Please give input on LAC choice based on YOUR experiences

Parents Forum
41

<p>The key terms in the initial post were “significant sacrifice”. Significant sacrifice for college could make sense if you had only 1 option to attend college. But she has many options. And 1 option that does not require significant sacrifice. Does she want you and your family to experience the “sacrifices” while she attends the school of her dreams?</p>

<p>It’s a college education, it is what SHE makes of it, not the school. Yes the “fit” is important but at the expense of your family enduring “significant sacrifice”? I know my kiddos would not want that for me or their siblings. Not to mention any debt they would carry afterwards. Obviously MHC REALLY, REALLY wants her!!!</p>

<p>There are no dream schools, only dreams and some many ways to get there, and it is HER that will make the dreams come true, not the school. She is being offered a gift for herself and the ability to grant her family the escape of a “significant sacrifice”.</p>

<p>And the kids at school are just that, kids. She is the one with the FANTASTIC scholarship at a great school. She is to be congratulated over and over again!!! And hers is merit, they probably think she is worth every penny and then some!</p>

<p>Son in med school turned down 3 ivy med schools, including HMS for a great med school with a full MERIT scholarship, offered to him because they believed he was worth every cent!! The poster referenced above with the daughter who turned down Yale for undergrad took the full-ride at Rhodes and she is the same year in med school as my son, she is now at Yale med. Yale med does financial aid differently then Yale undergrad, that is why she could attend. And no undergrad debt at all for her. The decisions came down to the $$$. And that was 3 years ago for med school and 7-8 for undergrad. Tuition has gone up every year.</p>

<p>Kat</p>

42

<p>OP- none of us have enough facts to help you decide.</p>

<p>I know a kid whose family “stretched” for the “dream school”- and he took a Wall Street job after graduating (a sell out, in his mind) and is halfway done paying down his loans after only two years. He lives like a student (no car, lots of roommates, lots of mac and cheese), basically put his entire bonus last year against the loans (according to his mom) and by next year (assuming a comparable bonus) will be able to manage the remaining payments as a teacher or community organizer or what-not. I don’t know if your D has the stomach for this- but a great plan for a kid with fantastic grades and drive who is willing to devote three years of intensely long hours and crazy stress to basically wiping out his loans- and he will have his degree from Dream U for the rest of his life.</p>

<p>I have a college friend who took a 15 year maternity leave- but then looked at the college calculators and realized that they couldn’t afford their EFC on one salary, so dusted off her law degree (she hated being a lawyer BTW) and got a job in alumni relations and development at a third tier law school which was a close commute. Three years later (eldest’s Freshman year) she was being courted by a major non-profit to help with their major gift/capital campaign, basically doubling her salary. The bad news- they are now full-pay for both the kid in college and the one coming up. The good news- they can comfortably afford it.</p>

<p>Why do I share this with you? None of us have any idea how much flexibility you have WRT earning power or savings power or budgeting power, so advising you on how much debt to take on is like shooting darts in the dark. If you are a one income family which can double your take-home (after taxes and expenses, childcare for any younger children, etc.) then that suggests one approach. If you have two incomes and are already maxed out- well, where is the cashflow to pay down the loans going to come from? If “cutting back” for you means giving up the week at Disney world every Christmas and the family ski trip in February- then maybe taking on the loans is a fine idea. But if cutting back means taping the muffler to the car with electrical tape because one more car repair eats into the money you need for the gas bill- well, then I think ANY amount of debt is probably a bad idea if you are one paycheck away from the fiscal cliff.</p>

<p>The other factor is travel. Not just for your D- but for you. I know college kids who have managed emergency appendectomies and infectious diseases and broken bones just fine all by themselves far away from mom and dad. And I have friends who seem to be jumping in the car and on airplanes for the most minor medical issues (and breakups or “Oh no, I didn’t get cast in the Spring Directors Showcase”) and their kids can’t seem to cope with things from far away. So we don’t know your D- but if you need to consider a couple of “not budgeted for” airplane tickets and nights in a motel just to provide piece of mind- that can add a couple of thousand dollars to the debt load which you might not have planned for.</p>

<p>Most people are fine with their kid being thousands of miles away and not coming home for Thanksgiving or Spring weekend, if the kid has a roommate close by who has invited and the arrangements sound fun and safe. Fewer people are OK with major surgery where you are communicating with the medical team via phone without being able to actually see your kid.</p>

