@85bears46 Newsflash- not everyone wants to work for McKinsey. I had an interview with them when I was a senior in college and I couldn’t wait to get the heck out of there.
@MassDaD68 have you looked at the schools with good merit? If your kid fits the stats, that can bring it down tremendously. Not just publics. S could have gone to Tulane for $28k a year, to Northeastern for $30k a year, a nice smaller public like Miami (OH) for about $25k a year. Temple would have been 15k a year.
Where you squeezed is when your kid’s stats won’t get merit. But there are still options. One reason 35k a year is tough is room and board. That can be 6k or 18k, depending (largely) on location. Look at less expensive locations, and find the lower priced schools. For example:
Ohio Northern University $40 all in
Elon (NC): $45 all in
There is a list somewhere in here of schools that are under 25 or 30 all in.
I too was shocked 2 years ago when we started paying attention. I was thinking tuition would averaging 35 or 40, not 50 and up.
@homerdog @toowonderful Clarification: I am not advocating to work for Goldman or McKinsey. My feeling towards Goldman is unprintable. I am just trying to illustrate the point that humanities major on the surface is a bit less appealing to high power employers (Investment Banks, Consulting, etc.). Of course, you can find examples of hedge fund managers hiring Russian/French poetry majors but they probably hire even more STEM majors.
@85bears46 Unprintable! :))
@MassDaD68 There’s a thread on the Parent’s Forum where kids with B avgs got accepted this year. They compiled a list and showed what kind of merit they got. It’s amazing how many kids got merit that brought the cost down to around the range you want. If your kid is an A student you can get even more money.
@85bears46 - again- I guess it depends on goals. My D has no ambitions towards any form of “high power employer” - in part for many of the reasons I might guess would be included in your “unprintable” opinion! 
She is very much an Indy kind of girl. Of course, we all change with time, and reality forces compromises… but I think the education she had had access to will more than prepare her for types of ways that she might earn a living.
@HRSMom and @citymama9 Thank you for your comments. I find my situation particularly frustrating because my initial understanding of what a top student is was wrong. The reality that I found was only the very top get the good merit scholarships. Then a pretty substantial drop off. I did not understand when I first started this journey that they threw kids into such rigid baskets. You either qualify for a certain scholarship or you do not. I thought it was a more graduated scale as opposed to a step/cliff scale. I know this is totally my ignorance and I have since learned the truth. My son is decent but not tippy top. Quick stats are 4.0 wGPA, 700 math-640 English new SAT, Top 10%, three sport Varsity athlete. He might be ok if his GPA was higher or his SAT higher. But it is not and he will have to deal with the fall out. So sad, too bad. The cost difference is huge. Top students might get $40K/year aid and his tier gets $20k/year. That $20/ year is the killer for us. That $20k represents the difference between private and public. I find it is true across the board here in the NE. Private schools are double the cost of public and the aid from private does not make up the difference for non tippy top kids. Like I mentioned, this forces the 4.0 GPA student into the public system which I found to be very limiting. We unfortunately discovered too late that NY seems to have a good city school system. Here in MA it is less so in my opinion.
Enough about me. This is sliding to a highjack post.
Your regional requirements really hurt you, too. Large merit aid is easier to get away from the coasts, in the Midwest and South.
Coming back to say – Midwest CTCL schools, like Kalamazoo, Wooster, Earlham, Beloit, Lawrence, and Knox – generally have lower tuition and room and board than east coast schools and regularly give half tuition merit awards to strong candidates. Last year, tuition was between $42-48 at those schools, and room and board around $8k at most of them. That means, total cost can be $50-55k. A high achieving student, such as @MassDaD68 's kid, would almost certainly get half tuition scholarship of $20-24k, bringing cost to the desired $30-35k range.
Mass Dad – you really need to hunt in the merit aid threads. You should be able to get the net number down to where the first number is a 3 rather than a 4. But you may not be able to get it down into the low threes.
For example, take Marist College which is in your neighborhood. $51k sticker price and the top merit award gets you $15k off. So net of $36k. Their 25-75 SAT range is 1180-1350. Your kid is at 1340. Do-able if he gets the top level award. Not so do-able if he gets the second level award which is $10k.
If you drop down a level from where Marist is, you should also be able to drop your net price further. But then the question is whether that school is a good fit that your kid would want to attend.
Good luck!
P.S. I find the Kiplinger database to be an excellent tool for hunting merit money.
Mass Dad – OH is definitely the land of merit money.
Take Xavier as another example. $49k sticker price. Average merit award is $15k and 75% of students get merit awards. 1050-1230 SAT range, so your kid is in the money zone – way above the 75th percentile. The website says your kid would get $18k.
$31k net!!!
@homerdog (#291) True point! I mean that in her immediate area, she feels completely unsupported.
@hebegebe You’re putting words in my mouth. Tell your own story.
@MassDaD68 is you son an athlete where he could get some $$ to play, even at a lower ranked (athletically) college?
Regarding college majors and bang for the buck up-thread, I had always been in the camp that there way no way that I would “allow” one of my children to enter a traditionally known non-good-job-producing major. This of course was in my eyes only have working in higher ed all my life and in a STEM area. Once your kids begin to get older and show love for something I feel my attitude has been altered in a big way. The jury is still out on them but I’m way more open than I used to be!
