<p>Parent forum: [url=<a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/parents-forum/]Parents”>Parents Forum - College Confidential Forums]Parents</a> Forum - College Confidential<a href=“in%20case%20you%20came%20to%20this%20thread%20via%20a%20search%20engine%20or%20something”>/url</a></p>
<p>
</p>
<p>All colleges now have Net Price Calculators on their websites; you input a few numbers on income, assets, etc., and the NPC will give you an estimate of what you can expect in financial aid. Harvard has probably the most generous need-based financial aid; families earning up to $65,000 are expected to pay nothing, and above that level it’s usually 10% of income, up to an annual income of $150,000 or so, at which point the percentage contribution starts to increase, with most families with incomes up to $200K or so receiving some FA. Unusually large assets could result in smaller or no awards. Yale and Princeton try to keep pace but are not quite as generous as Harvard. Most of the other top research universities and leading liberal arts colleges (LACs) promise to meet full financial need and are need-blind in admissions (so coming from a family with a lower income won’t hurt an applicant’s chances of admission), but this is really just a few dozen colleges and universities. And keep in mind that each school will have its own definition of what counts as financial need, and most will include loans and work-study in the FA award. The Net Price Calculators are your friend; use them to explore options.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I’m not sure this needs to be a major factor in selecting an undergraduate school; you want to get your daughter into a school where she’ll get a strong foundation and do well, at a price you can afford. Biggest factors in medical school admissions are college GPA and MCAT scores; the prestige of the undergraduate program counts for very little. If your D wants to do medical research, it’s more important that she use her undergrad years to burnish her credentials to get into a strong research-oriented medical school. It’s also important that she not accumulate a lot of debt as an undergrad, because medical school is costly and she will almost inevitably need to take on large loans at that level. That said, some universities–and some LACs, for that matter–do offer opportunities for undergrads to do biological research. Some schools noted for their strength in biological sciences would include Stanford, Harvard, MIT, Caltech, Johns Hopkins, Princeton, Yale, Cornell, Washington University in St. Louis (WUSTL), Duke, Chicago, Columbia, and Penn, but you’d need to investigate each for undergrad research opportunities. A step down in selectivity from there, a school like Case Western in Cleveland is worth a look. A number of public flagships–UC Berkeley, U of Washington, Wisconsin, Michigan, UNC Chapel Hill, Texas–are also very good, but unless you’re in-state in one of those states they may be cost-prohibitive since most public universities are not generous with FA for out-of-state students. It is, however, worth checking out your own state’s public flagship, and you may want to include it on your daughter’s list because most of the schools I’ve mentioned are extremely selective and even a lot of well-credentialed applicants don’t get it.</p>
<p>Hope this is helpful for starters, and welcome to CC!</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Why did you quote studies like the following that only discussed unemployment but not underemployment? Most college graduates are not looking to work at Wal-mart for minimum wage. I thought that was the point of getting a college degree-so that you didn’t have to take minimum wage jobs, which, unfortunately, many college degree holders have to take now just to make a living.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Even some stupid, mindless jobs that pay garbage require high grades from top schools. And you know what caused this? Boomer propaganda that everyone deserves and should go to college and that a degree is worth it at any cost. This is a large reason why this country is tanking in our lifetime, leading to high unemployment due to the oversupply of college graduates. Not to mention the bad fiscal Boomer policies from Boomers only looking out for their own interests (SS and Medicare), and the federal government lending money to naive young people, artificially inflating tuition. While the government makes it impossible to discharge student loans, we’re bailing out irresponsible Boomer mortgage holders and large banks that intentionally made bad loans. If the fiscal cliff crisis hits, there will be an even worse recession, making the job market worse for college grads wasting money on tuition. And all of this is due to bad Boomer policies and Boomer propaganda that no longer applies to the current economy.</p>
<p>And yes, these unemployed college graduates were probably better off investing that tuition money to start a company.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Moral of the story is - for my generation, even if you follow the “right” path there is a decent chance that you will fail. The best choice for my generation is to take the unconventional path - forge your own future. Take a risk and start your own company. Education isn’t necessarily the best solution since it’s over-priced and the expected value is declining annually. If my friends, who are in the top 0.0001% in intelligence and graduated from the best colleges in the country, some with “employable” degrees like engineering, can’t find good jobs, what makes you think your child will just because they go to college?</p>
<p>I can empathize with the article, if it weren’t for the Post 9/11 GI Bill I would not have even considered going back to school for a piece of paper that would have put me in debt for years to come. I was not about to dish out $20k-$30k per year so I can partake in the job market rat race thanks to the over saturated pool of qualified applicants. Now though with Uncle Sam footing most of the bill, quite a few doors opened up for me, never would I have imagined that I would attending next year lovely UBC in Vancouver otherwise.</p>
<p>Thanks so much, especially Bclintonk – I am reading a lot here, and panicking a <em>little</em> less. Thinking “upscale” is still so overwhelming. We are still completely unaware of typical admissions deadlines for early admit or standard (?) admit. From what we’d heard, her 4.0 community college credit history was enough to get her into what we figured was the school we’d be able to afford for her to attend (Wayne State in Detroit, we’re in MI) so admissions and deadlines were never very relevant to us. That is reassuring what you’ve said about undergraduate studies; now I don’t feel like I have to learn about <em>every</em> college <em>everywhere</em> that might give her the background she needs. </p>
