Anyone going through the college admissions process?

[ct fab]

My son is going through it now, he has great stats, 99% SAT, very good GPA, excellent EC's. SDS, the best two on that list I think are Florida (great alumni network but they have dorm problems and are forcing some students to take summer classes and skip the fall semester). If your son is going for engineering than Vtech is hands down the best on the list. My son got a nice merit scholarship to Marquette (safety school which he won't be going to) and a nice merit scholarship to Tulane. He's a  month away from hearing from 8 remaining schools: Notre Dame, UVA, USC, Michigan, Wake Forest, BC, William & Mary and Richmond. Half of these are long shots and the other half 50/50. The competitiveness in top 30 colleges is ridiculous. Everyone seems to have a 1500+ SAT, a 4.5 GPA and has saved the world 2-3 times. My guess is he ends up at Wake Forest, but no real clue at this point??

 

 

[freester]

I have a lot of experience with the admissions process and am currently going through it for the second time. My eldest is at Michigan. Is your child a huge sports fan? If so than Rochester may not be the ideal choice. A few of my friends had kids who were sports fans who regretted not going to schools with college sports. Florida is a great school and very difficult to get into congrats on that. My daughter got rejected by Florida Where else are you waiting to hear from?

[ct fab]

Freester is right. If the sports atmosphere college experience is important to him it narrows the list down. My son liked Emory a lot but with no sports tradition passed on applying. 

 

 

[SDS]

34 minutes ago, freester said:

I have a lot of experience with the admissions process and am currently going through it for the second time. My eldest is at Michigan. Is your child a huge sports fan? If so than Rochester may not be the ideal choice. A few of my friends had kids who were sports fans who regretted not going to schools with college sports. Florida is a great school and very difficult to get into congrats on that. My daughter got rejected by Florida Where else are you waiting to hear from?

He doesn’t watch sports at all. He’s an esports gamer. Plays soccer. Watches nothing. Said a basketball team would be nice to cheer for, but sports is worth about a pepperoni pizza to him. 

Only waiting on William and Mary, but I doubt he is really that interested. 

[freester]

5 minutes ago, SDS said:

He doesn’t watch sports at all. He’s an esports gamer. Plays soccer. Watches nothing. Said a basketball team would be nice to cheer for, but sports is worth about a pepperoni pizza to him. 

Only waiting on William and Mary, but I doubt he is really that interested. 

He sounds exactly like my close friend’s son who is at Rochester and loves it.  

 

[Hoss]

2 hours ago, SDS said:

I assume the love for the campus is sarcasm then?  What happened to you?

No, the love for the campus is genuine. It's gorgeous there. I just couldn't afford it being from out-of-state and never made the jump to just move there and live for a bit before resuming college like I wanted to. Poor family life limited things a lot... then I went to a ridiculously expensive private school in-state and put myself in eternal debt anyways.

[ct fab]

Location is also a big question as is accessibility to transporting. If he wants to be close to home, Rochester, if not....if going away, VTech has Roanoke airport nearby but that's a small airport. Tulane has New orleans, UVA is sort of close to Richmond. W&M is an hour from Richmond but also has Amtrak in town. We visited w&m last week, gorgeous campus, students are known to be a little quirky. It's near the top of my sons list.

 

 

[nfreeman]

2 hours ago, SDS said:

You have in one in Rochester now?  What specifically do you mean about shopping around and do you think this is me and/or merit dependent? 

No -- Rochester was high up on his list but he ended up getting in early decision elsewhere.

As for shopping around -- I haven't done this myself, but my understanding is that the process has devolved into one similar to buying a car -- i.e. if you don't have your heart set on one particular car that is only found at one dealership you can shop around and negotiate for the best deal.  (The college industry -- and an industry is what it is now -- has also become much more like the car dealer industry in terms of sleaze and corruption, but that's another discussion.)

As GA was saying, I think you can contact the admissions departments at your son's top 5 choices, tell them you are weighing alternatives and ask whether there are any grants or other reductions in tuition that are available.  Some will probably say no, but some may say yes, and the results may be material enough to affect your decision -- especially since it sounds like your son doesn't have a strong preference. 

Good luck.

[SDS]

10 minutes ago, Hoss said:

No, the love for the campus is genuine. It's gorgeous there. I just couldn't afford it being from out-of-state and never made the jump to just move there and live for a bit before resuming college like I wanted to. Poor family life limited things a lot... then I went to a ridiculously expensive private school in-state and put myself in eternal debt anyways.

How was Maryland not an option but private school was?

 We did our best to plan for no debt or at the very least a small amount of deliberate debt to establish credit. 

7 minutes ago, ct fab said:

Location is also a big question as is accessibility to transporting. If he wants to be close to home, Rochester, if not....if going away, VTech has Roanoke airport nearby but that's a small airport. Tulane has New orleans, UVA is sort of close to Richmond. W&M is an hour from Richmond but also has Amtrak in town. We visited w&m last week, gorgeous campus, students are known to be a little quirky. It's near the top of my sons list.

We live in Maryland. 

[ct fab]

If you live on MD then MD should definitely be high on the list. Solid academically, good campus atmosphere, reasonably priced. My friend's son goes there (freshman) and likes it.

 

 

[Hoss]

15 minutes ago, SDS said:

How was Maryland not an option but private school was?

 We did our best to plan for no debt or at the very least a small amount of deliberate debt to establish credit. 

The two cost almost the exact same but the private school I went to accepted my high school merit scholarships (which covered a ton of tuition) as well as a ton of loans I was able to get for being in New York whereas Maryland wouldn't honor the specific merit scholarship I had and offered a much lesser version of it. And because I did not have any financial support or proper guidance in finding other loan and scholarship options it limited how much more I could get for a move to Maryland.

