I am admittedly terrible at it. I manage to pick the worst search terms and most of the time it’s just one long run-on sentence. When I don’t get any quality hits that give me the answer, I go back with a different approach, different search terms and sometimes even try different search engines until I start to see useful results.
Like I said up-thread, doing the research can involve actions other than internet searches. Between the time that my oldest applied to colleges in 2012/2013 and this past admissions cycle with my youngest, I’ve had countless conversations with other parents in my school & community about the process and gained a tremendous amount of insight from their experiences.
The strategy with my youngest was completely different than it was when my oldest was applying. This time I knew which colleges were generous with merit, which ones tracked interest, which ones placed a strong emphasis on EC’s, etc. - most of that was gained by talking to people and reading the graduation stats from our high school. I didn’t even find this site until late in my D21’s application process (and this site is a great resource with so many people willing to take the time to give useful information to complete strangers).
I think this applies most parents of high school students in the US. Most are unprepared and delusional about college costs and financial aid. I know someone from a lower-middle class family who took out $100k in loans for a BA from a notoriously expensive and stingy art school. When she couldn’t find a job to pay off those loans, she decided to take out $20k in more loans for a Master’s from that same school. Her parents believe that she’ll be able to pay off those loans very quickly because “a degree from a prestigious school always pays for itself!” And for the record, this is not someone who was spoiled; she worked in minimum wage jobs throughout high school to pay for her phone and clothes and faced lots of financial limitations as a child due to her family’s low income.
Obviously, most people aren’t in situations that dire. But even for students who have prior work experience, the reality of student loans doesn’t hit until after graduation – or sometimes later. For first-gen college students, there’s often little to no financial literacy within their family or immediate school community. Many view loans as inevitable if they want to go to college, so the actual number they take out seems irrelevant.
Oh, and for the record, the girl in my example posted a Youtube video about her financial situation as a way to tell other prospective students “This is how you can afford my [expensive art school] too!” as a How-To guide. And the comments were all along the lines of “thanks so much for posting, this was really helpful!” Truly a tragedy.
@bennty You are covering a lot of ground in your posts and switching focus of issues within this thread, which is why I think there is so much debate on here (and your other thread). But by bringing up many different topics within the scope of college admissions, I often think we are talking at cross purposes.
And not all these things have to do with college admissions per se.
Rising inequity and lack of funding to public higher education are serious issues that have multiple causes. However, looking at it through the lens of the college admissions process (imo) is looking at it backwards. Frankly, if that is where the rubber meets the road for families in their understanding of those issues, there are much bigger problems. Inequity doesn’t start with college admissions, nor is it going to get solved by complaining about the stress of college admissions.
Those problems are bigger and also require discussing politics and political choices on a fundamental level that I don’t believe is really allowed on this website (for good reason - as political conversations devolve rapidly).
In every state, there are schools (community colleges, state directional institutions, etc) that are substantially open enrollment and even with the reduction in state funding - usually affordable. They are not the most desirable choices for students, and may well require compromise on the wants lists of prospective students. But they do exist. And there have always been good students who for financial reasons have to choose the less expensive, less desirable option. Those community colleges and directional universities do provide decent educations.
There are ways to get an education, at a reasonable price without a ton of stress in the application process. It is in fact the way most Americans are educated, through the public high schools, public colleges and universities in their home states, most often non-residentially.
Residential selective college has always been a luxury choice available to a relatively small percentage of the population. The fact that only 25% of adults in your state have a college degree points to this very fact.
Only 33% of the US population has a college degree. This whole conversation is a conversation among a minority, no matter what school awarded each person their degree. And the reasons behind this fact are not due to the stress of college admissions or the opacity of the process.
Financial stress and the reduction of choices due to financial constraints, lack of ability or geographic restriction are not new. And are definitely not limited to the college admission process. I’m not trying to be trite, but life isn’t fair and it isn’t fair in lots and lots of ways.
I think you’re absolutely right. The admissions tourney is the consequence of the piled-up inequities and backing-away from Great-Society levels of funding for public higher ed. Which is why the solutions lie not just in attempting to sherpa people who don’t know they need sherpas, but in a political-crossroads decision we may or may not get. The wildcard here, imo, will be attitudes of younger generations that have grown up without the sense of “public” that GenX and Boomers knew, and, as @ssnicker638 says, just assume that being mired in debt for ed is inevitable, and lamb or sheep, makes no difference; imo a lot of their code is an older, pre-public-welfare code of lore-based looking after yourself.
