I remember comparing college visit notes with the neice of a family friend who is the same age as me. Her take on Brown was that it was (I paraphrase) “far to Bohemian. I saw a student attend class in pajamas! I need to attend a school where students feel it’s necessary to put on nice clothes for class.”
She did not apply to Brown. Ended up at Princeton IIRC. I applied to neither
Late 80s. Visited seven with two friends, spring of junior year, but it was more about learning ABOUT colleges — what to look for, that sort of thing. None of us ended up going to any of the colleges we visited.
During fall and winter of senior year, I visited the three I was applying to, plus a couple more.
None. I didn’t have the luxury of going around and “choosing” a college.
Setting: Me, age 18. 1986. No money. Broken home. Mother worked minimum wage job. Father MIA. Lower middle class.
To make matters worse, I screwed off in high school and achieved a 2.8 GPA my senior year. Even then, I told my guidance counsellor I wanted to be an electrical engineer. He laughed and said, “Crafter_Man, you need to look into trade schools.”
Not to be dissuaded, I applied to one school through the mail: The College of Engineering at the University of Cincinnati (UC). It was a publically-funded school about 50 miles away. I got a rejection letter, not surprisingly.
I enrolled in UC’s “University College” with an undeclared major. I was so poor that I qualified for all kinds of grants. I took the same courses the engineers took (calc, physics, etc.) and studied my ass off. Got a 3.8 GPA at the end of my freshman year.
Applied again to UC’s College of Engineering. I got in.
I visited zero universities, applied to 2 universities, was accepted to both, picked 1, attended & graduated. The main goal at the time (almost 20 years ago) was to GET OUT of my hometown. I was less concerned about the details of the destination campus.
Crafter_Man, awesome story.
When I was a college prof. I met quite a few people with stories like Crafter_Man, but it’s always good to hear another such tale. Shoot, I wasn’t all that far off from that.
I forgot to mention upthread that I also didn’t visit my postgrad school. I just applied, got accepted, and went. Location was all that mattered.
We are dropping our daughter off for her Freshman year on Monday.
She really only did two college visits. We wandered around some campuses close to home so she got a feel for different campus types, but she knew she wanted to go out to the East Coast. She attended the class reunion family and recruiting events at her Dad’s college. Late in her Freshman year of high school she took some internet match thing that gave her a name of a good match - and she spent the next six months or so pretty sure that was it. And on paper it appeared to be - it was a “just right” school in terms of her academic performance, it was in budget, and it fit the sort of school I thought she would do best at. It was early (most people do the trips their Junior year), but since it was a trip, and since if this wasn’t it, I wanted her to move on, we went out November her Sophomore year. That was it. It seems to be a great fit. She applied and was accepted early decision. We did admitted student weekend this Spring - you aren’t supposed to back out with early decision, but if she really felt she was making a mistake at that point, we would have.
She did a dorm weekend at a school closer to home, but still farther away to give her a different experience. It was a similar type school - but really it was a chance to spend a weekend in a dorm on campus, attend a college class to get some idea of what happens there, etc.)
Here is the advice I’d give to high schoolers.
Determine what you are likely to be able to afford and get into. Its really no use to go out to Yale if you have a 3.2 GPA, test scores in the 95th percentile and a completely ordinary middle class existence. It isn’t a lot of use to set your heart on a private stretch school that there is no way you’ll be able to afford if you get in. You aren’t likely to get a great scholarship from your stretch school.
(This was where my daughter’s friends all went wrong. We have lousy college counseling and a lot of parents who didn’t do any of their own research - so the girls all go their hearts set on schools that had 5-30% acceptance rates and $70k a year cost of attendance - and almost all of them are ending up at the University of Minnesota - which is a good school - but has the issues of a big flagship university where most of the students are commuters - huge class sizes, difficult to make friends, and a very urban campus.)
Casually visit (or at least think through) a variety of campus types within your realistic financial and academic target. Big public university, smaller public college, community college, private college or unversity. Urban, rural. Could you be happy in Grinnell, Iowa (its a great school). Would living in NYC or Boston be overwhelming? This isn’t looking at a specific school, but more getting a feel for the variety available. If your family takes a Summer road trip during your high school years, swing by the college campuses in cities and towns you go through.
