Will she go to a name brand school?

Paying for College
61

Sounds like OP wants to dialog about options not on the table (get it out of his system?), but if DD is a HS senior, should be having dialog about the options that are available. Not sharing stats other than GPA and desired major, and even that not indicating what direction career wise are potentials, what size school, staying in region, etc.

I agree about not paying more than his budget allocated for degree - if she has good ACT/SAT, can write a good essay, there are plenty of options.

I am first generation American and 3 siblings and I graduated from college, one in MIS, one is PE - civil eng, and two of us with advanced degrees. Parents figured out how to be successful in the US (legal immigrants) and cash-flowed our college costs. H is from second generation of some having college, but it was a bigger financial sacrifice for the siblings’ and H’s college education. I am glad we only had two children to educate, thanks to H for saying we were done having children at our age - we would have had to spread our resources over 3 instead of 2, and the 2 did benefit from extras.

Was OP and W too busy earning a living and keeping up with living in a high cost (and stressful) living area that there wasn’t enough planning/seeking out info on colleges? Are they (parents and DD) being directed into thinking about schools like some of peer families/students/HS advising? Is there unhappiness in options?

Essentially we are all looking for what fits our student with higher ed, as we utilize those educational resources with our personal resources.

Students in the US have so many opportunities for education that internationals are wanting. Should maybe try to move up on the happiness scale and be more positive about the opportunities ahead for DDs. Hard to tell from the posts about the student and the parents equally being dissatisfied with schools that are not available, be it by selectivity or cost.

62

Sorry OP, but I’m not entirely following your reasoning.

“I am so frustrated that she will not go to a name brand school . . .” There are name brand schools beyond HYPMS. There are publics that are “name brand” schools, like TCNJ and Rutgers. And there are several dozen LACs that, while they are not household names, provide incredible educations. The affordable LAC I mentioned above, with a midrange ACT of 26-30, has produced 26 Rhodes Scholars!

The second paragraph of your post #56 is filled with inaccurate assumptions. If you want to tell your child that she is limited to in-state publics, that is certainly your prerogative as a parent. But to suggest that none of the private schools that would offer her merit $$ are worthy of her interest is either incredibly elitist or incredibly shortsighted on your part.

63

Student loans more than the federal direct loans (at most $31,000 total for undergraduate, starting at $5,500 frosh year) require a co-signer, so the student is not making the $100,000 loan decision alone.

In any case, if college is the first time in the kid’s life that s/he will be facing financial limitations on what s/he wants to buy, it is not surprising that s/he may not be able to make the best decision here.

64

ccdd— what’s wrong with cornfields? Also guess you just write off the vast businesses including BIG pharma and Big
finance in the area as well. Seriously, explain why no property tax? whens enough enough? 34 billion?

65

Especially for a future CEO but for any 18 year old, this is a good teachable moment. If she understands and makes her decisions now based on good financial and yes, other criteria, from where to apply to where to attend to whether to spend another few weekends in SAT prep class to qualify for more merit money, she can apply this ROI reasoning to lots of things.

Want a new car? Wait, if I do an ROI, and I can drive dad’s cast off Civic for free for another few years, and then buy a used Civic, all in cash, I can use that money to buy something else.

If I don’t rack up $20K on my credit cards, maybe I can buy a house sooner or have some more money to spend.

If I go backpacking in Europe instead of on my school sponsored 5K trip, I can see 10 countries on my Eurail pass, stay all summer, and still have $3K for my next trip.

If my husband and I buy this McMansion and one of us is laid off, what are we going to do? And don’t we have to save for retirement?

Really a lot of this is what to say at the cafeteria table in HS. If she actually got up the courage to discuss money at the table, suddenly she would have a lot of company with lots of parents already announcing there is no way they will pay $60-70K and trust me by graduation, there will be a lot more. Right now it’s all about Duke or whatever, but few will get in and even fewer will actually go (our HS in wealthy area had about 50% of top students going to their top school, no more, rest mostly at guess where - state flagship or OOS merit opportunity ranked in top 100 rather than top 50 first choice - that they got in!).

If it’s you who want to brag about where your daughter is going, think of it as driving up in your new Lexus, it’s nice but do you want to keep making those payments 


And D won’t see HS friends much and your friends won’t remember which of the Wesley
 schools your daughter is for more than a few minutes, let alone years.