Oh – I want to point out, about this one, there’s a common misconception embedded here. Community college is not inexpensive. In-state, the local CC costs $5K less than the flagship university does. You still have to live somewhere; you still have to eat, buy books, have transportation, etc. So your total cost for an AA, assuming you don’t string it out forever, is going to be around $40K vs the university’s $50K for the first two years; if your savings are $0 and your disposable income after living expenses is approximately $0, there’s no practical difference between the two, but you’ll probably pick the one with the lower number unless something unusual happens and you talk to someone who knows what happens next. You will be told that you can transition seamlessly to the university, but this is a lie, because your courses will not have been equivalent to majors’ first-year and sophomore course, and you won’t be prepared for navigating the bureaucracy. Odds are good your GPA will plummet, which doesn’t matter if a bachelor’s degree is the end of the line for you, but it’s real trouble if your aim is a professional program. Odds are excellent that your leg through university will take 3+ years, not two, meaning that in total it’s more expensive than if you’d just gone to university in the first place. Unless you happen to win in the game of snakes and ladders and qualify for scholarships and grants that make up for that likelihood, but a big part of that will be demographics and accidents of meeting people who know things you don’t about how the money works.
Of course, if you get that kind of help from university people, you’re also likely to be encouraged to go to a graduate program you can’t afford, and unless you’re pretty savvy you’ll probably go for the loans. I had a prospective tenant like that a few years back. Massive debt from a 7-year crawl through the mud to a bachelor’s degree, and then the way of keeping the debt in grace is just to stay in school, plus they were being told by tenured people how much promise they had. So they’d gone for a master’s, been super-excited to get in, and had no obvious path to either rent-paying or making the money back.
The CCs are less rigorous because they have to be: they must take all comers regardless of ability, and they’re serving everyone from bright high schoolers to retrainees in their 40s and 50s to continuing ed for retirees. There’s also no expectation that these students may someday go to grad school and become part of the professoriate, which is the abiding obsession of university profs. So yes, CC exists as last-ditch, but it’s not something to be cavalier about, imo.
Community college may well be only $5k less in cost where you live. But community colleges don’t only provide the springboard to transfer to a 4 year university, nor are all (or even most) as expensive as the ones you seem to be familiar with. The community colleges in our area offer not only the chance/ability of guaranteed transfers to our 4 year state institutions (provided the student gets the requisite courses and grades), but also offer 2 year programs that get students into good paying jobs in medical/medical technology employment, the trades and other certification programs that lead to full time work.
Students in our school district can get two years of free community college tuition after high school graduation if they maintain a greater than 2.0 average in high school, volunteer an average of 10 hrs/yr during high school (not a typo) and graduate without too many unexcused absences (more than 11 per year, I believe). Will those students still need a place to live while going to college? Yes, but they would need that whether they were college bound or not, and any issue with room/board costs exist if their parents aren’t willing to let them live at home after high school graduation - college plans or not.
If your local CC is not low cost, that again is a political issue and choice beyond the scope of the college admission process, not a matter of the schools being open enrollment.
In my opinion, CC shouldn’t be looked at as last-ditch, but rather another path to an education for those not interested in joining the professoriate, or even in a BA. CC can be a wonderful, usually low-cost, relatively low-risk option for students who have (solo or in combination) a financial constraint, a lack of educational preparation and skills for an immediate path to a 4 year school, or a lack of interest in attending school for 4 or more years.
We’re actually very average for CC costs. The state universities are relatively inexpensive tuitionwise, as state universities go. For someone with no money – which is a lot of people – it’s still a mountain of money.
Which, again, is why so many families wind up back at that “is it possible to go to a private college affordably with great fin aid” question, and entry into a Stephen-King-like admissions competition.
Exactly. This is why CC isn’t an inexpensive “instead of university” option on average in this country. Even if students do live with their parents, the living costs money. Cast your mind back to the Bunkers, and Archie’s resentment about carrying Mike and continuous complaining about how much the guy eats and uses. This is still real, and it’s why living at home while going to CC (or in-state university) also means working and paying to contribute to the household for a lot of kids who don’t have professional-salary parents who can handle the overhead without noticing. Part of COA.
You are lucky you state universities are low cost, ours aren’t. If they are low cost, another option for students is to take a gap year or two and work full time to earn enough money make up the differential between CC and your 4 year state college.
As long as someone isn’t taking classes while they are working, they will still be looked at as a freshmen during their application for financial aid and merit scholarships.
Again, there are actually many possible solutions to the issue of going to school. Most may not be not optimal, but most of us aren’t living with optimal choices regardless.
Personally, I think we’ve done more disservice pushing 4 year college as THE path so that the idea of community college, or taking a gap year or two, or going out into the workforce after high school are looked at so negatively. And again, these are choices we as a society have made. When i was in high school, students could choose between getting a Regents diploma (college bound preparation), a local diploma or even either of those diplomas with a vocational certification awarded by the end of your senior year in high school. Our high school offered vocational training in mechanics, cosmetology, CNA, and other areas which gave graduates the qualifications needed to get full time skilled work directly out of high school.
The lack of those kinds of programs in high schools now is due the choices we’ve made in our local communities - with the elected officials voted into office and how we have lobbied for them to spend and/or save money. Everything costs money, and many many people have said with the voting levers they pulled how they wanted money spent or not.
Edited to Add: If parents either cannot or will not continue to support their children after high school graduation, that is again an issue to discuss but is not a part of the college admissions process or problem. This was an issue even when public schools were funded at a higher rate…if your family is unwilling or unable to help subsidize your living expenses while you are being educated (at home or in a dorm), that is it own big issue separate from the college one.