43

<p>

</p>

<p>Look at the net price:</p>

<p>

</p>

<p>Based on this, the net price of Pomona is $35,526 higher per year, or $142,104 (not including increases over the years) for four years, higher than that of Mount Holyoke. The student would have to take $16,254 in loans and do an unspecified amount of work study, so the family contribution is implied to be $125,850 - work<em>study over four years, or $31,462 - work</em>study per year, more for Pomona than Mount Holyoke.</p>

<p>This implies that the actual family contribution maximum is something like $46,002 - work_study per year (so probably in the $41,000 to $44,000 range). Mount Holyoke at $14,540 easily fits under the budget with room to spare, but the other three use up the entire actual family contribution and require student loans and work earnings to make up the difference. Indeed, one year of the family’s budget is enough to pay for three years of Mount Holyoke; the lack of stress associated with having both the family’s and the student’s finances stretched to the limit can be quite valuable.</p>

44

<p>There is little doubt that the massive difference in net COA bears the largest impact on the decision. It would still be hard at 25 or 50 percent of said differences. However, the missing perspective is how paying the difference would be a burden to the family. That is why our opinions matter little to nothing. </p>

<p>Regarding some of the above comments, the parallel to the case of Curmudgeon’s daughter might be strenuous. Dad and daughter followed a well defined plan and measured the offered opportunities versus dollars. Rhodes, which is not substantially lower than MHC in the rankings, had lots going for a strong biology student aspiring to be a doctor, including the proximity of St Jude and an amazing mentorship. As cliché as the word is, UNIQUE is the appropriate qualifier for the goat raising and tuba playing Texas valedictorian. </p>

45

<p>Based on the math, the OP’s daughter has been offered a Trustee’s Scholarship at MHC – that offer would also include a funded internship and a myriad of networking and mentoring opportunities. </p>

46

<p>An added note: I do not place any stock or faith in US News Rankings. Simply put, their methodology sucks. I do not know nor believe that Pomona is any better academically than Scripps, nor that Wellesley is any better academically than Mount Holyoke. Women’s colleges tend to be ranked lower because they don’t admit men – i.e., they form a specialist category that ends up being dinged along the way by the methodology used for the rankings. I think that among the women’s colleges, geography is an important factor: Wellesley gets more applicants than Smith or Mount Holyoke because of its close proximity to Boston; with more applicants, more students get turned away, so Wellesley is deemed more selective and perceived as a better school.</p>

<p>Outside of rankings, I am sure there are significant differences among the schools if you focus narrowly in specific academic programs or majors. Those would not be across-the-board differences, but I am sure that if an applicant was asking a question such as, “which school has the best linguistics department?”, then the applicant might be able to discern clear differences. The OP did say that her daughter may be interested in studying English, History, Foreign Languages, Linguistics, International Relations, Cognitive Science, and Psychology. So one approach to narrowing things down would be to look at those majors for each school – with that a different sort of ranking may emerge. </p>

<p>It also would probably be worthwhile to look at the overall academic structure --which schools have stronger core or distributional requirements, which have more open curricula. That could help answer the question as to where the OP’s daughter’s educational goals and needs might best be served. </p>

<p>When I made the comment above about a college being “significantly farther down the rungs of the US News ladder”, I was looking at MHC’s current US News standing of #38 compared with the other college’s current standing at #54. One colleges shows up near the middle of a listing of the top 50 LACs on the US News site, the other does not. One has a 42% admit rate and is considered “most” selective by US News,the other has a 55% admit rate and is considered “more” selective by US News. So that’s what I mean by “significantly”</p>

<p>But again, that does not reflect my opinion of the schools – I only referenced that because rankings or perceived prestige does seem to be a factor in the OP’s daughter’s thought process, and because that’s a good example of one of the many cases where students who are well qualified for elite admissions end up choosing lesser ranked schools. I do think that the historic prestige accorded the Seven Sisters are additional draw that probably tend to keep that group of colleges as being regarded as functionally equivalent to one another, perhaps something that is more apparent to people of my generation than those who have grown up in the US-News era. </p>

47

<p>

</p>

<p>What I do place stock in is SAT and ACT ranges, though. It is one of the few standard measures where one can look at caliber of student at the school. And there are differences between these schools. </p>

48

<p>However, using only SAT and ACT ranges would overrate the selectivity of schools where SAT and/or ACT are relatively highly important in admissions, versus those where SAT and/or ACT are relatively less important in admissions. Whether or not that is your intent, it is the result.</p>

