What's the right college for me?

College Search & Selection
1

I have just started to research colleges and I have found a few that I like, but I would really like some more suggestions/opinions.

One college that I was looking at was UCLA, and it seemed really perfect until I realized that there was no education program for undergraduates. I haven’t decided what I want to major in or do after college, but I’m considering education so I definitely want to go to a school where that’s at least a possibility.

My grades are okay, I think that my gpa is a 3.6 or a 3.7 unweighted, and a 4.2 weighted.
I got a 30 and the ACT, and I am waiting to get my scores back on the SAT (my PSAT score was a 1320).

I would prefer to go to a big college that’s in a large city or suburb. I’ve talked to my parents about the price of college and they basically told me that I can go wherever I want (but obviously cheaper is better), so I’m not limiting my options based on price. I want to look at some schools in the south, but I’m from the midwest so I also maybe want to look at schools near here too.

Are there any colleges that seem like good matches for me?

2

Home state? I would also pin down your parents with an actual amount.$$$ they would be willing to pay. Big difference in paying $20K/year vs $65K/year.
If you are leaning towards Education, then A teaching career is in the future. Elementary/Middle School/HS or College?

3

I told my parents that college could cost up to $65k/year and they basically said that we’d need financial aid but they’d let me go to a college that’s that expensive.

Elementary or maybe middle

4

Here are a few less well known southern schools, but very nice options. They are more in the match/safety range for you, not reaches. CA mandates a low % of OOS students, and the UCs, including UCLA, are incredibly competitive for OOS students.

James Madison University (JMU): Students love the school; great school spirit; in Harrisonburg, VA, a nice town in the Shenandoah Valley; very well regarded in the DC area and attracts very strong students from the DC/Nova area; about 18k undergraduates, four seasons.

Elon University: an upcoming national university with a beautiful campus; in a nice town (Burlington) with things to do adjacent to campus; undergrads also love it there; 6k undergrads; very nice weather (bit of winter, but nice most of school year). It’s becoming much more popular in DC area and up to New England.

UNC Wilmington: in a great port city; near the beach; spectacular weather; contemporary campus, near the beach, 14.5k undergrads, near the beach.

College of Charleston: in a spectacular city; spectacular weather; breaks education majors up by elementary, middle school, and secondary; 9500 undergrads.

Good luck!

5

Your parents are willing to pay over a quarter of a million dollars for an education degree?
The UC’s are public colleges and are obligated to instate residents.
This means not one dime from UCLA. Y
our parents would be on the hook for $260K.

6

UW-Madison is outstanding in Education. It’s in a medium-sized city. The campus has some city feel but there are also grass/trees and two nearby lakes, one of which essentially forms the northern border of campus. It is strong in a large number of programs, so you’d be fine if you changed your mind. It is not your cheapest option but if you want a big school in the midwest or south that offers a highly regarded Education program (and which is highly regarded overall), UW is definitely worth a look.

If you wanted to get away to a lager city, Milwaukee is maybe 70 minutes away and Chicago is about two hours away.

If you are an out-of-state applicant, UW would probably be a high match or low reach for you. But you may find, by delving deeper, that it is worthy of an application.

7

I previously recommended southern schools.

In the Midwest, Creighton University is a terrific choice. It has a nice campus about a 10-15 minute walk from downtown Omaha, which is a pretty dynamic city with a very busy downtown restaurant, bar area (Old Market).

8

For public school teachers, credentialling requirements vary by state. I’m in CA and here you can get a 4 year bachelor’s from anywhere and then do a 1 year specific program for either the elementary or subject credential at a different school. But if you are thinking about teaching, think about where you want to live and start looking into requirements for that state. You might be looking at a 5 year program where you do the first 4 years wherever and then the 5th in the state you want to work in, or some states it’s just a 4 year program.

9

Thanks for all of the recommendations! I think that I’d like to go to a college that is more well known. Are there any colleges that are more known and also fit with the rest of my preferences and are matches for my grades?

10

If you like UCLA, then how about University of Miami ?

