Author Topic: College Admissions  (Read 5523 times)

smoghat

  • Bristles
  • ***
  • Posts: 258
College Admissions
« on: October 15, 2019, 06:24:35 AM »
I didn’t make myself clear enough. It was unquestionably too early in the day for me to make a post. I’m leaving the post as it is, but my response below explains that I’m not after financial aid, I’m after giving our kids a level playing field with overseas applicants who clearly don’t need aid without moving overseas (an option! but one my kids aren’t interested in).

Our daughter is in junior year now so it’s time to think about college. I used to teach at an Ivy prior to FIRE and if I had worked for ten more years, both our daughter and our younger son would have had free tuition anywhere. So I’ve already made a choice. We also have a good bit of money in the bank ($5 million) and have been doing pretty well with our investments. Does anybody with a relatively high net work have experience with financial aid vs college admissions recently? Even though I taught in universities for twenty-five years, I am wary of the structures they create for themselves. It strikes me that we are likely to have to pay full price but have our kids (who are good students, my daughter has all As with one B) considered in a need-blind process, which strikes me as unfair even though yes, it’s part of a guilt-ridden capitalist worldview. Anybody have experience with this?
« Last Edit: October 16, 2019, 02:05:56 PM by smoghat »

MDM

  • Senior Mustachian
  • ********
  • Posts: 11477
Re: Financial Aid and Colleges After FIRE
« Reply #1 on: October 15, 2019, 10:40:42 AM »
It strikes me that we are likely to have to pay full price but have our kids (who are good students, my daughter has all As with one B) considered in a need-blind process....
Very likely indeed.  Good luck!

ETA: Although, if her class rank and test scores are similarly high, there are good non-Ivy schools that do offer some decent merit-based scholarships.
« Last Edit: October 15, 2019, 10:47:58 AM by MDM »

ontheway2

  • Stubble
  • **
  • Posts: 195
Re: Financial Aid and Colleges After FIRE
« Reply #2 on: October 15, 2019, 02:23:00 PM »
I'm not sure why it would be unfair to have to pay full price for college with $5m saved.

That being said, assets are not considered for need based financial aid if income (AGI?) is less than 50k. I'm not sure what income is considered, but you can easily look it up. Other than need based, look into any scholarship you can. Your daughter will also be expected to contribute 50% of her income above ~6k with exception of student work-study (which is needs based).

MrsPennyPincher

  • 5 O'Clock Shadow
  • *
  • Posts: 31
  • Location: USA
Re: Financial Aid and Colleges After FIRE
« Reply #3 on: October 15, 2019, 04:40:12 PM »
To be honest, I think very few colleges are truly need blind. I think your kids may in fact have a better chance of admission to the second tier schools or even at a lesser ivies. Alternatively if they choose a school where they are say in the top 25% of applicants, they will likely get merit aid regardless of your income or assets

secondcor521

  • Walrus Stache
  • *******
  • Posts: 5503
  • Age: 54
  • Location: Boise, Idaho
  • Big cattle, no hat.
    • Age of Eon - Overwatch player videos
Re: Financial Aid and Colleges After FIRE
« Reply #4 on: October 15, 2019, 04:47:29 PM »
I'm not sure why it would be unfair to have to pay full price for college with $5m saved.

That being said, assets are not considered for need based financial aid if income (AGI?) is less than 50k. I'm not sure what income is considered, but you can easily look it up. Other than need based, look into any scholarship you can. Your daughter will also be expected to contribute 50% of her income above ~6k with exception of student work-study (which is needs based).

The $50K is AGI, which is line 7 on the new 1040.  And that is for schools that use FAFSA.  The OP will want to find out if the schools his/her daughter is looking at use FAFSA or CSS Profile.  CSS Profile is used at many competitive schools and most of the top private liberal arts schools.  CSS Profile does not have the simplified needs test, so assets will be considered.

Also, it is not just AGI below $50K.  It is a two part test, and low income is only one of the two parts.  Google "simplified needs test" for more information.