Look for a good academic, future path, and personality fit for you. A raging atheist liberal will likely feel out of place at BYU, and a religious conservative may not enjoy Sarah Lawrence.
Now you can narrow things down and start attending prospective student days - if you are looking local, you might make it to half a dozen schools. If you are looking at going away, you may have to apply without visiting - heck, you may end up accepting without visiting. But if possible, try and visit “like” schools near you.
30 years ago, None. I applied to and was accepted by at least 5, but I unconsciously knew I needed to stay in state. I had never visited to the one I chose; we only saw the town as we drove by on the Interstate a few years before.
Visiting campuses wasn’t a thing in my family. I don’t know that any of us did.
My nieces and nephews have visited a number of schools before choosing. They have many more options than I did; they are in STEM fields and my sisters are far more affluent than my parents were.
As a teacher, I would tell high school students to be certain they really want to go to college before they commit to anything. There are so many useless majors out there, and many that aren’t worth the debt.
No research indeed:
For plenty of middle class families, Yale is cheaperthan UMN Twin Cities.
Read the whole thing in context. If Yale is a stretch school for you, you probably aren’t getting in to get one of those deals. And those deals are rarely available at easy to get into schools.
According to Yales web site, the average need based scholarship is $49k. The cost of attendance including room and board is not quite $70k. That still leaves you $20k short, and you aren’t figuring any books or any incidentals like toothpaste or getting home for Christmas. Sending our daughter off this year is costing us about $2k just to move her from the Midwest to the East Coast…sending her to the University of Minnesota would cost us two trips and borrowing an SUV - getting her home for Thanksgiving would involve a $30 Lyft instead of a $500 plane ticket. All those costs have got to be considered when thinking about what you can afford - which 30 seconds on Google is insufficient to explain - but all comes crashing down when you realize all the things your package doesn’t cover and your parents can’t afford.
BTW, this is what drove me nuts - and ended up with a lot of disappointed students. 30 seconds on Google will tell you that schools like Harvard and Yale, with huge endowments, are need blind and meet 100% of need. But MOST kids - even most kids with great grades and test scores - are not getting admitted to Harvard and Yale. $20k+ a year for most families who make $100k a year is still a LOT of money. So a lot of students and parents were depending on financial aid packages when choosing schools that did not come through with their acceptance letters.
And a lot of good schools are no longer need blind in admissions. They can’t afford to be.
When the kids were in the visiting schools pre-application stage, they didn’t have realistic expectations about where they’d get accepted or what their financial aid packages would likely look like. So they got their hearts set on schools they either won’t get into, or won’t be able to afford - instead they should make the investment in visiting those schools once the aid and acceptances come in and they can make informed choices - rather than falling in love with the feel of a campus that will cost your parents $30k a year they don’t have or that you will be waitlisted for until May and then told no. I mean, if you live close to Vassar, stop in and take a look. Carleton is an awesome school to look at if you happen to be driving through Northfield Minnesota or live an hour or two away - but don’t make a huge investment in visiting schools (airfare, hotel) that aren’t realistic.
I only visited one. It was a liberal arts college out of state, and my dad really wanted me to go there, so I did.
However, after my freshman year, I transferred to a state university in my home state without officially visiting, though I had been on campus before for football games.
That’s not how it works. It’s need-based financial aid. Yale doesn’t offer merit scholarships. They do not expect you to take out loans. Admissions are need-blind.
The estimated sticker total cost of attendance is $73,180 for the coming school year. That includes books and travel. The average need based scholarship only tells you about the average need, not what any particular family is going to end up with, so there’s no point mentioning it and the gap is irrelevant.
Median household income in the US is about $60k. Send your kid to Yale at that income with typical assets and you’re looking at a few thousand from work study and a few thousand from a summer job. No loans. Nothing expected from the parents. As opposed to ~$15k all in at UMN.
That’s what UMN charges. You’re unlikely to pay that much at Yale if your household income is $100k.
Maybe you should have picked a different school as an example if you weren’t going to verify before posting, but the information you posted to this thread about Yale is false. It’s too late for anyone already in or done with school, but it’s important to correct the record for anyone else so that they aren’t making decisions about where to apply based on ignorance of the Yale’s (or schools like it) aid process and availability.