  • Sunny, urban location near the beach. Like UCLA in these respects, but in the South.
  • Well known due to football. Ranked in USNews Top 50 for National Universities, ahead of UIUC and most other Big Ten schools. Again, like UCLA.
  • Has Elementary/Exceptional Student Education major. Graduates are eligible for Florida teacher licensure, in both elementary education and gifted education. Better than UCLA. http://sites.education.miami.edu/elementary-education/
  • Private, so they won't discriminate against out-of-staters in admissions. In fact, they might even give an admissions boost to an Illinois resident, for adding geographic diversity. Much better for out-of-staters than UCLA.
  • For Fall 2017, enrolled freshmen had ACT range of 28-32, according to Common Data Set. UCLA was 31-34 for enrolled out-of-state freshmen, so UMiami is a better match for your score.
  • Private, so they charge they same tuition to everyone, regardless of state residency. They will offer financial aid to out-of-staters if they qualify. UCLA doesn't do either of those things.

As noted above, teacher licensure is state-specific, so you might have to meet additional requirements if you wanted to use a UMiami degree in a a state other than Florida. But this would be a potential issue at any other school as well.

11

Thanks! University of Miami definitely sounds like a good option and I’ll look into it for sure. I also thought about it more and I don’t only want to look at southern and midwestern schools, so if you know of any matches for me in other regions that would be really helpful too!

12

You want (1) well-known schools, that are (2) in big cities, and that (3) offer undergraduate degrees in education.

There are two problems with these requirements. First, well-known schools in big cities tend to be quite popular and therefore quite selective. Your current stats are good, but maybe not good enough for the most selective schools. Second, many well-known schools don’t offer undergraduate degrees in education (just as many well-known schools don’t offer undergraduate degrees in business). They prefer to offer professionally-oriented programs, like business or teacher training, at the graduate level.

If you are in Illinois, them you’ve probably already realized that one or both of these points apply to the best-known schools in Chicago (U of Chicago, Northwestern). But they also apply to the best-known schools in other big cities, like New York (Columbia, NYU), Boston (Harvard, MIT), Baltimore/DC (Johns Hopkins, Georgetown), Los Angeles (UCLA, USC), or the Bay Area (Stanford, Berkeley).

So your options may be limited, unless you are prepared to compromise on the requirements above.

13

Those southern schools that I previously recommended are really good schools, if less well known outside the Mid-Atlantic/South. JMU has a great reputation in the DC area, and is considered very competitive for Northern Virginia students. Elon is one of the few schools that has really been able to remake itself over the last few decades. It was a small, regional LAC and now is an emerging national university. They are also the schools that I think offer a pretty high quality of student life. I also intentionally wanted to give you some names that might not be familiar.

A few that would be great fits for you are super-competitive and usually require extremely high stats–Duke, UNC, Vanderbilt, Emory, UT-Austin, Rice, and Tulane (which is very hot now). UT and the University of Florida only accept a very, very limited number of OOS students–the states are committed to providing education to in-state students–so are very competitive OOS. The rest are just very tough.

So some others:

–Miami was a good suggestion. It’s competitive, but you’re a reasonable candidate.

–University of Georgia: great school, obviously big-time sports, etc. Athens is a great college town, and decent size.

–University of South Carolina and Clemson University: I know Clemson less, but USC has a beautiful campus. It seems like a nice place to go to school.

–Florida State University: again very similar to the above; large, quality state university.

–Rhodes College: tip-top liberal arts college and really a stunning campus in Memphis. I was thinking they did not have education but they do:

https://www.rhodes.edu/education

–University of Richmond: Excellent school, also a stunning campus (try a google image search). It’s in a very nice suburban area just a couple of miles from downtown Richmond (RVA). Richmond has been transformed in recent years and has become very popular with college students and young professionals. Nice park system along James River, etc.

Rhodes and Richmond would probably be reaches, but reasonable. Georgia also now gets dramatically more apps than just a few years ago.

Some of these schools are very different, i.e. Georgia v. Rhodes. Some might be better fits than others. But all, in general, are very nice places to go to school.

I do encourage to take a look at those in my first post, at least for safeties and matches. They all offer a quality education and a very nice quality of life.