The comment above about student income is also true based on the FAFSA.  I don't know how student income is considered in the CSS Profile way of doing things.

OP, you have six viable paths to consider, maybe more:

1.  Pay for your kids' schools out of your assets.
2.  Encourage your kids to go to the military academies or get an ROTC scholarship.
3.  Encourage your kids to apply to and attend an Ivy and you have an income below around $80K.
4.  Encourage your kids to apply to lower tier schools where they are in the top 10-25% of the applicant pool.  They'll get merit aid from the schools themselves.
5.  Have them apply for dozens or more scholarships using sources like FastWeb and such.
6.  Have them go in state public.  They'll probably get good scholarships this way, and it'll probably be cheap anyway.

Finally, the American Opportunity Tax Credit can be mildly helpful.

Good luck.

SwordGuy

  • Walrus Stache
  • *******
  • Posts: 8955
  • Location: Fayetteville, NC
Re: Financial Aid and Colleges After FIRE
« Reply #5 on: October 15, 2019, 05:36:07 PM »
Very few college students actually need to go to any specific university.   Most of them are apathetic about learning in high school and there's no particular reason to expect that to change in college.   So, for them, since they won't do the extra hard work, they might as well go to a local college.

A lot of students pick a college because it would be a nice 4 year tourism location.   That's foolishness.

In my state a student can easily graduate from an in-state public  4 year local university for about $40k or less.    Some are significantly less expensive.

A $5M stash should easily support two kids at $40k to $60k total costs apiece.   If it won't, your expenses are too fixed and that should be of concern to you.

stashja

  • 5 O'Clock Shadow
  • *
  • Posts: 81
Re: Financial Aid and Colleges After FIRE
« Reply #6 on: October 15, 2019, 09:02:23 PM »
"Most of them are apathetic about learning in high school and there's no particular reason to expect that to change in college."

Absolutely untrue of my students, and I have about 200 of them in my 4 classes this term. They love their (useful, difficult) program, want to be in college, and often work full time and 2-3 jobs to remain in college. First gen students, definitely no Ivy faculty kids. None of them sees college as vacation. I just got back from hearing one of them hold her own in a public speaking event with local community leaders and our Senator.

SwordGuy

  • Walrus Stache
  • *******
  • Posts: 8955
  • Location: Fayetteville, NC
Re: Financial Aid and Colleges After FIRE
« Reply #7 on: October 15, 2019, 10:06:57 PM »
"Most of them are apathetic about learning in high school and there's no particular reason to expect that to change in college."

Absolutely untrue of my students, and I have about 200 of them in my 4 classes this term. They love their (useful, difficult) program, want to be in college, and often work full time and 2-3 jobs to remain in college. First gen students, definitely no Ivy faculty kids. None of them sees college as vacation. I just got back from hearing one of them hold her own in a public speaking event with local community leaders and our Senator.
You are damned lucky, then!   Or your university weeds out the apathetic high school students.

marble_faun

  • Pencil Stache
  • ****
  • Posts: 643
Re: Financial Aid and Colleges After FIRE
« Reply #8 on: October 16, 2019, 08:21:14 AM »
If you have 5 million dollars, why do your kids need financial aid?

Captain FIRE

  • Handlebar Stache
  • *****
  • Posts: 1176
Re: Financial Aid and Colleges After FIRE
« Reply #9 on: October 16, 2019, 08:58:30 AM »
It strikes me that we are likely to have to pay full price but have our kids (who are good students, my daughter has all As with one B) considered in a need-blind process, which strikes me as unfair even though yes, it’s part of a guilt-ridden capitalist worldview. Anybody have experience with this?

Need-blind admissions just means that schools only consider the merits of the kids when made admission decisions.  Thus, a child's inability to pay will not prevent them from getting in if they merit it academically.  This means colleges aren't just reserved for the elite as they once were.  I don't think you mean that this is unfair - at least, I really hope that you don't think that.

