Summer campus visits backfiring?

College Search & Selection
1

<p>The only post I could find related to this was six years ago, and didn't directly address my concern. I agree with the principle that the ideal time to visit a campus is when school is in session, but better to visit during the summer than not at all.</p>

<p>However, I may have inadvertently put DD in a bad situation. We took some "generic" campus visits during sophomore year to get a sense of whether she preferred large versus small, rural versus suburban versus urban, etc. The campuses were selected purely based on geographical proximity. Unfortunately, a few of the "small" examples were good to very good LACs, which likely will not be financially feasible for us. As we try to make her more comfortable with expanding the scope of candidates to public universities (including some non-flagship ones), is visiting under-populated big campuses like to cause even more despair about what she sees there compared to how "right" the feel was at a couple of the strong LACs? We could wait until the school year begins, but with school, sports and other ECs ,we'd be limited to fewer visits than we could this summer.</p>

<p>How to undo the damage I may have done?</p>

2

<p>You could look at some of the public LACs (see COPLAC’s website). They tend to be
larger than the private LACs but are usually smaller than flagship or directional universities.</p>

3

<p>Why not confront the 12 ton elephant in the room–without ever leaving home?</p>

<p>Take your D one evening and sit down with her and the net price calculators. Show her your financial information and do an NPC for her favorite LACs. Talk to her about what would have to happen for your family to be able to pay the gap between the Expected Family Contribution and what her parents think they can afford to pay. Make clear to her that loans, which are almost always a part of the EFC, are really something that she or the family will have to pay back.</p>

<p>The gap btw (EFC-minus loans) and what family can afford to pay could be filled by tuition/tuition plus awards (usu. not covered in the NPC) where available, summer work, internships, school year work over and above any “work study” that’s already part of the EFC, gifts from family members, additional savings, liquidation of assets, etc. </p>

<p>Your D could contribute by winning tuition/tuition plus scholarships. Any merit the student wins the school applies to the financial aid and student loans provided in the NPC calculations. So merit has little effect on the EFC unless it is a whole lot of merit, such as full tuition or tuition plus. LACs seldom provide full tuition in enough numbers to matter to you, but you can look this stuff up. You might have such an excellent student.</p>

<p>Take your average LAC for an entirely hypothetical example. LAC has granted your D 5500 in student loan, the parents another 1000 in a loan, 2000 in work study, and 12200 in a grant. LAC’s COA is 60150. Your COA minus the financial aid is your EFC. Your EFC is 39550, but even with all your savings and tightening of belt, your family can muster but 25K/yr. Assuming steady family income, that 15K difference each year, increasing 2-8 per cent annually with inflation is the yearly hump your D must overcome if she is to go to this LAC. Your D can contribute by her work and savings outside of school. Every little bit helps to close the gap, but she cannot work enough during the summer to raise 15K. </p>

<p>This is the reality most of us face, whether we run the npcs when they’re juniors or when they’ve already been handed a FA package which makes the school impossible. Most students start out in community colleges to pay for their first two years more easily. Others join the service or govt civilian programs that will help pay for their college.</p>

<p>There is in the Financial Aid forum a number of threads about related topics, including full tuition/full ride scholarships, some of them automatic, and other great merit opportunities. </p>

<p>I just went thru this with a nephew, and until I did there was a lot of magical thinking going on in the student’s and the family’s heads. Numbers have a way of bringing reality into focus, and it’s an excellent lesson for your D to learn now. Your D needs to know what is affordable to her family and focus on schools within her financial reach just as she must focus on schools within her academic/athletic/et al. reach. </p>

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<p>Once your D gets over her disappointment(?), you can return to visiting schools in your area and to thinking of them as TYPES of schools she might attend. Not all LACs are out of her reach, perhaps, but she might explore other types of schools to open up the possibilities beyond LACs. I emphasized with my nephew and his family that it’s not where you go to school but what you do there that matters, but also that he could find like-minded students just about anywhere. Your D could find an LAC at a large state university by looking at those schools that have honors colleges within them or those states that have honors colleges off the main campus. There are threads on CC about these, too. It depends on your state of residency, but there are some honors colleges OOS that give generous support to OOS students. D might have to compromise, but that too is an important lesson to learn.</p>

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<p>If I recall, you live in the DC area. If you live in MD, check out St. Mary’s College and UMBC. If you’re in VA, look at William and Mary, Christopher Newport, James Madison, and Mary Washington. These are all public non-flagships of varying size and type. This will give a feel for some in-state (read: affordable) options. You never know, she might like the bigger campuses.</p>

6

<p>I second @jkeil911’s advice: level with your daughter about finances, the sooner the better.</p>

<p>There are quite a few small liberal arts colleges that offer merit aid. It’s true that many of these may have a perceived negative, e.g. location in the midwest or south, all women’s, poor name recognition, but many of them are excellent academically. </p>

