@cjpski I know you are right and OP obviously wants to vent with likeminded posters but my pragmatic nature is such that I like to find workable solutions to problems and gripes available in the here and now. And then for longer term solutions, I like to vote for politicians whose platforms mirror my desires for change. 
@Quietlylurking In addition to monitoring Common Data Sets, put some boots on the ground and tour the Honors College specifically and speak with the students. Your kid will likely be in that subset and I really think it will be unlikely at the top of that tribe. I think you are greatly underestimating the talent and caliber of instruction. Remember, many kids going onto medical school and PHD programs are starting at state schools because of the cost of their long term education. I mean there are students getting Rhodes, Marshall and Fulbright scholarships.
I can relate to the sticker shock the OP is feeling. Four years ago when my daughter was applying, we didn’t know how we would be able to cover everything. We were under the impression the top kids would be eligible for more merit money, but at selective schools, everyone is a top kid. She ended up at Vandy where they have/had? a very generous financial aid office and a no loan policy. With our income around $100k, they have more than covered the tuition every year. Our son is now a sophomore at Alabama where the automatic scholarship for ACT score covers his tuition for four years. I don’t think guidance counselors do enough to prepare kids and parents for the financial realities of college. My best advice has come from this forum.
Some people on CC don’t like to be told that their emperor has no clothes.
I totally disagree with Blossom’s tone, but he/she is right about the quality of schools. These NE privates are not worth their full tuition,and there are plenty of schools outside the NE that will offer a better, more rigorous education. You will need to find some that will make your kids happy.
@blossom -
Did it ever occur to you that a two income family that put itself in the position to be paying the AMT and amassing enough in savings to be able to pay full cash for private college got there by making smart decisions with their money? Just because you decided to be full pay with your kids does not mean you have to denigrate others who find the high tuition demanded by private schools a poor investment.
I think the OP and others have some funny views on what top campuses were like30 years ago in regards to facilities and ability for folks to pay. They were not affordable for many bright students. There were few minority students. People had student loans up to the max at the time -in the mid 80’s I had $10,000 in loans. I’ll have to look up what that is in today’s dollars. I thought our dorms were great. The food was better than what I currently see at some currently lessor ranked colleges. It was plentiful and fine. We had good speakers and a famous band for the spring fling weekend.
My plane ticket to go home to Tennessee was about $300 dollars which isn’t much different than today’s fare without adjusting for inflation.
I agree with the poster who writes that there are more administrators partly because the government expects more reporting. That is a good thing to me. Makes it harder to sweep things under the rug.
I don’t think that we should denigrate people who are or are not paying full price.it is a free choice market.
I got a chuckle from the Georgetown CEW survey which surprisingly proclaimed that Georgetown had the largest positive delta between actual earnings and projected earnings. The researches must have spent quite a bit of time tweaking their multiple regression to get that result.
The Economist and Georgetown surveys are interesting, but they don’t try to replicate Dale and Krueger’s methodology.
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“This whole thing is sad.”
First thing I’ve agreed with the OP on.
Just not for the same reasons.
I do think it’s sad that people who can afford the absolute very best whine about their options.
That’s a good catch about the CEW rankings. Since I view the methodology of Krueger’s second study as deeply flawed, I don’t know why anyone else would try to replicate it.
@roethlisburger - How do you find the Dale and Krueger study to be flawed?
@Quietlylurking
What’s the matter with Bucknell, Lafayette, Fordham, Richmond, Oberlin, Hobart, St Lawrence, Dickinson, Muhlenberg. All excellent LACs offering merit and most in the NE. They are peers to many of the schools you have interest in.
^Indeed, go in to OH (perhaps out of the OP’s comfort zone but not on the other side of the country, I promise), and you find all sorts of fine LACs who give out merit money. Denison, OWU, Wooster, Kenyon—you can probably go on and on.