I suspect you might mean that it's unfair you have to pay because you have the assets to pay for it, and other equally qualified kids might get financially-based scholarships.  Note that if you are seeking merit based scholarships for your kids, there are plenty of good schools that offer them, even if not usually in the top, say 25 colleges.  There are also private organizations that offer them as well.

My folks used to say that you're supposed to spend all of your money on getting your first kid into school, take out loans for the second, and then you can get a free ride for the last one.  As the middle kid, I didn't like this joke very much!  Yes, it does hurt a bit that by saving you are "penalized" by having to pay full price, however, if someone with $5 million isn't willing to pay full price, who do you think should be paying?  How will colleges afford to operate if only those with say, $10 million pay for it?

You are extraordinarily privileged with that type of wealth, not to mention the time you can devote to helping your kids now that you are FIRED and your amazing experiences you can apply/share from being a college professor (e.g. work ethic, importance of education, study skills), advantages very very few other kids have.  I would suggest focusing on your blessings - such as having time to help them find appropriate scholarships to apply to, or having the money to fund costs out of your 4% living expenses - rather than dwell on any potential unfairness.

smoghat

  • Bristles
  • ***
  • Posts: 258
Re: Financial Aid and Colleges After FIRE
« Reply #10 on: October 16, 2019, 01:55:00 PM »
A few responses are covered by this one.

I'm not sure why it would be unfair to have to pay full price for college with $5m saved.

Absolutely fair. I misnamed the thread and should have made my original post clearer.

We have no need for financial aid and that’s fine. I really dislike it when FIRE types take advantage of the Affordable Care Act to get subsidies just because they didn’t build a big enough stash by age 40, and I certainly don’t want people to get that idea about me.

But I want a level playing field. If our kids were Europeans (actually they do hold dual passports) applying to US colleges from Europe, they would get preferential treatment since colleges know that they they would be paying full price. I think it is true that many schools aren’t really need blind, but Americans who have worked hard and saved are the most screwed by this system. I taught PLENTY of incompetent foreign students in top graduate schools (even MIT, sadly) who were only there because they were from overseas and would pay the bills (during my last semester teaching, I explained the syllabus for a half hour, page by page, in excruciating detail and … at the end of class one student asked, in halting English, what we would be doing in the course). The faculty and the other students all knew it. I’m sure my kids will be much better than that and would probably do fine in whatever school they were in. If anything, I’m a harsh judge of their abilities, and they aren’t Felicity Huffmann’s idiot daughter.  If they were, they are welcome to go wait tables and pay their way to the local community college. But they are good students in a cutthroat world, so it only makes sense for me to see how to give them an edge up. 

« Last Edit: October 16, 2019, 02:21:30 PM by smoghat »

smoghat

  • Bristles
  • ***
  • Posts: 258
Re: Financial Aid and Colleges After FIRE
« Reply #11 on: October 16, 2019, 02:17:14 PM »
"Most of them are apathetic about learning in high school and there's no particular reason to expect that to change in college."

Absolutely untrue of my students, and I have about 200 of them in my 4 classes this term. They love their (useful, difficult) program, want to be in college, and often work full time and 2-3 jobs to remain in college. First gen students, definitely no Ivy faculty kids. None of them sees college as vacation. I just got back from hearing one of them hold her own in a public speaking event with local community leaders and our Senator.

Good for you and your students! There’s no question that in the Ivies there are plenty of unmotivated students. Many of them are from overseas and many went to lousy private schools that handed out As along with free Adderol before the SATs. After my program was eliminated, I received plenty of offers to head up programs, but I was so burnt out by bad students that I was glad to FIRE. Honestly, my most memorable times teaching were when I taught undergraduate classes to students who were first generation college students, generally Mexican-American.