Here’s the list of need-blind schools for anyone interested. They come in different flavors, especially with regard to supporting demonstrated need: Need-blind admission - Wikipedia
Most of those aren’t easy schools to get into. But if you’re the sort of student who has a reasonable chance of getting into some of them, it makes sense to only apply to the ones you would actually want to attend. And I can’t see knowing which ones you would want to attend without visiting. I was wrong above about applying to ten. It was seven. Six in the "meet full demonstrated need’ category. The 7th was UT Austin Plan II as backup. This was before the common application was common so maybe people apply to a bajillion now.
I already posted the net price article for anyone who needs that. Many schools also offer net price calculators. Yale certainly does.
You’re both right.
First, I’d take the ultra-selective schools–most of the Ivys, MIT, Stanford, CalTech–off the table. They are a whole different game. Last year, a quarter of students enrolled at Harvard got a 1600 on the SAT. No one gets in as a “stretch”. If you are in that pool, you know it, and the decision about whether or not to go is really it’s own thing. These are also the schools with endowments in the tens of billions, and they are the least in need of tuition dollars. They are truly need-blind because they really don’t care about your $70k/year. You can’t generalize about these schools to other schools.
The next level down is very different: your moderately-to-highly selective but not ultra selective. These schools have tons of applicants, but they do need tuition money. They are also doing two related things: they are trying to build up the perceived selectivity of their class and the perceived status of their program. To do the former, they blitz advertise and try to get everyone to apply so that they can get tens of thousands of applications and claim they are getting more selective because they are rejecting more people. To do the later, they focus on only taking kids that up their stats in terms of GPA and test scores. A great example of this: I had a student a few years ago who was an absolute rock star–amazing girl–but her test scores and grades were a little soft (by which I mean a 1350 on her SAT, an A- grade point average). She was rejected by USC and Notre Dame, but she got into freaking Williams, which is significantly more selective. Notre Dame and USC can’t “afford” to take anyone that is going to lower their “% of students in top 5% of graduating class” or “average SAT score” stats, but Williams doesn’t care, because my god, it’s Williams. They wanted the rock star and they got her.
However, again, those selective but not too selective schools also need tuition: they don’t have those $40B endowments. So if your test scores and grades are good enough that you’ll likely be successful, but still below average, and they think you can pay full tuition, they are more likely to accept you because someone has to be paying the bills. Something like 80% of actual tuition dollars paid at selective private institutions comes from students who graduate from the 150 most expensive private high schools in America–and everyone makes sure they get their share of these kids.
The next level is kids who will bring up those key stats and can pay full price. These are the kids who will likely get better offers. IME it’s very common to get merit money at this level–but it won’t be all of it: it will take the cost of attendance down to within $2000 of the Flagship State University they think that kid is also considering. I’ve seen this kind of merit money even from Duke–but with the caveat that a kid Duke thinks is getting better offers is a very, very strong student. These are the kids Dangerosa is talking about: if you apply only to schools where you are a stretch, you may well get in but there won’t be any money because they only really want you for your money–you aren’t helping their stats. If you apply at schools where you are a little above their average, you’re likely to get a much better offer.
Then you have the kids whose grades/stats are so far above the school average that they will very obviously have much better offers, and the only way they are coming to your school is if it’s significantly cheaper than the alternatives. This is, again, pure merit money. USC has this big scholarship where they fly a ton of kids out for 3 days and offer a full ride to half of them. Near as I can tell, these are literally the kids USC has identified as “probably have an offer from an ultra-selective school” and they want to have 3 days to convince them that USC for free is better than Princeton at $70/yr. And it may well be–lots of factors there. Lots of selective schools have some sort of “Presidential Scholars” program that is basically this: it generally is a full-full ride (including housing) and includes research opportunities, study abroad, that sort of thing.