49

<p>I forgot, MHC is test optional, making it hard to make that comparison. I personally believe most of the top tier and tier 2 schools weight test scores more heavily than they will acknowledge. </p>

50

<p>

That’s somewhat tautological because of the US News methodology – schools that weight test scores more heavily will end up moving up the scale of the US News rankings, precisely because they are choosing students based on a metric that impacts their ranking. </p>

<p>That provides no information whatsoever about the quality of their academic offerings or the abilities of their student bodies.</p>

<p>We’re not comparing Pomona to Podunk here – that is, I wouldn’t be asserting that the OP’s daughter is going to to get the same quality of education at her local community college. When you look at Pomona vs. Scripps, you are looking at partner colleges. The people who run Pomona are perfectly happy to have Scripps students enrolled in their classes, and to send their own students over to take courses at Scripps. So the overall structure of the consortium arrangement pretty much demonstrates that the people who run the schools recognize a rough academic equivalency. </p>

<p>I don’t think think that any undergraduate is going to find tangible differences in the qualify of education when they are comparing any of the colleges that US News puts in the “most selective” category – and that broader category does put Scripps & Mount Holyoke on par with Wellesley and Pomona.</p>

<p>I know that people who follow the rankings perceive the two schools as ranked within the top 10 LACs by US News to be better than the ones that rank lower – I just don’t know that they can actually articulate specific, objective differences to support that perception.</p>

51

<br>

<br>

<p>Haha, you said tautology, didn’t you? You do not believe in the USNews but believe schools make admissions decisions based on how the scores might impact the rankings! What a clueless and utterly stupid commentary that shows how much you understand. </p>

<p>On this issue, you might consider how it is actually the SAT optional schools that manipulate the ranking impact since they know that students report only high scores when available. This distorts the metric. </p>

<p>Fwiw, the selectivity index used by Morse is a direct indicator of the abilities of a student body as it is measuring class rankings and test scores. Like it or not, the student body of MHC is not at the level of Pomona or other highly selective schools. You are simply presenting a hodgepodge of facts and opinions that do not change the conclusions of the differences in schools in terms of student body. </p>

<p>The quality of education is a different issue altogether. </p>

52

<p>Thanks, @ucbalumus, for the math lesson. I understand the Holyoke Pomona comparison, but the rest of the figures still elude me. If the parents are contributing a fixed amount per year – let’s say $40K – why is the daughter’s 4 year loan debt so variable? The cost of attendance doesn’t vary that much among Pomona, Scripps and Wellesley, even with additional travel and other miscellaneous expense.</p>

<p>These are the total costs for this year listed on the websites – more or less the same (not including travel etc.).
Pomona $60
Scripps $59
Wellesley $57K</p>

<p>So why is the 4 year loan debt $16K, $2K and $52K respectively? Are there other merit offers? Any other factors? </p>

<p>I agree with @blossom and @xiggi: we really can’t know what cost of attendance would mean for this family. Nor do we know how the daughter feels now – or how she will feel in a few years – about turning down Pomona for Holyoke. </p>

<p>For the parents paying $40,000 a year may or may not be workable. We just can’t know what “significant sacrifice” entails. We don’t know their age, we don’t know their earning power, their savings, their assets, their family obligations.</p>

<p>For the daughter, graduating with $64,000 in debt would be burdensome and would impact job and graduate school decisions. (And I wouldn’t count on work-study or summer earnings to amount to much.) If it were my child I would advise against it, but I might look again at Scripps if the loan burden were truly only $8K</p>

<p>I guess my real question is if Pomona – West coast, near Los Angeles, coed – were the daughter’s number one choice, why weren’t there other schools with similar attributes on the apply list? It would be interesting to know if there are any other lower price options – State school, merit offers in her acceptance pile.</p>

<p>Personally I like Holyoke. I like women’s colleges, I like rural locations and I like Western Mass, but this is not a universal preference. That the daughter might prefer a different environment, begs the question, then why did she apply to Holyoke in the first place? The parent’s comment that the daughter’s “dream” is not “germane” to the discussion, is, to me, worrisome. </p>

<p>The whole decision process is beginning to seem less like managing dreams and more like managing regret. Every decision we make comes with risk, but I feel in this case the only one risk – financial – is being considered and even there the information is still evolving.</p>

53

<p>

</p>

<p>

</p>

<p>Versus Pomona:</p>

<p>Wellesley: net price +$8,922/year, +$35,688/4years
Scripps: net price -$3,476/year, -$13,904/4years</p>