That said, my kids have been slow to pick up a dedicated interest that they want to pursue in college, so likely a school like yours wouldn’t be appropriate for them. Rather, they are probably like myself or my wife and, while not apathetic at all, will benefit from a liberal arts and sciences environment in which they will be able to get a broad education along with enough exposure to diverse fields. For me, eventually something weird stuck and I wound up getting a doctorate in my field. It worked well for the next twenty-five years until I realized that I could sell my side business, FIRE, not deal with apathetic students and do something more fulfilling. For my wife, it didn’t work out as well since she was hustled into engineering because her parents thought it would be best for her. She didn’t enjoy it, the field was incompatible with being a parent—something that really mattered to her—and, about 15 years after she started, she decided there was no sense in her continuing with it.
« Last Edit: October 16, 2019, 02:22:06 PM by smoghat »

Car Jack

  • Handlebar Stache
  • *****
  • Posts: 2141
Re: College Admissions
« Reply #12 on: October 17, 2019, 07:26:22 AM »
There is so much anxiety about getting into THE college for parents.  Here's my philosophy......if a kid isn't accepted, that may mean that they wouldn't be able to handle the workload.  Maybe that's not always true, but it certainly can be.  Both I and my son started bachelor's programs the same way.  Start at a mediocre college.  Ace out of it and transfer to an excellent (not ivy) engineering college.  Note workload doubled.  Buckle down and get through it.  A downside for people without $5M is that merit aid is pretty much always gone if you transfer.  We paid full boat.  Around $65k a year on average.


ontheway2

  • Stubble
  • **
  • Posts: 195
Re: Financial Aid and Colleges After FIRE
« Reply #13 on: October 17, 2019, 08:04:42 AM »
A few responses are covered by this one.

I'm not sure why it would be unfair to have to pay full price for college with $5m saved.

Absolutely fair. I misnamed the thread and should have made my original post clearer.

We have no need for financial aid and that’s fine. I really dislike it when FIRE types take advantage of the Affordable Care Act to get subsidies just because they didn’t build a big enough stash by age 40, and I certainly don’t want people to get that idea about me.

But I want a level playing field. If our kids were Europeans (actually they do hold dual passports) applying to US colleges from Europe, they would get preferential treatment since colleges know that they they would be paying full price. I think it is true that many schools aren’t really need blind, but Americans who have worked hard and saved are the most screwed by this system. I taught PLENTY of incompetent foreign students in top graduate schools (even MIT, sadly) who were only there because they were from overseas and would pay the bills (during my last semester teaching, I explained the syllabus for a half hour, page by page, in excruciating detail and … at the end of class one student asked, in halting English, what we would be doing in the course). The faculty and the other students all knew it. I’m sure my kids will be much better than that and would probably do fine in whatever school they were in. If anything, I’m a harsh judge of their abilities, and they aren’t Felicity Huffmann’s idiot daughter.  If they were, they are welcome to go wait tables and pay their way to the local community college. But they are good students in a cutthroat world, so it only makes sense for me to see how to give them an edge up.

Ah. I get what you are saying now, but I have no experience or advice. I just went the state school route with no question of whether I would be admitted to whichever public in-state school I applied to.
« Last Edit: October 17, 2019, 08:25:05 AM by ontheway2 »

BTDretire

  • Magnum Stache
  • ******
  • Posts: 3074
Re: Financial Aid and Colleges After FIRE
« Reply #14 on: October 17, 2019, 09:26:16 AM »
I explained the syllabus for a half hour, page by page, in excruciating detail and … at the end of class one student asked, in halting English, what we would be doing in the course).
Well at least you understood the question!
 When I was taking college classes, an international grad student taught one of my  classes. Very heavy accent, he may have known what he was saying, but the students didn't.
  That really sucked, I guess I should get over it, it was 43 years ago! :-)

Cpa Cat

  • Handlebar Stache
  • *****
  • Posts: 1692
Re: College Admissions
« Reply #15 on: October 17, 2019, 11:12:15 AM »
Why the concern?

There's a lot of choice between community college and Ivy league.

I went to a state college, attended a mediocre BA program and then a fairly good Business School at the same institution. I only qualified for merit based aid, and I was excluded from a lot of aid because I was a transfer student/non-trad and not a freshman from a US high school. My merit based aid covered about 25% of my BA.

