No, seriously. If you need to budget to the point where you say you can only fund 1 1/2 years of school, just save the travel money until acceptances come in. There are virtual tours, she can email students about campus life and professors or even the admissions office about coursework and classes. By the way, those emails will count as “showing interest” if that’s important.
D did not visit the college she is attending this fall until after she was accepted. Then she went alone. We just could not afford to spend the money to travel 900+ miles to distant schools. Every single college, though, felt they were her top choice because she did call and email with substantive questions. She usually asked about specific classes or activities.
Run the NPC for every single school on her list FIRST. I know people say it’s not perfect and it’s not but it will give you an idea of expected costs as a lower bound. Actual costs can be higher but rarely lower. This one exercise was an eye opener for me. Luckily I ran this during D’s sophomore year and by her senior year, I was able to breather again. My basic strategy was, if the EFC was over a certain dollar amount, I eliminated that school from her list. I had a "fuzzy"range but, trust me, if a school gave me an EFC of $50,000+, I wasn’t going to expect a FA package showing a net cost, without loans, of $30,000.
Finally, what I think everyone is saying, the days of “working your way through college” are gone. Very very few people are able to do this. Also borrowing your way through college is a disaster.
Honestly the summer before senior year is a good time to schedule tours and college interviews for a student applying EA or ED since for some schools where the deadline is October or November 1st. Preparation for the SAT scheduled. Work on scholarship applications. August is the time to start working on the common app. The school counselor will likely require a list of schools the student is applying to prior to the application deadline so that they can write recommendation letters and mail out transcripts. Our counselor gave us a huge packet end of junior year to be completed over the summer which included several essay questions both to be completed by student and parent so that they could write more personalized recommendations. Ex. What are your child’s greatest strengths and weaknesses? What activities are they involved in? What do they plan to major in? I wouldn’t wait till November of senior year for this. This summer figure out which colleges are financial and academic safety schools. Yes junior and senior year is very stressful for the parents and the students because there are so many deadlines to meet and most of them are not parent imposed.They are imposed by the school counselors,teachers,college admission officers, FAFSA, and college board. To keep up with all the deadlines we used an excel spreadsheet and ms project especially when applying to a large number of schools.
Also keep in mind a budget for all those misc fees that creep up during application season. Applications, testing fees, transcript fees, fees for sending test scores, graduation fees, prom, test prep, dorm furnishings,laptop, commuting fees, health insurance… It all really adds up before you set foot on campus freshman year. This is all aside tuition,room and board. All this can blow a tight budget.
I’m with the OP on this one. My daughter was asking to start tours in spring of her sophomore year. She knew it would take a while and didn’t want to be pressured to do so many all at once (especially during the school year). So we started with spring break that year and then got most of the schools in during the summer, winter and spring breaks that followed. Granted, it was easy for us because most could be done in an afternoon — thye did not require an overnight stay (and those that did were folded into family vacation time).
Don’t really know what the “norm” is…maybe we are the anomaly. But it worked for us. By the time senior year rolled around we had visited most campuses and she knew where she wanted to apply (same for my son 2 years later). Only a couple schools got “thrown into the mix” senior year (one for my son) and those were the ones we decided to wait until acceptance to visit (and only if it was a true contender).
OP - I encourage you to come back when time permits. It seems you have some good intentions, but only part of the key info you need.
Yes, it can be helpful to visit schools. But even more critical is the need to lay out feasible financial plan. None of us can figure out where the “1 1/2 years” figure idea comes from. More typical is dollar figure, to be stretched across 4 years.
I also agree that starting to visit colleges early in junior year–or even earlier, to at least a limited degree–is a good idea. Otherwise you find yourselves touring when the campus is empty.
When I say “even earlier,” I mean driving through a campus, and maybe even getting out and walking around, if you happen to be in the vicinity on a vacation or the like. It can be motivating.
Yes, but she hasn’t answered how she expects this kid to pay for the remaining 2-3 years of college all on the student’s own. That is a huge elephant in the room.
@mom2collegekids - Yes, that I know, I was talking about since then. Many questions thrown at her about finances, lots of advice but no response from her. I think she may be overwhelmed by the response.
But she’s from Wisconsin, land of many good colleges available at a good price. The mother seems to want the child to explore, and that’s fine, but I’ll be the child ends up at a Wisconsin school. The whole family is still learning. I agree that kids learn a lot from working, but my daughter learned how long it takes to earn 2 Starbucks or 1 outfit, still no concept of $60k in tuition or what it would take to pay back a $40k loan. My kids don’t even know how earning $10k would affect the FAFSA calculations, or how to squeeze another $2000 from the FA office. It’s really a lot of work to keep FA organized.
Oh, I agree. I’m just guessing that with being busy with 6 kids, she may just be getting to the responses.
I agree that it’s a lot to process.
I hope that they’re looking at full COA, and not just tuition. I still remember my neighbor’s reaction when he found out that R&B could be $10k-17k per year! He thought it would be about the same price as when he went to college. lol
They also need to be careful to notice that some schools list cost “per semester” so it is easy to wrongly conclude that a school costs half of what it really does.
I agree that it makes more sense to tour one of each type of school which usually can be done locally. Then choose similar colleges to those that were liked. A very strong student can apply to need blind schools and get excellent funding. Short of an very strong student, it may make sense to figure out what your child wants to get out of college. Then choose colleges that will provide that. That seems to be the last thing people do these days but it is important. Is she an intellectual type who is likely to go to grad school. Is he not academic at all so an efficient cheap degree would do? Once you figure out the function college will have for her, then you can figure out how to attain it.
I remember us rolling our eyes when one of the Tufts admissions officers was going on and on about how important it was to figure out why you wanted to go to college at all, but ultimately it is *the * question isn’t it? I think it’s fine to do some visiting early on, for both kids it helped them figure some stuff out. Older was emphatic that campus size and location simply didn’t matter to him, though he preferred not to have sweltering summers. Younger son cared a lot about what the campus looked and felt like, and was okay with both city and suburban locations as long as the campus was sufficiently defined and the city wasn’t NYC. But he certainly had made no decisions about where to apply at this point in the process.