Get As at Rutgers and then go to a prestigious grad school or go to med school or MBA and then you can keep calling your D Dr.D for a long long time.

66

wppdf2- i agree but then why do list like forbes and usnw continue to rank these over priced schools as the top choices and with the best ROI?

67

<<<
er SAT scores are between 1900 and 1950 (from my memory) - she did particularly well on writing so her reading/math are only in the low to mid 600s


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Well, the writing score is largely ignored by colleges particularly for merit.

Frankly, I was expecting MUCH higher stats from your posts. I was expecting 700+ sections from how you described her.

Low to mid 600s on the M+CR translates to about 1300 or below. That’s fine
somewhere around an ACT 28-29
 but not likely at the range to get into schools right below ivies. Those stats are what you find at mid-tiers
without a lot of merit. Even at my kids’ mid-tier, a 1300 M+CR only gets half-tuition, and if the total is below that, the award is MUCH smaller.


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She tells me she could have done much better with more time.

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uh
she and every other kid in the world. Stop making excuses for her good-but-ok stats.


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As a parent I am so frustrated that she will not go to a name brand school because of the cost. I know she will get $$ for academic merit but not at schools that she is interested in .

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she may not go to a brand name school because of her test scores
they’re not the scores that brand names are looking for. Brand name schools often have middle quartile scores that are above your DD’s scores.

Even in regards to “automatic merit”
I think she needs to retest so that she might get merit at some schools that might interest her.

Is your DD retesting? I hope so.

68

pick one Tcnj has a 43% acceptance rate. It also has honors program and very very prestigous bio dept. Plus it is known to be a top undergraduate program with much more personal attention and small class size. Thats why it has such a high ranking.

69

@PickOne1 makes a good point that by the end of senior year, your D will probably have lots of classmates who get into schools they can’t afford or they decide with their parents is not worth going into debt for. We knew families whose kids got into schools that I would definitely call “name brand” like Rice, Carnegie Mellon, Georgia Tech to name a few. But their EFC was just more than the family felt comfortable paying or borrowing. Or they got into UC’s from OOS and belatedly realized it was unaffordable. Those kids went to the honors college at the local state university. That’s a perfectly rational choice. I also agree with @mom2coIIegekids that your D’s scores are okay but not competitive for what I think you mean by “name brand” schools.

70

um with those test scores i would count on merit aid from TCNJ. Sorry.

71

oops i mean i wouldn’t count on merit aid from tcnj

72

TCNJ is a highly ranked regional north university, the “regional” which the TCNJ supporters seem to forget. It is a 4 year school with no graduate offerings. It is nice and small which can be appealing and probably has both smart kids and good programs 
 but it is not better than Rutgers 
 sorry, I was hoping to believe you, but it is not.

Regional North top 10 - Villanova, Providence, Bentley, Loyola-Md, Fairfield, Rochester Institite of Tech


Are these “name schools”?

Virginia Tech and UPitt would be two other good schools to consider, BTW.

Biology is a lab science and most real interesting jobs need significant graduate school.

Rutgers is ranked #72 nationally and is part of the AAU research university organization. Its graduate biology program is ranked #68 nationally which is very high. Cook college alone has 8 specialty bio programs some of which could be really interesting to many people.

A few lower performing freshman in your Bio1 class does not mean that the program is tainted or diminished either.

Regardless, for OP - it’s time to get in your car and check these schools including Rutgers, TCNJ, and nearby OOS options out . Kids are funny, what they think of a school and what they think after a visit could be very different. Rutgers might even have an Ag Day or an open house you can attend. If you drop an email prior to visiting to either admissions or the department, you may get a tour of facilities and more info on the program.

73

@stones3 - my post wasn’t theoretical. I was a poor kid in a rich kid school. It sucked. Did it provide me with opportunities? Sure. But there were lots of ways doors would’ve opened to me. If I’d have attended one of the schools where merit money and grants would’ve allowed me to go debt free, plenty of different doors would’ve opened for me I could’ve gotten my teeth fixed sooner. I could’ve afforded the classes I really wanted to take. And I could’ve gotten an internship rather than hustling jobs that gave me higher pay mostly off the books. I wasn’t going into Wall Street. If I had it to do over, I’d have gone the less prestigious route.