<p>Maybe it’s not the time of year that’s the determining factor. It could be that your daughter is just drawn to smaller, more intimate environments. We did all our visiting in the summer. Although the LACs that were overwhelmingly quiet. The big and medium sized universities were actually quite lively, maybe not as much as they might be in October, but still full of students and activities. </p>

<p>So go ahead an visit the Big U’s. Explore the honor colleges. But at the same time, look more deeply into LACs that would be affordable and keep an open mind about the trade-offs.</p>

<p>If you’d like to provide more information on your daughter’s profile and academic interests we could give suggestions.</p>

7

<p>There are some LACs that promise to meet 100% of need, so definitely look into those. Explain to your daughter that you can only afford a certain amount and that she should take that into considertation when making her choices. That doesn’t mean that she can’t apply to those other schools, but she has to know the realities before getting those acceptances and FA packages. I completely agree with jkeil on the net price calculators, and it is something I wish my parents did with me prior to applying.</p>

<p>On a side note, what state do you live in? We could definitely help suggest some good local or public LACs that might be more fitting to your daughter.</p>

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<p>Typically you can get tours in August before high schools go back to school and the colleges are back in session. </p>

9

<p>Is your D a viable candidate for LACs such as Bowdoin, Pomona, Williams, Amherst, and Wellesley? Because they have excellent need-based FA. (That is not an exhaustive list.) I endorse the idea of sitting down and running the NPCs at a bunch of schools. While you’re at it, look at their Common Data Sets and admissions statistics.</p>

<p>Hopefully, you can get your D to calmly identify what she thinks she likes in a school, and identify those that she has a shot at getting into and that you can afford.</p>

<p>I would do everything in my power to discourage her from latching on to the “dream school” idea. Don’t even utter the words in her hearing. :)</p>

<p>I must say that I have always thought that the idea of visiting schools that one can’t afford and one’s kid can’t get into just to see what a school of its type is like is a pathway to disaster. I know a lot of people her recommend it. But in my experience schools are too individual to make the assumption that if kid likes LAC 1 and Uni 1 that kid will have the same reaction to similar schools. It is also true that many kids are not set on one size or one kind of setting: they like different schools for different reasons.</p>

<p>Lastly, a lot changes between sophomore and senior year of HS. The sophomore who felt intimidated by Big U and loved the cozy LAC might be all set for Big U two years later.</p>

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<p>We did confront the very large elephant, (in the minivan on the ride home from an LAC), but perhaps too superficially. I used the analogy of a ladder. She needs to get her “credentials” strong enough to match the profile of students admitted to schools as high up the ladder of selectivity as possible. With that, though, comes the reality that she will likely be unable to attend a “match” school in the traditional sense. She would need to set her sights a few rungs lower, at schools where she might attract merit aid. Circumstances (many within our control, some not) have led us to the point where we can’t come close to meeting our >$30K EFC, so need-based aid won’t be nearly enough. We’ll really need to chase big merit aid, and I’ve only recently realized exactly how far down the ladder we’ll have to climb. </p>

<p>Unfortunately, this was AFTER the big, supposedly generic, fact-finding trips. She hated UMd, UMBC, George Mason, Penn State, and GW. Her reactions to American, Georgetown, Hopkins and Villanova were somewhat better. She thought Goucher and Hood were ok, and loved the vibe at Gettysburg, Dickinson, and Bryn Mawr.
Now I need to re-orient her to the potential reality of a Frostburg or a Salisbury or a Bloomsburg .without de-motivating her to the extent that her performance drops and she loses any shot at a sufficient aid package at a dream-type school, and I worry whether she’d find a summer-time visit to a deserted campus at one of these places doubly depressing.</p>

<p>So, it comes down to giving her a reality check without too much demotivation, which could endanger whatever small chance she has to attend a dream school. Man, first some of my financial decisions have put her in a bind, and now I’ve let her fall in love with $60K LACs. I’m not doing well with this college thing!</p>

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<p>Which LACs did she fall in love with? Money aside, does she have the grades/scores etc. to get into these?
There are LACs that offer substantial merit aid – for example Smith, Rhodes, Grinnell, Holyoke – but it’s difficult to tell whether your daughter would be a candidate for an award.</p>

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<p>So just to confirm that you know, that merit aid is often used to offset need based aid (so you don’t get to have 30K EFC and knock additional merit aid off the EFC – a lot of schools take that merit amount out of the need based aid, so your cost of attendance stays the same).</p>

<p>When you say your EFC is >$30K, do you mean from net price calculators for the colleges (vs FAFSA)? It is the NPC numbers you need to worry about. Assuming she takes out federal loans ($5,500 freshman year, $6,500 sophomore year, and $7,500 each junior and senior year), is your EFC still out of reach?</p>

