@Midwest67 Thanks.
@Midwest67 Great info. Learned something new here. Thanks.
@Midwest67 that is correct. It may not be too much with the kid’s standard deduction tho.
Kentucky, prestigious scholarship, full ride.
UCLA would be different if you could afford the dorms but as I don’t think being a commuter would be much of a college experience, I would lean towards Kentucky.
With that full ride, she would be able to do study abroad, research and other things that you could afford with the full ride. And the opportunity as one of the “big dogs” on campus. Invaluable
well, it’s not just medical school. how likely is it that she will go on to med school OR grad school?
also do you have other kids that you will have to put thru college?
if she is an only child and 90% certain that she will stop at a BS or BA, then I can see choosing UCLA or Santa Clara. but personally, there is no way 18-year-old me would have chosen living at home and commuting to college over a full ride to a flagship.
if there is at least a 50% chance she will pursue med school OR grad school then i would disregard anyone’s advice that does not mention anything about paying for grad school.
BTW here is my plan:
- take full ride to UKy, have a great time at a complete college experience, and crush your grades
- save the $60,000 for med school or grad school
@Wien2NC Yeah there is definitely a greater than 50% chance of grad school. Good points!
The commuting to UCLA is not free. I imagine it will cost $2000 or so for parking, gas, car maintenance (fast food on the way home?), and then there is the time to commute, weather issues (yes, I’ve lived in Orange County, and there were days it was raining so hard that it really wasn’t safe to drive on the freeway). Just consider those too.
If your daughter is happy with Kentucky, I’d go there. I’d also consider Santa Clara very carefully. (I’d probably go with Santa Clara, just a personal preference). However, as @Wien2NC said, it IS about $50k saved if she goes to UK, and if she has no big preference, why not save the $$?
@twoinanddone. The commute wouldn’t be fun. Been there, done that. At least I wouldn’t be driving. 
I had to be a college commuter many years ago for financial reasons. I got a great education and went to a great grad school. But it just isn’t nearly the same thing. I think about my grad school as sort of being my “college experience”, but really I just never had the college experience.
So UCLA would be a no for me.
Since the other two schools are both within budget, I’d let your kid pick the school she likes best between those two. Don’t let the med school thing overwhelm the decision. TONS of kids say they are going to be doctors as HS seniors, and only a small fraction of them will actually wind up doing that. And the typical college student changes majors three times before graduating.
Let her pick on the basis of location, weather, campus, dorm life, how good the cafeteria food is, size, close to home vs. far away from home, and overall vibe and fit. It depends on what she likes and is looking for.
Personal preference, but I’d pay $15k a year for a strong (ACT 27-31), reasonably sized (5400 undergrads), private college. But if she wants a big (22,000 undergrads), non-selective (ACT 22-28) state school, UK would be fine too. They’re different experiences.
UK wont be “free” if you count taxes on the nontuition scholarship, 3 or 4 flights, maybe insurance. Make sure you compare all costs to make the best choice.
My daughter is a very proud Santa Clara graduate. She didn’t have anything bad to say about the area at all. Also, there is something very favorable to be said about a Jesuit college and the education provided there. To be frank…it’s a great school.
But what exactly did you get from Santa Clara that makes the cost to you only $14,000? The school costs nearly $60,000. Was this need based grant aid?
If the kiddo wants a smaller undergrad population, no TAs, and a smaller campus, SCU for $14,000 a year is an amazing deal. But not if your costs are primarily loans.
How much would UCLA cost you? Would the commute be doable? If it’s similar in cost, and that is her top choice…then it should be considered.
Kentucky is the financial good deal. Any chance she can visit there again to see how she feels about it? That one sounds most secure innterms of cost.
@thumper1 Thank you for your insights on Santa Clara. We’ve visited UK, but we haven’t been up to SCU yet. The pictures are beautiful and everybody says good things about the quality of education. We plan to make a trip soon. At SCU we qualified for a need based grant and an additional “incentive” grant, which doesn’t appear to be need based. These two grants added up to full tuition. We are left with room and board. So no loans.
My daughter got an incentive grant too…which was not really need based as I recall. Hers was very small.
Honestly…you can PM me and I can fill you in on the school.
See if your kiddo can do Shadow SCU. It’s an accepted student thing whereby a student is shadowed by an accepted student. Attend classes, etc. it’s their best admitted student even (my kid developed most of it).
I’m a huge fan of the Jesuit philosophy. Lots of community service and interaction with the greater Santa Clara and San Jose areas.
As an FYI…the San Jose airport is only a 10 minute free bus ride away. Very convenient. Southwest flies there too.
Great choices! Three of my sibs graduated from UCLA. I grew up in L.A., in the SF Valley. Of the 5 kids in my family, in addition to the 3 who graduated from UCLA, one went to Reed and the other to Caltech.
I agree with those above who said that it’s really important to live on campus to get the full college experience. I don’t know where you live but I assume it’s a bit of a commute every day from campus, and that plus the “dislocation” cuts out a lot of what’s important to the college experience, and happens outside the classroom. Even though they lived in commuting distance, my UCLA sibs all lived on campus (one of them started out at UCSD and then transferred).
