Thank you. I see what I see in NJ. I read about high achieving students in CA getting shut out of the UCs and ending up in community colleges. There has to be a sizable population of students in the same boat.
The question becomes - what does the reputation buy ? You can go to UF full pay - it’s tied with UNC. It’$45k Purdue is a wonderful school - it’s a tad over $40k engineering, a tad under not.
There are examples - price and value all over. We don’t know anything about your student but if they had an interest in MIS, we might steer them to Arizona or Minnesota. Supply Chain - Michigan State, Arizona State, UTK. English - Iowa or Sewanee. All great ‘values’ - all highly respected in their fields. Or is Wisconsin at $58k a better value than a Michigan at $72k.
There’s a lot of inputs even to answer as you want it that you haven’t provided - and you’re a semester and maybe more too early.
It’s your kids that need to explore.
You should take them to some schools - maybe incorporate with travel/vacation - one or two here or there. Large, medium, small - urban, suburban, rural. Get a feel for what they like. It doesn’t matter where.
But even as you look at things like ‘rank’ - you have to look deeper at major rank etc. in there, you can graph this and find the optimal point.
The answer is out there but it’s not what you think. It’s what your students decide is best for them using the financial parameters you establish.
In the end, it’s their experience, not yours. You just get to pay - and borrowing against your home or 401k is lunacy. Why strangle yourself financially when it’s not necessary ? You’re already paying a ton on now want to add interest and fees?
3 Likes
And not that $42k per year is easy to swallow, but given 30 years ago when I was college the going rate for privates was $18-$20k, it seems… palatable? In line with what I would expect a college to cost? And they make strides to keep the tuition reasonable.
OP- I think your approach is incomplete.
I don’t give a hoot where Missouri S&T is in the rankings. Nor do I care if it’s “going up” or down. It has been a HIGHLY respected university for decades, and recruiters love its students. Has the guy at the dry cleaner in your town- or even your HS guidance counselor heard of it? Don’t know and don’t care. It provides a rigorous science, technology and engineering education and the people who matter- large corporate employers, graduate school admissions committees- know how well prepared its students are.
So chasing “reputation going up” if money is a concern is the wrong approach in my mind. U Maine in Paper Technology; Delaware in Museum Studies; Indiana in Folklore and Ethnomusicology- truly a hidden gem at a public U where the general public is concerned, but highly respected by academics; etc. Truman, Morris- are their reputations going up or down? Doesn’t matter.
There are a handful of colleges which lately seem to have their “popular” reputations starting to match their “employers and grad programs” reputation. Pitt is one. A fantastic university; it’s gained a lot of traction outside the region in the last few years. But that doesn’t mean it wasn’t fantastic 10 years ago even before Robotics and AI and Pittsburgh’s overall reputation as a center for excellence took off. Tulsa University is another (it’s private though, not public). It has one of the top Cyber programs in the country. But nobody “out there” had heard of it because most of its grads go directly to the CIA, NSA, other scary sounding agencies-- or to security roles in large corporations where obviously- nobody is shining the PR light on “here’s what our bank has accomplished preventing cyber criminals for stealing your identity”.
If you post what your kids are ACTUALLY interested in-- instead of gaming rankings- the posters here can help you.
9 Likes
As my kids narrow what they want to study, what kind of college they’re looking for, I will do a match me. But at the outset I’d like to have some merit schools to keep an eye and do further research on.
1 Like
I think the issue many long time CC’ers are trying to tell you is that a generic “here are some schools with merit” may not be helpful depending on what kind of school you are looking for, what majors, what location, etc.
There are lots of well-respected LACs that will stack need based and merit aid - but if your children don’t want a smaller school - it is a waste of everyone’s time and energy to list them here.
8 Likes
Based on the data I am aware of, the unhooked (in the traditional sense) admissions rate at Harvard was probably more like twice that in the last cycle, likely higher still at various other Ivy+. And of course a large portion of those not accepted did not meet Harvard’s normal academic and activities standards for unhooked applicants. I’d guess probably only about 10% of Harvard’s unhooked applicants met those standards, so I’d guesstimate the application success rate for such unhooked applicants was more like 20%.
Now, I don’t know what happens if you treat “not from an expensive private feeder school” as a hook. That’s pretty problematic, though, because expensive private feeder schools are going to correlate with a whole bunch of other things, including academic scores, activities scores, legacies, recruited athletes (for Ivy+), and so on. But if you can get those things anyway, I don’t know if there is much more value added out of private schools.
I guess the other question is what you mean by “cured cancer”. Back in the lawsuit era, around 43% of applicants got the necessary academic scores, about 34% got the necessary activities (including non-recruited athletics) score. And being in the top 34% of the applicant pool for activities/athletics did not require curing cancer.