I received a 50% tuition break for being a GTA, which I also got paid for - essentially a merit based employment position at my Business School. I also received graduate scholarships. In total, I paid about 25% of the cost of my Master's degree out of pocket.

I had a job offer prior to graduation and later parlayed my degrees into self employment, and now enjoy lots of success and money. 99% of my graduating class had job offers prior to graduation - in their city of choice, and usually 1st or 2nd firm choice  (not a made up stat - the school tracked it).

Why have any ounce of anxiety about college for your kids? Let them apply where they want to apply and see what gets offered. Make sure they include the best state school available to them. Tell them to come up with their own proposal of how it will be paid for and present it to you. Don't act like you paying 100% of wherever they feel like going is a given. If they are destined to be successful, then they will be successful regardless of the college they attend, because there are a lot of opportunities for students who have the incentive to make the most of wherever they land.

skiersailor

  • 5 O'Clock Shadow
  • *
  • Posts: 36
Re: Financial Aid and Colleges After FIRE
« Reply #16 on: October 17, 2019, 02:04:39 PM »
We have no need for financial aid and that’s fine...But I want a level playing field. If our kids were Europeans (actually they do hold dual passports) applying to US colleges from Europe, they would get preferential treatment since colleges know that they they would be paying full price. I think it is true that many schools aren’t really need blind, but Americans who have worked hard and saved are the most screwed by this system... But they are good students in a cutthroat world, so it only makes sense for me to see how to give them an edge up.

If you visit a couple of Ivy League college websites that have financial aid calculators, you can run the calculators a few times using different income and asset profiles to learn how financial aid is awarded.  The short answer is that income and assets matter - if either number grows too large, the projected need-based financial aid quickly drops to zero.

The New York Times published an article recently titled "What College Admissions Offices Really Want" by Paul Tough.  The subhead provides a quick summary: "Elite schools say they're looking for academic excellence and diversity.  But their thirst for tuition revenue means that wealth trumps all." The author interviewed an admissions officer at Trinity College, a mid-tier selective school.  Although Trinity says they want diversity, academic rigor, a good reputation, etc. their endowment isn't large enough for them to be truly need-blind.  In fact, only a handful of universities can truly afford to be need-blind even though many more claim to be.  That means that with only a few exceptions, all universities must balance full-pay students with scholarship students in order to survive.  So having wealth or a high income is still an advantage when applying to college, but the colleges are reluctant to admit that publicly because it would hurt their image.  From the article... "In public, university leaders like to advertise the diversity of their freshman classes and their institutions' generosity with financial aid.  In private, they feel immense pressure to maintain tuition revenue and protect their school's elite status."

How then do these universities identify full-pay applicants?  I suspect that's why they encourage all applicants to complete the FASFA.  You've probably read that the FASFA is required even for merit-based scholarships which doesn't make much sense - if it's merit-based, why does income matter?  More likely, the schools are pushing everyone to complete the FASFA so they can build financial profiles on each applicant in order to maximize their yield.  They know who the rich parents are, they know who the poor parents are and they can optimize the mix and vary the financial aid offers in order to meet their budget and their diversity/academic rigor goals.  There is nothing "fair" about this process, but I'm confident that students from wealthy families still have an advantage as long as they signal their wealth to the college by completing the FASFA - as counter intuitive as that seems.

I highly recommend reading this article - it's an eye opener.  Of course it's written from the perspective of how best to make colleges more diverse, but it's also a road map for how children from wealthy families can get admitted to selective colleges (with the exception of the Ivy+ schools that have huge endowments).