There must have been some pull toward KY that led to that application. Give it careful thought. To me this would be very appealing, even with the inconvenience of long distance travel. At least these days there are many ways to keep the connection to home electronically. I wanted to live away from LA, and “grow up” independent from my family. If it hadn’t been Reed, I’d have gone to UCB. I know a couple of HS classmates who went to Santa Clara. Very different atmosphere, excellent college!
Great options!
I spent my freshman year at SCU, now at USC (closer to home + family issues, had the grades to transfer, had nothing to do with the quality of education/experience at SCU). For some reason I was linked to this thread from my LinkedIn page - (because of a mention of SCU) so I thought I’d take a minute and chime in on my own experience. I understand this is the parent forum, but hopefully this will help anyway.
First of all, Santa Clara is a small school. There’s no avoiding it. UK and UCLA are both huge compared to SCU, and if your daughter went to a big high school, Santa Clara will not feel much different. You will edited SOMETIMES see the same people on campus, so it takes away from the “big feel” of being at university. I edited the previous statement to say “sometimes” instead of “always” because that’s a gross misrepresentation. By the end of the year, however, the school did feel quite small as I could walk a minute in any direction on campus and probably find someone I knew well enough to ask them how they were doing. This can feel weird; sometimes you just want to grab some food from the cafeteria without seeing or talking to anyone, but someone will probably end up striking conversation with you anyway. You can make a big school feel smaller, but you can’t make a small school feel big.
Second of all, it makes a difference whether or not your daughter has been a part of the public school system or not. Most of the kids at SCU came from private school, and so the atmosphere is definitely a little bit different. This is exacerbated by the fact that the school only has about ~5000 undergrads, so it can feel like there is a bubble around the school that you just don’t get at other big schools.
That being said, I came from a ~2000 kid public high school in Southern California, and did not expect the amount of attention I received in class. My freshman classes (Computer Science) were roughly 15 to 30 students large. I don’t think you’ll find freshman classes that small anywhere else. Your daughter will receive a great education, and it won’t be easy to just fly through class because both my math and computer science classes only took a certain number of A’s. I got some bad professors during my year at SCU - but that experience holds true at any university. I will say, however, I’ve met some of the most passionate professors at SCU who really spend time with anyone who will value their attention, and who also wrote me excellent letters of recommendation which landed me my current spot at USC.
Third of all, if it matters, I got an interview from most of the places I applied to that summer for internship. Santa Clara holds a job fair every quarter for students to network with recruiters, especially from big Silicon Valley companies and even smaller, local startups. If your daughter is looking to go into Computer Science, SCU should be a serious consideration. YMMV, but SCU has a great engineering program which is seemingly less competitive because of the size of the school, however it seems to produce great engineers and programmers (based on where they go to work after, and the awards the engineering school has won).
Hope this comment helped in any way!
- Looks like she isn’t engineering and wants to be at a big school, so I can’t comment on that academic track, but SCU is definitely a small school.
Great post, but I have a hard time conceiving of 5,000 undergrads as a “small” school!
Everything is relative, of course.
A question re SCU: I never even heard of the place until CC, but I’ve noticed that a lot of parents really praise its CS program(s) and hiring results in Silicon Valley. I’ve never heard anyone mention any other areas of study. How would it be for students in other areas of study?
@scu2usc very helpful! I’ll have her read your post as she’s deciding.
Consolation, you live on the east coast. How many other small/mid sized colleges and universities had you heard of in the west before your kids started looking for colleges? U San Diego, Whitman, Redlands? Harvey Mudd and the gang? I actually first heard of Harvey Mudd when a kid from there won Jeopardy! College tournament. Did you know if USF was public or private, Jesuit or another denomination? I never knew there were so many small colleges in the south, in upstate NY, in Ohio until my kids started looking at colleges and one is an athlete who was getting calls from them. I still have to look some of them up when she has a game and even then it’s a challenge. She was recently playing a team and the parents in the stands couldn’t decide if it was in Tenn or Georgia (Tenn was right). None of us, many from the south, had heard of the school before. Tusculum.
CC people may know the difference between Hamilton and Haverford and Hampshire, but go beyond the Mississippi and you’ll find a lot of people who not only don’t know, but don’t care. There are a lot of people in California who don’t know about Santa Clara either, but OP’s child applied, so much have seen something good in it. A val from my daughter’s school in California picked it over Stanford and Dartmouth (money was not an issue)
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= better than
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Academics: UCLA > UK = Santa Clara
Traditional College Experience:
UK = Santa Clara > UCLA
Cost (unless you travel to and from UK a lot): UK > UCLA > Santa Clara
I think if UCLA is her favorite, and she doesn’t mind living at home, it’s the best choice. It’s certainly the best academically.
If she decides she wants to go away to school, i’d give UK a slight advantage based mostly on cost – assuming she wouldn’t mind the changing seasons, difference in culture, or prefer the smaller classes and campus at Santa Clara… etc.
@prezbucky We’re going to start looking carefully at travel costs for UK. She’ll being coming home at all the regular breaks and maybe for some other family gatherings and we’d want to go see her, maybe attend a Bball game etc. Those costs could add up quickly.