These days applications are up, but the math is not quite what some people seem to think. The unhooked admission rate probably dropped in like half since then (meaning it was around 4% back then), but that doesn’t mean each factor must have dropped in half. Instead, if you guesstimate only like 30% of applicants still pass Harvard’s academic screen, then as many as like 24% could pass the activities/athletics screen–even more if some of the admit drop was attributable to the personal rating. And being in the top 24% of the Harvard activities/athletics screen likely still does not require curing cancer.
That said, again, one of the observable facts about top private high schools is they are really good at giving their kids opportunities to get into the top portion of such activities/athletics screens. But public school kids can do it too, it is just going to be longer odds if there are fewer varsity captains per capita and such.
They get shut out because they only apply to a few of the most highly rejective campuses. The highest achieving students in California actually have guaranteed admission to UC so can not be shut out. However, many turn their noses up at campuses they consider “beneath” them (despite the fact that all are excellent schools and all are ranked in the top 100). That is their choice. They are not actually being shut out of the system.
Some in this situation opt to attend community college because 1. In many counties, community college is tuition free so a huge savings and 2. We have the TAG program which is a transfer guarantee to select UC campuses so, for example, instead of attending UC Merced or Riverside for four years, they save two full years of tuition payments by going to CC, then TAG into UC Davis or wherever.
There is nothing wrong with that option. It’s a great thing our state offers and can be a good choice for some students.
But it is not accurate to say that the state’s high achieving students get shut out of the UCs. They do sometimes get shut out of UC Berkeley, UCLA, UC Irvine (the campuses with the lowest admissions rates)…But they absolutely can attend a UC campus if that is their goal. It just may not be their first choice campus. Or they can choose the CC route. There are many roads to the same destination.
10 Likes
I am familiar with NJ. In Northern NJ this is representative of where the best and the brightest are attending. It is the running 3 year matriculation data for Bergen Academies. Ivy and other elite schools remain the most popular destinations at 40+% with Rutgers serving as the economic “fall back”.
This is a free public HS that accepts top students from the surrounding economically diverse communities. The vast majority of these families are similar to what you self describe in that they are comfortably middle class but not affluent such that they are sending their kids to Lawrencville, Peddie, Delbarton, Hunn or Pingry to the south.
These kids are the best of the best academically from the surrounding area and their parents have either saved, are borrowing or eligible for FA to cobble together the means to attend these elite schools. Contrary to your prior point they do get accepted and they mostly aren’t “institutional priorities”, but just super accomplished candidates.
If you look at the surrounding non magnate public HS such at Paramus, Indian Hills, Wayne Hills/Valley, Ramapo, Ridgewood, etc the tippy top academic kids and a few athletes constitute the 5-20 kids that go super elite annually. In fact we do see some kids going south but it isn’t entirely in search of merit. For many it is weather, Greek enthusiasm, big sports or easier academics. Some of the kids are undeniably very smart while for others it is an extension of HS.
Not sure this “migration” lessens the elite schools brands as the best and brightest still appear to go elite and find a way to make it work. Obviously finances are a personal matter so the value attached to that cache or opportunity will vary by family.
4 Likes
I know what you mean, although it is not precisely true that they get shut out of the UCs; they get shut out of the UCs except UC Merced. But as more and more solid students end up at Merced, Merced will continue to rise. This has happened for some of the other UCs which used to be schools of last resort, but are now sought after.
3 Likes
Lots of private colleges that didn’t make the Chetty Ivy+ list also potentially qualify. You have to look close, but WUSTL, for example, does unusually well in the 95 to 99 range, again controlling for test scores. From other data, WUSTL also does unusually well in cross-admit battles with need-only Ivy+ colleges. This is very likely mostly because WUSTL is using its merit programs to pick off students in that range.
Now, in the zero-sum rankings world, there can be a bit of a limit to how far this could further take a WUSTL in the rankings. Still, back in 2020 (before test optional sort of killed this off), WUSTL was way higher in SAT rankings than its US News ranking would suggest:
WUSTL tied for 4th with Harvard and Chicago, and after only three tech schools (Cal Tech, MIT, and Harvey Mudd).
So–I am pretty sure WUSTL is in fact succeeding at picking off upper-middle-class high numbers kids with merit offers and the like.
Vanderbilt and Rice too, incidentally–both tied for 12th on that list with Stanford and Princeton. This is placing them above Penn, Dartmouth, Brown, and Cornell, also Amherst and Williams–all need-only schools.
2 Likes
And to turn it around–on almost every branch of what I think of as the college family tree, you are likely going to find some very good colleges offering merit to compete with the very good colleges that have some other advantage over them in cross-admit battles. Could be non-Ivy competing with Ivy. Could be non-coastal competing with coastal. Could be flagship of a smaller state competing with the flagship of a larger state nearby. Could just be a few spots down in the US News competing with a few spots up. And on and on.
Point is this is happening all over the college family tree. So, first you have to identify the branch you want to be on, and then you can figure out who on the branch is dangling such fruit.
4 Likes
I concur. This thread has turned into a hot mess with users taking the opportunity to continue the discussion from the closed thread counter to my previous “suggestion.”
5 Likes