes in a simplified version) is used in many special needs contexts, children may be non verbal or have limited verbal skills due to other disabilities than deafness. Maybe even autism, though thatâs not my expertise. Just a thought.
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