Good luck!

14

Some well-known, big city schools that do appear to meet your requirements and stats:

  • Miami, as noted in post #9
  • Arizona State, which is in the huge Phoenix metro area. Plug your stats into their merit aid calculator to see if you qualify: https://scholarships.asu.edu/estimator
  • Tulane, which is in New Orleans. Might be a reach with your current ACT score. Only offers Early Childhood Education (pre-K to Grade 3).
  • Boston University. Less well-known than Harvard or MIT, but no shame in that. Great hockey.
  • U of Minnesota, which is in Minneapolis/St Paul
  • Southern Methodist University, which is in Dallas. Not particularly religious, despite the name.
15

So it sounds like you don’t like the suggestions that were posted.

Reread @Corbet’s post #11.
Re the West Coast:
Washington and Oregon have great schools, but I don’t know if your parents could fund their fees either.
Arizona is warm.

It’s obvious you want to be in California, but you can’t afford the California schools because it makes no sense when you look at your return on investment for teaching. Salaries in California don’t work well when you consider that your full salary will go on housing only. Plus, your 3.7 GPA isn’t considered “strong” when compared to instate residents.

The only other region not mentioned is the Northeast.

The posters above have made great suggestions. What’s wrong with those schools?

16

I just want to go to a good college that I will enjoy being at, so I’m sorry for being really picky about it. I have been doing some more research on some colleges and trying to make a list of colleges to apply to to narrow down, taking into consideration that and the suggested colleges. Do you have any advice based on what I’ve already mentioned? I didn’t spend too much time looking so I don’t know if some of these might be impossible for me to get into.

University of Miami
James Madison University
UW Madison
Vanderbilt
Tulane
University of Georgia
Boston University
Purdue
University of Pennsylvania
New York University
University of Illinois
Brown University

17

Check out some of the Catholic universities-
Loyola Marymount (I did a quick look and I don’t think they have an undergrad ed degree but they have the 5th year CA credential),
U of San Diego
U of Portland
Seattle University

18

“I just want to go to a good college that I will enjoy being at, so I’m sorry for being really picky about it.”

No need to apologize. That’s a reasonable desire.

On your list current list, I’ll just say that Vanderbilt, Penn, and Brown are just insanely competitive now. It’s no reflection on you. I like this example: we visited a tip-top LAC. They said 70% of applicants were fully qualified, and admissions was confident that they would be successful at the school, academically and otherwise. It accepted 14%. So 4 in 5 applicants that the school thought fully qualified were denied admission.

Here are the stats for this year’s class at Vanderbilt. The middle 50% ACT range was 33-35, so 75% of accepted students had a 33 ACT or higher. The other 25% probably included some at 33, and the rest probably included lots of “hooked” applicants (recruited athletes, etc.). Penn and Brown are similar. I’m not saying don’t apply, just that realistically these are very tough for everyone. It’s the same reason that “Hamilton” tickets cost so much on Broadway. Everyone wants to go!

https://admissions.vanderbilt.edu/vandybloggers/2018/03/class-of-2022-regular-decision-summary-statistics/

http://www.thedp.com/article/2018/03/class-of-2022-admissions-regular-decisions-university-of-pennsylvania-upenn-penn-philadelphia-acceptance-rate

https://news.brown.edu/articles/2018/03/admission

NYU and Tulane are very popular right now and are more competitive than a few years ago. That true of BU as well. You can research to see how you stack up at those places.

The others seem very reasonable, not safeties, but very reasonable. The SMU suggestion, in particular, is a very good one.

https://www.smu.edu

Also,

https://www.sandiego.edu/academics/colleges-and-schools/

19

I would avoid ASU if you want to be a teacher. They have a good program but you would need to leave the state to earn a decent living. Starting teacher salaries are around $35K - you will have a very hard time paying back your student loans with that. We are one of the worst in the country and teachers are on the verge of walking out.

20

TTG, thank you so much, I really appreciate your response! I didn’t realize that some of those schools were so competitive. Would you say that I’m “qualified” for Vanderbilt, Penn, and/or Brown, or should I just take them off of my list completely?