Here’s another tip. If your child becomes an RA, usually room and board are taken care of, which would amount to a considerable savings for sophomore- senior year, assuming your kid gets that job. Of course you would be committing to a school before you know if that is viable, so it takes a leap of faith.
“Let’s continue with the UMass assumption. Regarding, STUDENT body, I think you’re in for a real eye opener. Let’s say that your kid does make it into the UMass Honors program. Your kid is probably going to be surrounded by students that are smarter than her. She’ll be challenged and reaching to maintain a high GPA. These flagship schools DO have tippy top kids.”
Yes. UMass Amherst and UVM are very strong schools where students can get a great education. The honors programs have gorgeous dorms which are full of smart students. Premed at either is very challenging. Engineering is excellent and very good students are graduating from both and getting hired. I have a very good doctor who I see once per year, head of his department at a very well respected and famous medical facility, and a UMass Worcester graduate (this is where the UMass medical school is). There are other very good public universities in New England, and elsewhere in the US.
For UMC parents, at this point I think that there are three choices: (i) Pay through the nose; (ii) Accept an excellent education at a public school; or (iii) Play a relatively complex game, that might involve PSAT preparation to get to be an NMS finalist or might involve searching for the lesser known universities that have merit aid or might involve going north of the border (more appropriate in New England since NE is already pretty far north) or might involve something else that I might not fully understand. We went with “excellent education either at a New England public university or north of the border” (two kids, two choices), but others can make other choices.
UMCs do have the advantage that $25,000 per year for four years per child is affordable (if not either you didn’t plan or you aren’t really UMC). Not everyone has this advantage. Of course, most of us worked very hard for a very long time to get this advantage.
I hope that the universities are feeling the heat of the pushback against their sticker prices. I hope that eventually the “pay through the nose” option will become less popular. As long as the consumers (us parents) are willing to pay through the nose, the game is not going to change much. I have quite a bit of sympathy for most of the posts on this thread, including some apparently contradictory ones, I do feel that the system is in trouble, but at some level the consumers have made it this way by buying the hype that our kids have to go to a “big name” school, and to some extent losing our focus on just plain good academics in a safe environment.
Yep, and besides honors colleges and various other special programs, at some schools (publics, mostly, it seems), studying abroad may be cheaper than OOS/full tuition. For example, at GTech, you pay in-state tuition when you study abroad. At UIUC, many study-abroad programs are also cheaper than the OOS rate. And many publics are pretty generous with AP credit.
So if you know what you want to major in and stick with a major, for most majors, even OOS, 3 years at UIUC (one of them abroad) could come in at less than $140K total.
Now, if you are looking for social standing or social cachet through attending a college (and it has to be one of a relatively small circle of colleges where merit money is non-existent or almost impossible to get), this may not work, but if your goal is your stated goal of getting a good education, if you have a high-achieving kid and can afford to spend $140K, you have lots of options.
BTW, regarding the “it isn’t about prestige” comment that someone made, if it isn’t about prestige (or at least social standing), then why are Skidmore/ConnColl/Lehigh/Holy Cross put on a pedestal while Ursinus and a bunch of LACs where merit money is much more likely aren’t? The 75-25 ACT scores aren’t that different. Am I missing something?
I’m going to disagree—strongly!—with the claim, made a few times on this thread, that an UMC high-stats uniquely-shaped-quiescently-frozen-liquid student can only properly [something never really specified, but maybe achieve, be happy, enjoy life, whatever] when surrounded by the sort of students who go to Colgate or Wellesley or Dartmouth or wherever.
A high-achieving student will do quite well no matter where they go to college. They will do this whether the students surrounding them were high-stats in high school or not.
In fact, they may find that going to a “second-tier” college (or even “third-tier” college, or gasp a community college) does two things: Gets them to realize there’s a wider range of people out there than they knew about before, and discover that there are incredibly brilliant people available pretty much anywhere, even at (and I know this will surprise some of you) CUNY and UMass-Lowell.