Finally you have the kids who have no money and can only come if you pay them. How open a school is to these kids really depends on how much money the school has–old schools with big endowments are much more flexible. For instance, we had 12 very poor students get into Case last year, but only 2 got an offer that made it worth considering–and one of those had to be sharply negotiated. We had a third kid they really wanted–they called and called and called–but they couldn’t come through with the money–I assume because they didn’t have it. He went to a local school on a full ride. On the other hand, exclusive SLACs, especially East Coast ones, often give those kids remarkable money. Middlebury threw money at a couple of our kids this year, both of whom were solid but not like, Ivy-admissible. The Five Sisters also are great. NYU occasionally offers great packages–but not to many kids, and it’s hard to predict. In these cases, the school is paying for some sort of diversity. This can mean racial/ethnic diversity, but also socio-economic diversity, diversity of experience, geographic diversity. It’s not enough to check the diversity box: you still have to have the grades and test scores their internal stats say indicate you’ll be successful, and you have to be . . . interesting. You have to have personality. They aren’t paying for the stat, they are paying so that the rich white kids have someone interesting to talk to and can learn how to function outside the private school bubble they grew up in. Obviously, not everyone at these schools grew up in a bubble–but 80% of the tuition dollars come from kids who did, and they and their parents want a more diverse college experience. So colleges pay diverse kids to attend who otherwise wouldn’t be able to (and to be fair, admissions people often really like these kids and fight for them. There are a lot of people in admissions who are truly dedicated to diversity and opening up opportunities. But it helps that affluent, full pay types do want to see diversity and are more likely to pay to send their kid to a diverse school than a monolithic one).
What this means is that there is no one-size fits all recipe for where a student should apply. Not even close. It’s gotten to the point that being a college counselor is like being a tax attorney: you have to have mastery of a huge body of technical information that is always changing, and you have to evaluate every situation individually. It’s why high schools don’t have good college advising–they can’t. There’s no formal way to learn this shit, you just work with kids and talk to reps and go to conferences and read and it takes a lot of time and a lot of effort.
And, as Manda Jo knows about the school my kids went to - there was no college counseling, not even the one size fits all version.
An example of what I’m talking about. One of my daughter’s friends wanted Harvard. She was near the top of her class and had plenty of AP coursework. I asked her in her Sophomore year if she’d been working with her counselor to develop a Harvard attractive resume. “Huh?” A 4.0 GPA and being a good field hockey player weren’t going to get her into Harvard. She might get lucky, but there is no guarentees with the Ivys. She ended up with an ACT score in the low 30s. No volunteer except what was expected by the NHS here. And still no one said “hey, maybe you need a backup plan.” Her parents are middle class white people - Harvard has plenty of middle class white girl with good GPAs to choose from.
Her parents were counting on that “Harvard meets 100% of need” - and they themselves didn’t recognize the chances of her getting into Harvard.
She went to visit one college before she applied - Harvard.
And in December of her Senior year, when Harvard sent out its “we regret to inform you” letter. she was scrambling to pick a different school.
She ended up at a completely mediocre small private liberal arts college in the Midwest. One where her grades and test scores made her an attractive candidate to throw money at. Which will be great for her.
But had someone told her “sit down and figure out realistically what is likely to happen” she would have been able to pick from a ton of small private liberal arts colleges where her ACT score and GPA would have given her a ton of funding. Or a school like Tufts - which is a darn good school and meets full need (but is not need blind because it doesn’t have Harvard or Yale sized endowments), but gets overlooked because it isn’t an Ivy.
Instead you had a girl who got her heart set on Harvard her freshman year and no one warned her. Her mother took her on her only visit to a school where it would have taken luck for her to get in. They shortened their time to evaluate options down to two months between notification from Harvard and having to apply to other schools.
We had similar stories with Cornell, Macalaster and Carelton (both local, both good schools - Macalaster I know has issues with accepting kids who have to decline because the money isn’t there - my husband is a Mac alum and this years giving campaign and reunion had a lot of “this is what we are seeing”) and MIT.
My cousin’s daughter ended up at Vassar, and the family had to stretch to cover their contribution. But its Vassar, so once she was accepted, they stretched. She got some money, but not nearly the money that she’d have gotten from a school who really wanted her.
That doesn’t mean they should try for a stretch school, but it does mean you shouldn’t get your heart set on something that is a academic or financial stretch in the hopes that you get in and get enough money.
But if you can get into Yale, you can expect some scholarship money from the U - you won’t be paying full price. They don’t have a ton of money as a public institution to hand out, but its there if you are Ivy material.