<p>Note that the differences over four years are exactly the differences in the 4 year loan debt that the OP listed. (Of course, this assume that prices stay the same all four year, which they won’t.)</p>

<p>Based on these figures, it looks like the maximum actual family contribution is $184,000/4years, or $46,000/year, and that “work study funds” just means that the school offered work study.</p>

54

<p>First of all, there’s no reliable way to rank undergraduate departments. Second of all, that’s unnecessary anyway, because your daughter doesn’t know what she wants to major in AND even if she did, she’s going to spend most of her time taking non-major courses anyway. The most important comparisons are overall quality of education and quality of life type stuff. Those are roughly equal across the schools you are comparing - Wellesley and Pomona are a bit more prestigious than the other two, but not to an extent that it should make a significant difference in your final choice. They won’t make a difference when it comes to getting into grad school at all.</p>

<p>Speaking as a relatively recent graduate who chose the “personally fulfilling but not very lucrative” career route (I am in a PhD program in psychology, and intend to be a professor), I think when choosing between several equally good schools that cost should be one of the main eliminating factors. I graduated from an LAC with very little debt - I only had to borrow money for books and small incidental expenses, and the total was less than $10,000. It frees a recent graduate from having to carefully consider finances when choosing jobs and grad schools. For example, my original goal was to get a master’s before going to the PhD, and I was able to freely consider all of the top 10 master’s programs in my field without worrying a whole lot about debt because it wasn’t like I was adding grad school debt on top of a huge pile of undergrad debt.</p>

<p>So in that respect, I would completely eliminate Wellesley from the consideration. There’s no need to borrow $50,000 when you have just as good options for closer to zero. $16,000 is not so bad, but < $3,000 is better.</p>

<p>Work study isn’t really a huge consideration. I worked throughout college and I didn’t find that it distracted - in the contrary, I learned quite valuable skills in my on-campus jobs that I took with me into grad school and used for freelancing, including being an RA (I used my experience to be a hall director for two years, and got free rent in NYC during my grad program!) BUT if you already have all the money you need without work-study, then your choices are more flexible for on-campus jobs and your D can choose whether or not she wants to work in a given semester depending on how heavy her courseload is.</p>

<p>If she still can’t decide after that I would go by other things like social scene, etc.</p>

<p>If I were making this decision, here’s the way my thought process would go - Wellesley is too much debt, so that’s eliminated. And MHC is a great school, but most of the academic year is during the winter-ish months and it would be great to have perfect weather, all other things being equal. Plus, as far as consortia go, the Claremont Colleges is one of the best - the campuses are coterminous so there are no shuttles to negotiate. Then it would just be a question of whether I am okay with Scripps or whether I want to pay the additional money to go to Pomona. They’re both great places, but I think I’d be willing to pay the additional money to go to Pomona - a top 5 LAC - so I’d pick Pomona.</p>

55

<p>“I know that people who follow the rankings perceive the two schools as ranked within the top 10 LACs by US News to be better than the ones that rank lower – I just don’t know that they can actually articulate specific, objective differences to support that perception.”</p>

<p>*Endowment (per capita, and absolute)
*Strength of the student body (Pomona’s ACT bottom 25% is 31, but MHC’s median is 29. 57% of MHC’s student body was in the top decile of their class, compared to 92% at Pomona)
*Diversity of the student body (Pomona has more international students and students of color than MHC does.)
*Small classes (MHC has less classes under 20 students and more with greater than 50)
*Representation at the top graduate schools, fellowships- Pomona was 13th for graduate schools and 8th for fellowships not for liberal arts colleges, but for any college in the country
*More distinguished faculty as a result of higher salary compensation at Pomona. The top 5 places where Pomona professors have gotten their PhDs from are UC Berkeley, Stanford, Yale, Princeton, and UCLA.
*Higher retention rate = more students are happy with their choice
*Much lower acceptance rate. Yes, Pomona might have males applying as well, but Pomona receives more female applicants than MHC does.
*Higher average financial aid packages at Pomona, and less graduates with debt + lower debt undertaken
*A larger percentage of Pomona alumni give than MHC alumni. Pomona’s 25th among all universities and liberal art colleges for most generous alumni. MHC is 61.
*As far as I can tell, MHC has the Lync summer internship funding. Pomona has summer internship funding, over 200 summer research opportunities within campus, and an in-college internship program. This is likely attributed to the endowment, but Pomona students have greater access to opportunities. A poster originally commented how merit aid recipients at MHC would have access to these programs, but every Pomona student is equally qualified.</p>