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/09/10/magazine/college-admissions-paul-tough.html
« Last Edit: October 17, 2019, 02:10:36 PM by skiersailor »

AccidentialMustache

  • Pencil Stache
  • ****
  • Posts: 927
Re: College Admissions
« Reply #17 on: October 17, 2019, 06:53:05 PM »
So if you want to be viewed as $$$ and possibly have the "preferred admittance" it brings, why not just go to an out-of-state state school? Illinois (UIUC) is happy to charge the same to someone from India as from Indiana -- they're both "out of state". If "paying full rate" is the level playing field you want, that's doesn't seem like rocket science to get it.

smoghat

  • Bristles
  • ***
  • Posts: 258
Re: College Admissions
« Reply #18 on: October 17, 2019, 09:03:56 PM »
So if you want to be viewed as $$$ and possibly have the "preferred admittance" it brings, why not just go to an out-of-state state school? Illinois (UIUC) is happy to charge the same to someone from India as from Indiana -- they're both "out of state". If "paying full rate" is the level playing field you want, that's doesn't seem like rocket science to get it.

Great point, as are all your points, fellow Moustacheans.

Ultimately, during the last couple of days I realized that the school that I want my kids to go to the most is a cinch (I’m a legacy, my wife’s sister has worked there 29 years, and it’s only got around 1,500 students so believe me, given her position, admissions knows her and my daughter very well... she went last week and there was a fair at her public high school tonight and they knew who she was...).

Meanwhile my daughter doesn’t want to go this small liberal arts college because it’s not in the (New York) city. So either she gets her way because she studies hard and gets all As this year or she goes to a school that I think will be good for her, emotionally and intellectually. Sometimes it’s important to just go through a process of thinking things through to get it.

FYI, I guess thereason I have anxieties about this is that I was a lot lazier than my kids are now, did pretty badly in a s****y high school, and somehow, by falling through a series of trap doors wound up teaching in the Ivies and also FIRE’ing due to the right business decisions... I realize that a lot of this is making the right decisions and a lot of it is luck...but everything seems more difficult today and I would like less anxieties for them than I faced though, since it’d be nice not to have high blood pressure, but so it goes. 

2sk22

  • Handlebar Stache
  • *****
  • Posts: 1487
Re: College Admissions
« Reply #19 on: October 18, 2019, 03:06:50 PM »
Interesting to read about this topic. My older daughter is in her final year undergraduate, and is applying for grad schools in biology. She went to our state's flagship public university and got an excellent education at a very reasonable cost.

My younger daughter (who wants to study physics and math) is a straight-A student and just got her SAT score which is fantastic. I have a feeling that she could get admission in Caltech/MIT level schools. If so, I'm looking at a cost of $280k but, anticipating this possibility, I have set aside this money in a separate savings account. Lets see what happens - should be interesting :-)

MDM

  • Senior Mustachian
  • ********
  • Posts: 11477
Re: College Admissions
« Reply #20 on: October 18, 2019, 03:14:55 PM »
My younger daughter (who wants to study physics and math)...
In both of those fields, an advanced degree is often "necessary" (at least in the minds of hiring managers).  If she intends to get such a degree, the undergraduate school becomes much less important than the graduate school.

Cpa Cat

  • Handlebar Stache
  • *****
  • Posts: 1692
Re: College Admissions
« Reply #21 on: October 18, 2019, 03:21:56 PM »
My younger daughter (who wants to study physics and math) is a straight-A student and just got her SAT score which is fantastic. I have a feeling that she could get admission in Caltech/MIT level schools. If so, I'm looking at a cost of $280k but, anticipating this possibility, I have set aside this money in a separate savings account. Lets see what happens - should be interesting :-)

As a female student with excellent academics who wants to go into Physics or Math, I'd be very surprised if she paid sticker price. The scholarships available to a student in her position are substantial. Remember, there will be scholarships offered both by the institution and by independent organizations that have scholarships for female STEM students. Make sure she applies aggressively for all the money. If she does well in those areas during undergrad, it's unlikely that she'd actually have to pay to pursue an advanced degree in Math or Physics, her demographics would just be too much in demand in many universities.

Paul der Krake

  • Walrus Stache
  • *******
  • Posts: 5854
  • Age: 16
  • Location: UTC-10:00
Re: College Admissions
« Reply #22 on: October 18, 2019, 10:53:31 PM »
Consider sending her to the UK. Seriously. From the eastern seaboard, it's barely further than California, and she'll be done in 3 years instead of 4. You'll be paying full freight as a wealthy foreigner, but that's like 15k/year or thereabouts.