It's good that you're asking these questions. My parent did not get involved. She just asked how the process was going but didn't know how anything about the process and didn't even know to find out more.

I highly recommend Maryland even if I never made it there myself. I know only one person that actually spent four years there and they said all of my thoughts on the campus, its people and courses there were pretty spot on. They loved it.

Edited February 24, 2019 by Hoss

[SDS]

3 hours ago, Hoss said:

The two cost almost the exact same but the private school I went to accepted my high school merit scholarships (which covered a ton of tuition) as well as a ton of loans I was able to get for being in New York whereas Maryland wouldn't honor the specific merit scholarship I had and offered a much lesser version of it. And because I did not have any financial support or proper guidance in finding other loan and scholarship options it limited how much more I could get for a move to Maryland.

It's good that you're asking these questions. My parent did not get involved. She just asked how the process was going but didn't know how anything about the process and didn't even know to find out more.

I highly recommend Maryland even if I never made it there myself. I know only one person that actually spent four years there and they said all of my thoughts on the campus, its people and courses there were pretty spot on. They loved it.

I’m comfortable with the process, but I’m an obsessive compulsive information gather. Others may have done this better, so I’m always on the lookout for a better way or a new way to look at things. 

[bobs0108]

6 hours ago, SDS said:

Honestly, I tried to look a couple times but did not make any headway. The vast majority of scholarships I have seen are need-based, as they should be. Other than that, a cursory review of what I have seen did not appear to be applicable to him. 

Even if he doesn’t technically qualify for the scholarships he should apply anyways. I’ve had friends that got them even though they didn’t qualify just bc they applied and very few other people did. 

[SDS]

Just now, bobs0108 said:

Even if he doesn’t technically qualify for the scholarships he should apply anyways. I’ve had friends that got them even though they didn’t qualify just bc they applied and very few other people did. 

I guess it’s just my pessimistic nature that there are millions of high school kids looking for scholarships and they all go to google and search for the same thing. How on gods green earth am I going to find something that few have applied to?

I mean we would love free money, but we do have money saved so it’s not critical.

[ct fab]

SDS - yeah I'm compulsive too to the point I know the dean of admissions of his favorite schools.  The one thing I know is you can take any scholarship he gets from a school and try to get the same thing at his preferred school.  Might not work but worth the try, as they can't take the acceptance back, if you know what I mean.  For instance, My son got $60k from Tulane (over 4 years), and if he gets accepted to a college he prefers we'll try to get the preferred college to match.  It's all a game really.

[bobs0108]

2 minutes ago, SDS said:

I guess it’s just my pessimistic nature that there are millions of high school kids looking for scholarships and they all go to google and search for the same thing. How on gods green earth am I going to find something that few have applied to?

I mean we would love free money, but we do have money saved so it’s not critical.

Local ones are a good start and anything where you have to write an essay or do something other than submit your name since people are lazy. You just make a generic essay that you can slightly modify for each scholarship.   

[Taro T]

15 minutes ago, SDS said:

I guess it’s just my pessimistic nature that there are millions of high school kids looking for scholarships and they all go to google and search for the same thing. How on gods green earth am I going to find something that few have applied to?

I mean we would love free money, but we do have money saved so it’s not critical.

Supposedly there's millions worth of scholarships that go unawarded each year.

Like Bobs said, look for ones that require an essay or the like.

[matter2003]

On 2/23/2019 at 10:33 AM, SDS said:

 

$45k-$50k for any out of state public schools. MD is $24ish for us. Rochester would be $57K. Miami $70k. 

If I was diong it now I would be going to a virtual campus at a REAL College. Cheaper tuition in many cases, no room/board costs and the degree is from the same school. Nobody will know it's a virtual campus unless you put it on the resume.  Curriculum is the same and its very well done now as wll.  Would be able to graduate with a degree for under $25K for all 4 years in many cases.

[bobs0108]

48 minutes ago, matter2003 said:

If I was diong it now I would be going to a virtual campus at a REAL College. Cheaper tuition in many cases, no room/board costs and the degree is from the same school. Nobody will know it's a virtual campus unless you put it on the resume.  Curriculum is the same and its very well done now as wll.  Would be able to graduate with a degree for under $25K for all 4 years in many cases.

If I had to do it all over again I would do a community college or a two year program and transfer into a four year school to save money. I ended up with 150K in student loans when I finished my undergrad from a private engineering school and ended up joining the Navy for 6 years so I could pay my student loans.

Now that I’m out I couldn’t find a job in what I went to school for being that I haven’t worked in the field for over 7 years now, but I’m getting my masters at a private college here in CT for free with the GI Bill actually get $3000 a month when I’m in school on top of the education for my housing. I don’t recommend it but military gives you free college. 

[Fishtree]

1 hour ago, matter2003 said:

If I was diong it now I would be going to a virtual campus at a REAL College. Cheaper tuition in many cases, no room/board costs and the degree is from the same school. Nobody will know it's a virtual campus unless you put it on the resume.  Curriculum is the same and its very well done now as wll.  Would be able to graduate with a degree for under $25K for all 4 years in many cases.

Depends on what you're going for. If it's the natural sciences and you're planning on going on for a graduate/professional degree, they will absolutely know the difference. Letters of recommendation will also suffer.

As an aside for the natural sciences, if someone's planning on going on after undergraduate to a PhD program or MD program, a big-name school is not always the best bet. While you're more likely to find a giant in the field at a big name school, the likelihood of an undergraduate interacting with that person is microscopically slim. They're also less likely to be enthused about teaching undergraduate classes. Smaller, UG-focused schools often provide a better preparatory education because of small class size, because professors tend to be more focused on teaching, and because undergrads have a better chance of being accepted into a lab in which they can perform meaningful research.

This is definitely the case for biology.