<p>Would not being an undergrad at a college with an outstanding medical school be an advantage, though? In being admitted to the med school later on, or in finding mentors for research or lab work that would be useful later on?</p>
<p>Our very commonsense plan “A” was for Wayne State, followed by probably by a program to help with medical school expenses: a National Health Service program, the military… hard choices, and not the best ones, but she has known she was going to be a doctor since she was 4 and has never wavered from it. We are just trying to figure out how to get her there. </p>
<p>But the more I read the “How to Get Into Ivies” books - and I’ve got a small stack going now 
- the more she sounds like the kind they want: a sweet, smart self-starter who contributes in her classes because she wants them to be stimulating. Last year she had a teacher - a PhD English Lit candidate clearly having a Basement of the Ivory Tower moment – almost tearfully thank her for being such a good student, in the bathroom. She’s had other “WOW” moments from her other professors, too. </p>
<p>We had her take the SAT when she was 13 to see if she was ready for college, and as I recall, she did well even for someone older. We didn’t really fully understand the results, and at the time, it wasn’t really important, it was just for our info – but I could dig up the results if it would help gauge her chances at the selective colleges. Anyone?</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>This thread may be of interest:
<a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/national-merit-scholarships/649276-nmf-scholarships-updated-compilation.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/national-merit-scholarships/649276-nmf-scholarships-updated-compilation.html</a></p>
<p>Wow, thanks ucbalumnus! Bookmarked! There’s a lot of information at this site and you just saved me a lot of turning pages. And it looks like our safety school is on there!</p>
<p>Rocket you might want to start a new topic for this, since some helpful folks won’t read this far into this one.</p>
<p>Thanks OHMomof2, I was wondering if I should but wasn’t sure of the forum rules on reposting. I’ll have to figure out how to reframe what I don’t know enough about to ask about!</p>
<p>I’d just copy/paste what you already asked into a new topic. I think you’ll get more responses that way :)</p>
<p>This link should start a new topic in the parent forum: <a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/newthread.php?do=newthread&f=15[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/newthread.php?do=newthread&f=15</a></p>
<p>Highly recommend “Mismatch” by Richard Sander and Stuart Taylor, which addresses the negative aspects of affirmative action admissions policies at very selective colleges at universities. Authors flag the significant failure rate for URMs accepted into rigorous college and university programs for which they are unprepared and under-educated (by their weaker education background and by relative cultural isolation). Even outstanding URM students often founder in these academic situations. URMs often form the bottom 10% of rankings in each class year, and have high drop-out rates. Book contains a great deal of statistical analysis, and acknowledges that its findings are categorized as political incorrect by colleges and universities, but also notes that these institutions do little to encourage successful academic completion and/or timely graduation by their URMs. </p>
<p>Quoted from Amazon: "Affirmative action in higher education started in the late 1960s as a noble effort to jump-start racial integration in American society and create the conditions for genuine equal opportunity. Forty years later, it has evolved into a swampland of posturing, concealment, pork-barrel set-asides, and—worst of all—a preferences system so blind to its own shortcomings that it ends up hurting the very minorities educators set out to help.</p>
<p>Over the past several years, economist, law professor and civil rights activist Richard Sander has led a national consortium of more than two dozen nonpartisan scholars to study the operation and effects of preferences in higher education. In Mismatch, he and journalist Stuart Taylor present a rich and data-driven picture of the way affirmative action works (and doesn’t work) in this setting."</p>
<p>“Would not being an undergrad at a college with an outstanding medical school be an advantage, though? In being admitted to the med school later on, or in finding mentors for research or lab work that would be useful later on?”
-I frankly do not know. The reason is that D’s UG did NOT have ANY Med. School, outstanding or not. It did not prevent her and her classmates to get accepted to several Med. Schools, including top 20. Again, IT IS ALL UP TO YOU. Get your high GPA, decent MCAT and cover other requirements and NOBODY can take your acceptance from you. Another side of the coin, go to the very top UG, do not get required stats/do not participate in ECs like other pre-meds and you will get nowhere, I guaranteee you that, I have examles of that. More so, UG’s pre-med committee at this top prestigious UG may not even let you to apply if you do not have what it takes based on their opinion. They value their reputation much more than your acceptance. This is one of their responsibilites and they are not going to loose their job over one student who decided not to work as hard as it is needed.
This is the facts that nobody can ignore. Where you go for UG is up to you. How hard you will have to work to get into Med. School is NOT, you will work extremely hard NO MATTER where you are.
I do not know many facts about other fields. but the same is applicable to some others. The examples are engineering, IT, nursing. The cheapest option will do just fine.
This discussion is steering focus in the politically correct direction that is NOT a good mind set for the student who can afford only certain UG (actually this apply to the most of them). The politically incorrect direction that will work very well is self-reliance. Yes, work hard, get the best out of your UG and you will be where you want to be. Is there anything else that matters? Sorry, it will not work for those with the dream of having Harvard permanently attached to their own name, they will have to find the way to fund their dream, I am sure that Harvard is very perceptive to the top kids who are poor. Somebody who I know is on the Merit full ride at John Hopkins. If this is NOT the top school, then I am not sure which one is. If Harvard would want this type of kid on it’s campus, I assume, they would show some love also. And again, many of these very top kids simply do not care to apply even if they can afford it. Very, very many…</p>