Start at UCAS.com.

2sk22

  • Handlebar Stache
  • *****
  • Posts: 1487
Re: College Admissions
« Reply #23 on: October 19, 2019, 03:32:57 AM »
My younger daughter (who wants to study physics and math) is a straight-A student and just got her SAT score which is fantastic. I have a feeling that she could get admission in Caltech/MIT level schools. If so, I'm looking at a cost of $280k but, anticipating this possibility, I have set aside this money in a separate savings account. Lets see what happens - should be interesting :-)


As a female student with excellent academics who wants to go into Physics or Math, I'd be very surprised if she paid sticker price. The scholarships available to a student in her position are substantial. Remember, there will be scholarships offered both by the institution and by independent organizations that have scholarships for female STEM students. Make sure she applies aggressively for all the money. If she does well in those areas during undergrad, it's unlikely that she'd actually have to pay to pursue an advanced degree in Math or Physics, her demographics would just be too much in demand in many universities.

Yeah, she sounds like a good candidate for a merit scholarship at Harvey Mudd, etc.

Good suggestions @Cpa Cat and @lhamo . I have been spending a lot of time lately on the College Confidential forums to see what has changed in the four years since my older one was applying for colleges. Looks like the frenzy to get into the top schools has gotten even worse.

Just to be clear, my wife and I are definitely not tiger parents pushing our kids but my younger daughter is an intense and motivated student so I'd like to give her a shot at an academically competitive school. My older daughter is a lot more easy going and had a great time at her college.

We have visited a few colleges on day trips here in the east but we do want to make a trip to see Caltech (my daughter's dream school) so we'll definitely check out Harvey Mudd then.


jeninco

  • Magnum Stache
  • ******
  • Posts: 3995
  • Location: .... duh?
Re: College Admissions
« Reply #24 on: October 23, 2019, 12:40:10 PM »
To answer your initial question (where can she go where she'll be ... not "disadvantaged" by need-blind admissions), firstly she should be fine either way -- have her focus on writing a really kick-ass essay, because past a certain point of grades and scores that's her chance to demonstrate who she is and why the school would want her to attend.

The other thing to do, if she has a clear favorite, is to apply early decision. This tends to favor rich families, as you're agreeing to attend whatever aid package they offer you.

soccerluvof4

  • Walrus Stache
  • *******
  • Posts: 7161
  • Location: Artic Midwest
  • Retired at 50
    • My Journal
Re: College Admissions
« Reply #25 on: October 25, 2019, 02:03:31 AM »
To Swordguys point if you look around there are plenty of inexpensive schools out of state as well as in state schools. And grade depending even more options. The Crimson tide (Alabama) was offering 100% free ride to students with a GPA and ACT certain score level and now its 75% even for out of state tuition. Kiplinger just released a report of the top ten inexpensive schools with out of state tuition and Western North Carolina was on the list which was 9k. If I had the article I wold post the link but sure you can google it. There were actually 15 I believe. But there are many many different options and levels out there to consider.

familyandfarming

  • Stubble
  • **
  • Posts: 145
Re: College Admissions
« Reply #26 on: October 31, 2019, 04:56:38 AM »
If your daughter goes to a quality state school, she should apply for the honors program there. Might give her a quality education for a cheaper price. If you go to Amazon and search for “college chemistry textbook “, you will discover there are less than 10 viable choices, with thousands of colleges in the US. They must all have the same curriculum?

As parents we fuss a lot about college fit, when we “back in the day” took the ACT one time, because somebody told us to, and carpooled with a guy from high school English class to college orientation. (Might have been me.) Now, students take the ACT multiple times only after intense preparation and parents hover around in their self made helicopters with their children on ten to twelve college visits.

The competition is tough on you and your kids. It appears that you have the skills to successfully help your daughter figure things out! Good luck!