74

sorry but the fact really do speak for themselves. TCNJ does IN FACT have the considerable higher acceptance standard. I agree its not a research university but we are discussing undergradutate here and they are simply the best
at that, and that is what they concentrate on. Also ranked by Barrons as top 75 most competitive schools in the NATION that’s national.

Having said that, both schools offer similar degrees and its up to the student to get the most out of a program.
Also Nova at half the price sound damn good to me. Money mag also list TCNJ as top 75 schools ROI in the NATION.

And if the future CEO wants to maybe focus on business the TCNJ business school undergraduate is ranked 63 in the nation compared to R which is 118 and lower for newark campus by bloomberg. Also has the #20 accounting program in the entire nation.

But your right , football is fun.

75

Yeah, those test scores are going to be a problem. Much bigger problem for you than top tier schools not offering merit. Unless your D’s a division 1 athlete, even her chances of being admitted to top schools are slim. At this point, she has to get those scores up or she’s unlikely to get any offers outside of NJ state schools for <$30k. And that includes schools like Seton Hall.

76

halfempty i speak from experience as well. Certainly there were times that my child felt uncomfortabel , but there were many many more times when his friends fully understood his situation and didn’t think twice of including him and yes sometimes paying his way. And he is sincerely appreciative. I won’t go into detail but suffice to say he got to do things and meet people he would never have been exposed to at home. We are very appreciative of that .

77

Oh boy. Your D should be sitting with a minimum 2200 to even be worried about this “problem”. As it is, she could not compete for most name brand anyway at 1950-2000.

78

There are so many comments to reply to.

She isn’t going to NJIT. Call me anything you want but this is a bad area. Plus my daughter prefers corn fields to pavement.

Yes, her test scores aren’t stellar but are still good. So part of my problem is that she is a shining star with very good grades but not exceptional test scores.

I don’t necessarily mean to bash Rutgers (well maybe I do). If you get through Rutgers, you are very smart and will likely do well. My complaint is that Rutgers is the most impersonal institution of higher learning that there is - it is the very opposite of a small high end liberal arts school that you would find in New England.

Seton Hall will give her money. My oldest had slightly less test scores and none of the extra-curriculars and got $14k (or something like that - it was a while ago). She won’t go there either
 just 5 or 6 blocks down S. Orange Avenue is the worst section I have ever seen (along Sanford Avenue).

Sorry, I don’t mean to deceive. Maybe I am only dividing colleges into 3 or 4 categories. What I mean by the tier less than Ivy Leagues are schools like Boston College, Villa Nova, RIT, Stevens, Lafayette, Lehigh, Purdue, Illinois and some others like that. I’ll freely admit that her test scores won’t even guarantee her acceptance to those schools - although for some reason her test scores don’t match her academic performance. My oldest got into most of the colleges with little to no aid granted.

79

OK OP, time to up your parenting game.

First, your D needs to get her scores up if she is going to look for merit money. Did she try the ACT? Has she taken the SAT more than once? Have her run a calculator for places like Tulane or Chapman or Alabama so she can see how much it would pay off if she got her test scores up.

Next, you as the parent have to change what’s meant in your family by a “name brand” school. Those of us who’ve hung around CC for a long time become very familiar with many different schools. We become really enthused about places most folks have never heard of, places which can offer significant merit money to a student like your D, places that will offer her a jumping-off point for her aspirations. Your job now is to find places that you can all enthuse over because they’ll be a good fit for your kid and for your budget.

Wisdom here on CC is that you build your list from the ground up, meaning that you first find safeties–schools with an excellent chance of being admitted that will be affordable. Both my kids first toured schools where we were confident they’d be accepted, and where we knew they’d be getting merit money. That would’ve taken away the sting if they’d not been accepted to their top choices. What does she have on her list for matches and safeties? What is she looking for in a school? Does she have safeties that she loves? If she’s not a fan of Rutgers, what would she like? Do smaller schools appeal? Take a look at the Colleges That Change Lives, for starters. Bigger schools? There are out of state publics that could be affordable in Kansas and Arizona and Minnesota as a few examples.

Good on you for guiding your children about financial decisions. Now help guide them on finding value and fit, not just a name brand.

80

ACTs were only 27. If you superscore them - not sure that colleges do that - she would have a 28 w/o writing and almost a 29 with writing.