<p>Are you in-state in Maryland per another poster’s guess? If so, another vote for St. Mary’s College of Maryland. Almost a summer-campish feel to it, and about $25K in-state before any loans or scholarships she might earn. My D1 went to Dickinson, but I also think (after visiting later with D2) that SMCM would have also been a great fit for D1.</p>

<p>Knowing your home state, your D’s stats, and possible majors could help you get more viable suggestions.</p>

13

<p>I feel your concern, and I hope you can take a few deep breaths and give yourself some slack on this. You can not control your child’s emotions, and you meant well when you took her on the visits. What’s done is done.</p>

<p>I would suggest you start fresh with your daughter. Take her out for a leisurely brunch and ask her to describe in detail the college campus that would be perfect for her. My daughter’s list included beautiful campus, lots of green and trees, able to ride bicycle around campus. Not too large a student population, specific limit on number of miles from our home, she didn’t care about greek life, etc. If you can get her talking about specific details, then you have a “filter” to judge each school by.</p>

<p>In the same vein, if she visits and doesn’t like a school, ask her to give several specifics on what she doesn’t like.</p>

<p>I am a big proponent of visiting schools, we started when my daughter was in 10th grade. She was pretty tired of it, but all those visits gave her a good foundation when it finally came time to make decisions on which schools she would apply to. (Also, the senior year is so packed with schoolwork, senior events, and application deadlines, visits are very hard to fit in.)</p>

<p>So many factors can influence a visit, from the weather (good or bad) to a bad night’s sleep. A tour guide having a bad day can turn you off on a school quickly. You can’t know what is going to influence your child. You tour when you can tour, you have the conversation about finances and make sure she truly understands.</p>

<p>We wanted our child to be the “big fish” in the smaller pond. To apply to schools where her ACT score was way above the school’s 75% mark, so she would have the best chance for merit aid. It has worked out well for her, and she had a great freshman year experience.</p>

<p>The road trips with my daughter were fun and helped us bond, and I hope that they can be a fun adventure for you and your daughter too.</p>

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<p>Other than that she liked the look and feel of some schools, do you know her academic and other interests and wants? Possible major or activities, study abroad or research opps, etc. Then when you find afffordable schools that match these well, you can emphasize those positives. A soft sell.</p>

<p>If she’s liking sweet LACs, I’d take big schools off the list, for now. You know what they are and she’s visited enough of them to get the feel, for now. </p>

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<p>OP, i’ve pm’d you.</p>

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<p>rrobb, a couple of suggestions. One is that Gettysburg does a fantastic job meeting need if she can get in there. Ursinus and Muhlenberg are two more LAC’s that did a fantastic job in making college tuition affordable. Depending on where you live, I have heard really good things about McDaniel as a pubic college with a smaller LAC feel. Best of luck to you! </p>

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<p>First of all run your numbers through the NPCs of the schools on the list and the FAFSA EFC calculator. If you can’t come close to what the full need met, no merit schools are coming out with in terms of your family contribution and/or can’t meet your EFC, then you have to stop looking at the caviar and champagne and look at the less expensive options and also start looking for schools that have a number of sizeable merit awards. Also they should be schools that have enough of them and where your DD has a shot at them. Duke has some great merit awards, but danged few, and anyone on the periphery of even getting accepted doesn’t have much of a shot at all at them. Better than Georgetown, as they have NO merit awards. If you can’t make their expected contribution, they are not a school to put on the list as the chances of getting sufficient money from them is about zilch. Want to add a few as lottery tickets, and buy some real lottery tickets at the local store as well to fund them, go on ahead, but everyone should understand exactly what the chances are of getting the funds to pay for those schools. </p>

<p>Also find out, and call the Admissions office directly about this before applying , how many awards at the big levels are being given. If you need a $30K award and the school’s top award is $20K and they give out 3 of them, then, the chances of your DD getting enough from that school through merit are not good at all, even if she is in the top 25% of candidates, test score wise and the school does give merit to say $15% of the kids. You have to see if the big bucks are even available or you are fishing in a pond with no catch chances. </p>

<p>Nothing wrong with looking at things you can’t afford. I walk into designer shops all of the time and see what the fare is to get ideas, knowing full well that unless the sale rack is heavily discounted, there isn’t going to be any buying there. But when I walk into the Dollar Shop(yes) and see the same type of earrings, or the Salvation Army has a similar outfit, I know my stuff. I know the brand names and what’s “in” this season with the 5th Avenue stores and find what I like that is similar. Or not. I just know. </p>

<p>How much can you pay each year for college? What do the colleges (EFC estimator, NPCs) expect you to pay? THat is your gap.</p>

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<p>nothing like doing your homework, @cptofthehouse‌. I couldn’t agree more.</p>