I always thought I was open, @MAandMEmom. As a parent I’m finding it’s kind of hard to see your child turn away from a “high paying” major to one that he/she may have an uncertain financial future in. I really have to step back and get a grip. Any tips?
Maybe MassDad and his child are only interested in top 20 schools that don’t give merit. That may be what the problem is.
@redpoodles (and I have black poodles:)) I think this has come with “age” and being in this business for so long. I was so laser-focused on the forest that I couldn’t see the trees. S19 is heading toward civil engineering but D20 and D22 really haven’t any ideas yet. I’m trying to bite my tongue for now. I’m the product of a community college and state college for undergraduate (granted Bostom U for graduate work) and I did just fine – but that’s a woman in a STEM field.
Majors don’t lock you into low paying jobs and careers. I counsel the kids and friends of kids who are graduating-- just to be helpful- and I find that attitude is 99% of the problem.
Kids want to live in Seattle or SF or Boston- not Dayton or Tulsa where the really good job opportunity for which they are qualified might be. Kids want a cool sounding job- developing the programming schedule for ESPN or doing something funky at Snapchat. They don’t want to be in a management training program for Holiday Inn, or learning about trade promotion at a consumer products company. Kids want a job which will allow them to travel to great places-- South by Southwest and the annual tech conference in Vegas. They don’t want their boss telling them that there’s a problem in the facility in Akron and they need to get on a plane ASAP, or that their next promotion will be to the regional HQ in Albany.
I am in corporate recruiting. I go to conferences and sit through presentations by companies trying to figure out how to hire millennials.
You show me a kid who is fluent in English- reading, writing, speaking, and can read a bar graph; can write a two page accurate and coherent summary of a 500 page deck; and has a decent attitude and work ethic and I can get that kid a job.
Will it be in SF? Absolutely not.
Last year I worked with a kid with an art history major who was not interested in the 25 jobs I found for her. She was qualified for all of them and likely would have gotten at least one or two. Did not apply. Did not meet her criteria. There was no way she was taking an entry level job at a very highly regarded historical society learning about archival materials in “flyover country”. Paid pretty well- her loss.
It’s not the major. It’s the kid. If your kid has a good attitude and a decent amount of ambition, the major won’t matter. There are kids who majored in accounting who end up working in a store front doing tax returns for not that much above minimum wage, and there are kids who are earning huge salaries in private equity, or not huge but terrific salaries in insurance companies and consumer products companies and ad agencies who majored in philosophy and history.
^^^^^YES. I fear my kid doesn’t have the good attitude. I have seen exactly this kind of “NOT AKRON” (“NOT U-ALABAMA!” Heck, “NOT U-MASS” our state flagship) ridiculous snobbery. 
Growing up, I guess.
It’s the kid’s journey ultimately and the kid needs to take it and make his or her own bed.
Hello all,
@citymama9 So my son concentrated on four schools which I would not put into the top 20. We felt they are good matches for fit. Most were private as my son was looking for a smaller school (<10,000) and not interested in a huge college many times larger than our city. He also wished to be within a car ride of MA. His top choice and a financial reach has an acceptance rate of 50%. The other three schools have acceptance rates of 82%, 75%, and 60%. All private schools have an admissions yield of under 30%. The local city school has a yield of about 60%. We knew we only had $35K/year to spend so tried to apply a big fish in small pond philosophy hoping to score some aid. We felt these schools would like to have a student with my stats and might offer some funds to him. The cold reality is that each school is most likely going to come out higher then we can pay. No wonder the yields are so low at private schools. Who the heck can afford them. He of course is disappointed that it did not work out but we have been upfront about the amount we can pay. We got sucked into the falsehood that many schools will give good aid to good students. I guess in my ignorant bubble I never realized the fabulous students out there that make my kid look average at best. His stats just do not make the cut and he will have to bear the blame for that. Obviously is it frustrating to have feel like you let your kid down financially. This process has been a huge eye opener for my wife and I. Thank god there are so many wonderful people who have helped us here on CC. Our remaining problem is money. You look at the NPC and the averages and it all means nothing until you actually open up the envelope and look.
No, we didn’t look at stats for average debt for students at any particular school. I can’t imagine that being helpful because everyone’s finanical situation is different.
Our wake-up call was when our state flagship UIUC told us we were full pay. CCers might find this hard to believe, but I had not been paying any attention to what was happening with tuition costs over the years. I am from a generation that could still pay their way through college.
We made it happen by having D13 go to community college first, then she transferred in to UIUC her last two years. Even then, she had to borrow and work hard, and we had to borrow and work hard. Meanwhile, we were trying to manage D16’s private high school tuition (and she was there on deep discount scholarship).
The most helpful tool for us was learning about the NPC and how to use them. Still, I made mistakes when trying to estimate net cost of attendance. Forgot to add in inflation. Forgot to pull D13 out of school and change it to one kid in college instead of two. Forgot about health insurance. Let her apply to schools we could not afford. Ack.
Bumpy, not pretty, hurt feelings, but in the end, my spreadsheet was telling us the truth about the schools on our short list.