<p>There’s nothing wrong with going to a presentation and even applying to a few schools that are financial reaches. My son applied to four financial reaches, got accepted to all, got great merit at two and not so great at the other two. He also got offers from the flagship state school honors program, less merit aid but cheaper to begin with. Now he has 3 choices that are all substantially different, but will cost us <15K and since he knew going in $ were important he’s ok with having to decline the two that are just too pricey.</p>
<p>I’m on my way home now from my first college trip. So I guess $$ in the coming years won’t be as tight as it is now, so I have a little more flexibility. My parents found this program where I would go to college of dupage (CC) for two years and then have guaranteed admission to university of Illinois for my last two. Still crazy expensive even for in state for two years, but we still went down to champaign-urbana for a day. Then we drove out to university of Kansas and spent a day and a half there. I sat down with a professor in the civil engineering department there for about an hour and he told me about something called the SELF scholarship that is given to about 25 incoming freshmen that he thinks I would definitely qualify for. So with that scholarship and the scholarship I would get from my high school grades, costs would go down to around $10,000 a year, not bad at all.</p>
<p>Anyways, I didn’t really like the overall atmosphere of Illinois, it felt like a city. Everything there is built on top of eachother and there is way too many students, I didn’t like it very much. As for Kansas, I liked it A LOT. It felt like a little isolated town in the middle of nowhere, very hilly, and the tradition is unbelievable. There isn’t an over-abundance of students and its very comfortable. </p>
<p>I’m going to do more trips, I’m gonna start thinking about which others I should go to. Any recommendations?</p>
<p>Sent from my ADR6300 using CC</p>