Seriously, where did people get this idea that only dumb kids go to schools like that? I would really like to know, because it really boggles my mind, it does.
(And once you’ve explained that, maybe you can explain how it is that your kid’s intellect will wither on the vine from simply being near someone who doesn’t have a massively high IQ, because I’ve done some work in cognitive science, and I know a bunch of researchers who would like to see the evidence for that—it would be truly groundbreaking work.)
OP, you literally have all the options. The only limitations that exist are self-imposed. Inflexibility of mind is the ruin of many, so if I were in your shoes I’d break that habit.
James Simons, quant pioneer and billionaire hedge dude, went to MIT and Berkeley, and taught at Stony Brook. So where did he decide to send his sweet sweet $150 million? Stony Brook. But hey, maybe your kids are smarter than this guy, eh?
@PurpleTitan re #415. Not everybody sees schools as interchangeable, such that two schools with the same 75-25 statistics (or whatever other measure you want to use) hold the same value for everyone. Maybe you do, and if you do, that probably explains why you seem less conflicted about the college admissions process than does OP.
Another family might use other metrics, and that’s okay too. For example, another family might value one school or set of schools over another due to geographic location. Or setting - rural, urban, whatever. Or the strength of a particular major or department. Or the achievement of the faculty. Or maybe one school draws interesting speakers to campus and another doesn’t. Or maybe the student body at one school tends to be more conservative or more liberal or more religious or more whatever than another, and you know your child has a strong preference in that regard. Or maybe it’s about the relationship that one school has with a certain employer or a certain industry you know your child is interested in. Or maybe it’s about the opportunity to participate in some certain extracurricular that a given school offers and others do not. Or maybe it’s about the male-female ratio. Or maybe it’s about the presence or absence of fraternities.Or maybe it’s about the core curriculum one school requires versus the core curriculum another school requires. Or maybe it’s about the availability of a certain major. Or maybe it’s about the ease of double or triple majoring or minoring at one school versus another. Or maybe the family’s student needs special services for a learning disability, and one group of colleges provides the services while other colleges don’t. Or maybe it’s any one of (or combination of) thousands of tangible or intangible factors other than prestige that could lead a family to value one school or set of schools over another.
Or maybe it is all about “prestige” and “the college experience.” And if it is, so what?
The point is, all of us value different things about a college. Who is any one of us to say it’s okay to value this factor but not that factor?
I come back to this: I don’t know OP or what she values about schools, so I am not going to make any assumptions in that regard. But, it is clear OP wants the education she thinks is best for her child, has come to the realization that she can’t provide it for whatever reason, and is obviously upset about that. I think the kind and decent thing to do is to be sympathetic as she grieves the inability to provide her child with what she thinks is best for that child, and to hope she can come to terms with whatever she decides to do about the situation in which she now finds herself. 99% of the time, these things work out, and maybe she will realize that down the road.
I think it’s rather indecent to make assumptions about what criteria she uses in valuing a certain set of schools, pass judgment on whatever we might think her criteria are, to act like we know better than she does, or to refer to her (or others) in insulting terms as some posters have done.
@wustl93: “But, it is clear OP wants the education she thinks is best for her child.”
Education or social experience? Only some of the things you listed have to do with an education or life/career advancement and as @blossom noted, if you are talking purely about education, in many areas, the schools the OP disdains are actually stronger than some of the schools the OP puts on a pedestal.
Mind you, wanting a certain social experience/cachet is fine, but when you complain that the education you desire for your kid is now too out of reach and/or expensive and then list a bunch of schools where, in the case of many of them, neither I nor many others can discern what is more special academically about them than some other schools that likely would be more affordable, that’s just not going to garner much sympathy when there are many high-achieving kids in this country who have trouble affording any college or may have to put on massive debt just to afford some school that the OP disdains.
That comes off like complaining that that a certain bakery is too expensive and crowded these days (and it was so much cheaper and easier to order from back in the day) when there are millions in your country going hungry each night and suffering from malnutrition.