This is another commonly-held misconception, I’m afraid.
If you’re trying to get a job without a college degree, you’re looking at somewhere between $8 and maybe $17 an hour. You still have to live. You cannot expect your parents to support you. You’re not saving money: you might be going into debt.
This strategy is why that prospective tenant of mine was deep in debt for a state-college degree, btw. He’d go to school, borrow, get scared of the debt, take time off, work, try to save money, fail, come back and borrow more. All the stop-and-start meant he had to go to school longer, and it adds up.
The skills-gap/trade misconceptions are handled upthread, to do with why more education (and more intellectual education, unfortunately) is needed now because of the complexity of the systems we live with.
Again, you’re right, in the end this is a political – national political – problem. But it would help a lot if we looked at now, rather than what was 20 or 30 years ago.
I take exception to the description of “misconception”. I am perfectly aware of the difficulties surrounding any of these decisions. As I have repeatedly said, much of this may not be easy or optimal. But then, few of us are given easy and optimal.
Yes, taking a gap year or two might only work if your parents are willing to let you stay in the family home to help subsidize your living expenses. Being able to afford a 4 year college residential experience probably only works if your parents are willing to subsidize that choice as well.
If parents cannot or will not subsidize higher education (even if just through allowing child to live at home for free or reduced cost), it is out of most high school graduate’s immediate reach. And again, this isn’t a college admission issue, that is a family (possibly societal) issue.
Your comments upthread with the lighting and plumbing issues aren’t one of college education vs. trade education - going into the trades instead of getting a college degree doesn’t imply a lack of intelligence or an inability to add new knowledge. There are incompetent trades people, just as there are incompetent college graduates. Your personal experience with Dunning-Krueger effect in trades people doesn’t prove what you posited it did.
Making it financially advantageous for parents to disclaim responsibility for providing any support to their kids post high school seems likely to have plenty of undesirable societal side effects.
Which is not what I said. What I said had nothing to do with the abilities or intelligence of the people in trades.
What I said was that normal trades education does not anticipate the level of complexity and technical/scientific sophistication of contemporary systems, either to do with the equipment or to do with working with the people who’ll be using the equipment. And that to get to an education that deals with that level of complexity/sophistication, at this point the people who’re offering anything like the necessary education are university people.
And that’s why I keep strumming this tune about how trying to direct people to “trades school” will only wind you up right back at university, barring major changes in what we teach in trades schools.
Not sure what your pov is on this, but you’re describing most families. I mean sure, people will help their kids with bits of this and that, but outside the top two quintiles, people have enough trouble trying to look after themselves – they don’t have money for helping their kids substantially. It’s not about advantage; it’s about the option not being there to offer much support.
Which is why the problem’s not just about education: it’s about societal equity more broadly writ. Most people used to go to work after high school, and they were entering a heavily-unionized workforce. The people who went to college had, as an entire group, wealthier parents, not to mention much less expensive college. So this problem of “who has to be supported after high school” was a much smaller one. The changes of the last 40 years, though, mean that not only do more people need to go to college; the “you don’t need college” economy’s evaporated. (I’m using my “get out of trades-school circuit” card here, see above.) And there’s wage stagnation (or decrease, for non-professional hourly work) plus housing and medical inflation.
We made some serious errors in steering the economy this way. Made a bunch of people rich. Made big problems for a lot more. But – now we’re back into politics.
I just paid for 4 classes at our local North Carolina community college for my oldest (class of 2019) who took a gap year and has since been working at Starbucks. It cost $1009 for 4 classes. It is free in our state when the kids are in high school and there are free options for community college in many states (19, the last time I looked)
Not my school district. It’s a statewide thing. There is also a statewide program for students who go to Community College to be able to transfer to any of the UNC system schools. They do have to be accepted, but the credits are guaranteed to transfer. There are also specific pathways at the some community colleges to guarantee admission into UNC-Chapel Hill or NC State or other UNC system schools if they maintain a certain GPA in the community college classes and qualify by being low to moderate income.
Like I said before, look out a bit on that, and if you know faculty in the area your child’s in and/or registration or advising staff wherever your child’s likely to go next, if that’s what they’re after, talk to them about how the transfers fare and what they need to do to get up to speed, where the rough spots tend to be. This is widely advertised all over the country; the reality on the ground is often something else. It’s a pity, too, because you can get students who really pulled themselves up in community college, have great GPAs, feel newly good about themselves, and then if the transfer isn’t real smooth, especially at a big state U that can’t devote a lot of resources to student hand-holding, a lot of that newfound confidence can get knocked down. I’d say don’t be afraid to helicopter a bit there.
Anecdotally the families I have known whose kids have done CC and then transferred into a UNC system school have done well.
The state publishes a lot of stats on it all. I found some that show that NC Community College (NCCC) students who transfer to a UNC system school as a junior, having earned their Associates degree do just as well as juniors who entered UNC system schools as first years. There was a 0.03 difference in junior year GPAs.