Will she go to a name brand school?

Paying for College
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@wppdf2, Has anyone directed you to the Southern LAC thread for reference? This
was active last year and has a lot of great information in it including the merit aid offers at a long list of LACs for the students that applied, and a lot of trip reviews. Based on what you said your daughter would like, I think there are several there to consider that would likely meet your daughter’s desires and your price range.

Read the whole thread or skip to pages 23 - 28 for merit aid summaries: http://talk.qa.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/1671635-southern-lacs-p1.html

It has been repeated that many of these schools if relocated to the Northeast would immediately be full sticker price and impossible to get into. So you can possibly find your high value schools in the South or Midwest if you are willing to send her. Plus the weather is much warmer.

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Just to show how much difference a higher SAT can make in the example of UA

COA is about $39,000 (tuition/fees $26,000, housing &meal plan $13,000)

3.6 uw GPA
1250 - 1280 SAT CR&M $4,000 merit
1290 - 1320 SAT CR&M $12,975 merit
1330 -1390 SAT CR&M $17,300 merit
1400 and above full tuition

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http://uanews.ua.edu/2011/08/stem-path-to-mba-offers-top-students-shorter-degree-path/

UA has a STEM to MBA program

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@wppdf2 you don’t want to pay more than $30,000 a year. Fine. Ther are many colleges that will meet your price point. Not sure there is anything more to say!

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I’m just going to weigh in on the concept that our parents didn’t have to sacrifice and materially change their standards of living to put our generation/cohort through college which the OP claimed a few pages back.

You were clearly lucky in the parental sweepstakes. Paying for college was the single biggest financial commitment my parents made (many times more expensive than their house for example) even back in the 1970’s when you claim it was so easy to pay for a college education because it was so much cheaper.

Cheaper is relative. If you grew up affluent, and resent the fact that you need to sacrifice more- on a relative basis- than your family did to educate you (and siblings, if any) then I respect your POV- but please don’t generalize it to the rest of us.

As a fraction of my net worth, even being full pay for multiple children, paying for “elite U’s” was significantly less of a hardship for me than it was for my parents (and even more so for my in-laws who had MORE children, on a much more modest salary/standard of living). I look back at the sacrifices my parents and in-laws made and am truly humbled. I benefited from the run up in the stock market, the real estate market, etc. in the 1980’s and 1990’s, so despite having graduated into a recession and terrible job market initially, I had a few decades of astonishing economic growth (relative to what my parents experienced when they had young children).

So I’m happy you got lucky with affluent parents who didn’t feel the bite of college tuition. Mine did- and it was truly a gift that they made the sacrifices that they did.

You should spend exactly what you want to spend on your D’s education, but the notion that you get to decide who can and should get the “bells and whistles” education is kind of obnoxious. We are all intelligent, tax-paying people, who get to choose where to spend their dough.

I picked college. full freight, no merit, no aid.

A satisfied customer. I’m not looking for a hand-out, bail-out, or for anyone to feel sorry for me. And my kids are all out-earning where I was when I was their age (also tax payers who don’t need a hand-out or a bail-out) so even with my math challenged brain- the ROI has worked out quite well. (not that this is why we paid for college.)

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We did the same as was mentioned above. Our choice was to fund our kids’ college educations with our had earned incomes. one of our kids got a decent merit award which was 1/4 of th cost of attendance at a very expensive private school. The other got a very small merit award. We paid the difference.

And our income was less than half that of the OP’s.

We all make the choices that we feel ar right for our families.

So to the OP…fine. You have set a price limit for your college expenditures. That is your decision.

So…what is the point of this thread? Are you complaining that you kid can’t go to a $60,000 a year school on your $30,000 a year college budget? Because that is what this sounds like to me.

Here…read this thread. It is over a year old so you will have to check to see if the costs are really still >$25,000 a year. But if so…these fit your budget.

http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/financial-aid-scholarships/1651944-very-low-cost-oos-coa-universities-less-than-25k-coa-for-everything-p1.html

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My daughters received generous financial aid. Despite that, one year we paid $15,000 for their college costs (not counting loans) from an income “south” of $35,000. So, while $60,000 per year for college seems like a lot to me, so does an income of more than $250,000.

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There are many colleges your kid could go for 30K or less. No one is entitled to 60K school, just like no one is entitled to drive a BMW, at the same time a Honda could get you where you want to go as well as a BMW. Not sure why all the angst. I don’t need to read all 22 pages to guess what they are all about.

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I am out of popcorn.

330

@surfcity, you won College Confidential with post #1.

331

I am on my second glass of wine. I had a tough week, so I totally missed beginning of the party.

332

A lot of great guests at the party, even if the host was a bit boorish.

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Ha! $250k in nj will pay closer to $100k in fed and state income taxes…

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You can get an education for free, but you can’t get a degree with a fancy name on it or free…which is it you are after?

335

^^Sounds like you are describing having your cake and eating it too.

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<<<
Before you rush off to some OOS public dream school, make sure they aren’t the same thing coated in some southern sugar “I wish I could enroll you in that class honey, but it is full, and no I just don’t know when you can take that specialized lab class again” or “I wish I could provide you some more interesting lab work or more help with that assignment, but I just can’t … go talk to that non-english speaking TA”. NJ people are blunt when they aren’t giving you what you want or even what you need.
<<<

@PickOne1 You must have very little experience with southern helpfulness. They don’t say the “same thing” as “NJ blunt people” (your words). Southerners will go the extra mile to help you get what you need…particularly if it is sorely needed (in sequence, senior year, or whatever). Maybe those that think like you do need to absorb a little southern hospitality because that sort of cynicism is dead wrong.

You should spend some time over in the UA forum where people from elsewhere are happily surprised to see “the less red tape,” and how southerners “make things happen,” when there’s some little hiccup.

If you think that southerners “just say no” but do it with honey, you need to spend some time, up close and personal, in the South.

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Exactly@Mom2collegekids.

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Gee, I have family who are facuty at UA. They would agree with PickOne.

339

oh really? who are they? Are they from the NE? lol

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Yep, they are from the NE, moved south for a better position years ago, but pretty shocked by the culture. Certainly there are helpful people on campus, but the veneer of sugar is just that. The conventions of communication shift, but people are pretty much the same everywhere.