56

<p>Not that those statistics are all important to this discussion, but in virtually every metric, Pomona beats MHC. Pomona IS a superior institution to MHC based on objective numbers and statistics.</p>

<p>However, subjective rankings reveal that the experiential and academic difference isn’t as large.</p>

57

<p>

It is not germane because based on the information provided by the OP, it does not seem to be affordable. The concept of a “dream” school is mostly a way that parents and their offspring are enticed into taking on unnecessarily high expenses. </p>

<p>I don’t think the 4-year undergraduate debt for Pomona is unreasonable – but I do think that the OP is right to have her daughter focus on objective facts and not dreams in terms of taking on that sort of debt. If the daughter ends up at Pomona, it should be because she is capable of articulating the ways that Pomona is worth $14,000 more than Scripps, and worth $142K more than MHC. And that means that at the very least, it’s time to be looking a lot closer at the details and not relying on “dream” factors. </p>

58

<p>

</p>

<p>@ucbalumus, I understand your figures but I don’t understand the OP’s. The gross costs of attendance are more or less the same @$60, $59, $57 respectively. How, then, were the net annual costs determined? Seems too a big difference for travel, etc. Are there other merit/need awards involved?</p>

<p>Secondly, if the parents’ contribution is constant @ $40K, why is the “total 4 year loan debt” so variable? Unless there’s another factor at play, the cost of Pomona, Scripps and Wellesley – for the parents and for the student – should be about the same.</p>

<p>I’m also still not clear what the “total 4 year loan debt” actually means. Is this the amount of debt the parents expect the daughter to absorb? And is it in total or times 4? </p>

<p>“Dream school” is an emotionally loaded descriptor, but it’s reasonable to have preferences in location, gender and overall culture and ambiance. I don’t think the articulation issue is with the daughter. I think it’s the parents who are unable to explain why these costly private schools were workable at application time and are not workable now. @calmom, are you saying they were enticed in to applying to schools they couldn’t afford? I guess that’s possible but it’s also possible that the parents are moving the financial goalposts from “we’d like merit aid” to “we need merit aid.” </p>

<p>Or maybe they are borderline on need based aid, and their packages show a wide discrepancy from school to school. I’ve read through this entire thread several times and see that different posters are interpreting the figures differently so I hope the OP will provide further clarification.</p>

59

<p>

“Rank”? No. But comparing the departments is easy – its a matter of checking the web sites, finding out of the subject or major is offered, and then looking at factors such as the number of tenured faculty, the course offerings, the focus of the course offerings, etc. Sometimes the focus of a subject can be very different from one school to another – the OP cited linguistics as one example, and that certainly is a subject that can mean very different things at different schools – and of course is not offered as a major at many. The OP also cited an interest in foreign languages, but didn’t say which languages the daughter would like to study – of course those offerings can be quite variable as well. </p>

<p>Statistical data can be pulled from the College Navigator site as to the number of students who graduate within a particular major – certainly having a critical mass of interested students can impact the quality of offerings in a particular subject – while too many students within a particular major in relation to department size can be an indicator that the student’s experience might be less than optimum. </p>

60

<p>momrath, I have no way of knowing what the family was thinking at the time the daughter applied to various colleges. Perhaps they anticipated qualifying for more need-based aid that didn’t come through – or perhaps they encouraged the daughter to apply to many colleges with the idea that aid packages would be compared in the end, without really focusing on the differences in types of aid available. </p>

<p>It does look like there may be some need based aid in the picture – here is a rough list of the published costs (combined tuition and room & board) for the respective colleges. (I"ve done some rounding):
Pomona: $60,500
Scripps: $59,600
Wellesley: $59.000
Mount Holyoke: $55,200</p>

<p>The fact that the daughter has been offered work-study at some schools indicates that they did apply for need-based aid. My guess would be that Scripps has included a little bit of merit money, and that Wellesley & Pomona just came to some different conclusions about family resources based on the CSS Profile info. </p>

<p>I think the loan figures may very well be based on what is leftover after the parents throw in whatever they are prepared to contribute.</p>

<p>I don’t take issue with the idea that the student has preferences. I have a lot of preferences. But we can’t always afford what we want.</p>

<p>I do wonder why Wellesley is included on the current list, if Pomona is the “dream” school – obviously Pomona is charging the family less than Wellesley,so it should be an easy call to drop Wellesley from the list. </p>