Are Liberal Arts Colleges worth $200,000 more than flagship state schools?

Parents Forum
21

OP here. Thanks for all the thoughts that basically confirm my instincts. Some more background.

  1. Daughter isn't enamored with Liberal Arts colleges as a category. She particularly likes Reed because of its quirky woodsy intellectual vibe, lack of varsity sports, that kind of thing. Lewis & Clark, across the river in a similar setting with it's more traditional student body, lots of athletes and pretty upscale students walking around in college sweatshirts she found less interesting. So hunting down some other random liberal arts college that does offer merit aid is unlikely to be the answer. The most academic ones like Reed and Pomona tend not to offer any merit aid. She also has no interest in leaving the west coast.
  2. Yes I realize we are in a more enviable situation than most. My wife is a family physician, I'm a teacher. We have 3 daughters and just finished paying for daughter #1's college education at University of Arkansas. I never bothered to fill out the FAFSA because there was no point. We just paid for all four years full freight. CAN we pay for a school like Reed? We could probably get there with a lot of stretching and doing things like postponing our own retirement by several years. Our current income that puts us into the full pay category is a recent development as my wife is an immigrant from Latin America so we have far fewer years of higher earnings that most in our category and are playing catchup on retirement savings as well. And we also support family back in Latin America. So a decision to send the child to Reed (or the equivalent) would really likely mean asking my wife who is already reaching burnout to grind away for a few more years in full time clinical medicine long past the point that she wants to dial back and at least semi-retire and do other things. It would be her sacrifice more than mine. And that is a pretty big ask I think.
  3. Yes, we are fully aware of the UW Honors College. We were planning to visit the honors college itself in late March before things shut down. My finger-to-the-wind take is that while our daughter is a reasonably good candidate for admission to the university, the Honors College is highly competitive and perhaps more iffy. By reputation it also seems full of hyper-competitive pre-med types who make the smaller honors classes brutally competitive. So there may be both pros and cons to the Honors College.
  4. Some more background. I'm a Reed alum but I also went to grad school at UW in marine sciences. So I've been around both campuses for years. My own personal take on the difference is that small liberal arts colleges do a TREMENDOUS amount of hand holding of affluent kids who are used to helicopter parenting. That is partly what you get for your money. Much less of that at the big publics. At the big schools, the students who are highly successful create their own support groups for themselves. Especially the immigrant kids at a place like UW. It's just not deans and student life counselors and such doing the organizing. There are just ad-hoc groups of motivated students in departments all over campus who are making the school work for them in their own way. I'm pretty sure this daughter is mature and self-disciplined enough to make a big school work for her. She is more the kind that will need to be kicked out of the lab at 10 pm on a Friday and told to go have fun. Than the opposite.
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We have also given thought to UBC and possibly University of Victoria. They are both much closer than any of the CA schools. Vancouver BC is a 5-6 hour Amtrak ride from where we live in Vancouver WA. Are there threads about UBC here? Especially the experience of American students and families? Or do I need to start one. My own back of the envelope guestimate as to the cost of International Tuition at UBC is that it would basically split the difference between in-state tution here in WA and full freight at a top liberal arts private school. So maybe $25k more than UW compared to the $50k more that Reed would cost.

As for WUE. The top OR and CA flagships don’t participate. We did visit UO and she didn’t fall in love with it but it is a viable backup. They have out-of-state merit scholarships that would bring the cost down to within $10-15K of UW. The most viable WUE school is probably Utah but that is a long ways away. She would probably rather go to Western Washington in Bellingham or one of the local privates like UPS or Lewis & Clark if both UW and Reed fall through. So we aren’t actively looking into WUE at this point.

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I too am a Reed grad and from Seattle and would say that no school in my opinion is worth $200,000 unless money is not an issue. We are lucky on the west coast that we have such strong state schools from UDUB to the UC’s in California. I find the state schools are especially worth it you are majoring in the sciences because the research arms are so highly regarded and well funded.

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Yes, times have sure changed. I went to Reed in the early 80s. Tuition was in the 8K range. My parents (school teacher and nurse) kicked in a couple thousand. I covered the rest by working in the campus boiler room at nights and doing construction in Portland over the summers and a couple of small loans. The idea that I have to write a $75k annual check to send my own daughter there with no hope of relief is just galling.

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I just have to say that the median price of a home in the U.S. has very little to do with whether or not this upper middle class family should pay for a private liberal arts college vs a large public flagship.

To the OP, I think you can understand the value of a Reed education as you are an alum but if I had your choice, having not already saved a good portion of your daughters college educational expenses and would have to borrow most, if not all, of the money, I think the prudent choice would be to chose UW.

Edited to remove my question.

2 Likes
26

Sounds like Whitman might fit her better than someplace like Lewis and Clark if she wants to keep an lac on the list. They do give decent merit sometimes. Yes, I was thinking Utah and perhaps Montana State for WUE but mainly if you think she needs backups.

27

We visited WSU last summer and while the campus itself was very nice, she was not at all taken by the idea of living in Pullman. It has to be the most isolated major (big 5 conference) school in the country. She isn’t really a car person and doesn’t like the idea of the long remote drive over mountain passes and 2-lane rural highways to get to Pullman from Vancouver WA compared to just hopping on Amtrak Cascades to get to UW or WWU in Bellingham (or UBC). She’s more of an urbanite who’d rather just hop a train back and forth to school and use bikes and light rail to get around rather than driving. It was like pulling teeth to even get her to take driver’s ed and get her license.

We haven’t visited Whitman yet. Walla Walla is more of an actual town than Pullman. It will be worth a visit I think but my gut tells me she’ll rather be west of the Cascades in a more central location along the I-5 corridor. So UPS in Tacoma (which we also haven’t visited) might be a more likely alternative. When I ran the NPC for Whitman it popped up with a $10k financial aid grant (as did Lewis & Clark) while Reed showed full price. Whether that means anything in real life, who knows. At least they aren’t 100% need-based.

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Just read your number 2 based on the alone it’s a big no. Your helping family and your putting off your own retirement. You don’t know your health situation or your families in years to come. Now the virus and that can out a strain on your family financially as well. Your giving your daughter the best gift of all. A quality education! She should be grateful that you are able to.

29

Another thought that occurs to me. The massive savings we gain by choosing a flagship state school opens up a lot more opportunities to afford supplemental enrichment experiences. We are an Hispanic family. My wife is Chilean and our girls are all dual-citizens. She talks of things like a year abroad in Spain or Chile/Argentina. Summer research in Costa Rica or Barcelona. That sort of thing.

Four years of paying full-freight at a spendy liberal arts school like Reed or Pomona will be a white-knuckle experience financially, especially with a younger daughter on deck. Sending her in-state will mean we can give her a lot more ancillary experiences if we want, and if she wants to take an extra year because she is changing her course of study or something, it won’t give me a heart attack.

So I guess I’m talking myself into the advantages of the massively cheaper flagship state school route. Not just for the cost savings, but for the added flexibility should she decide to take a more scenic route.

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While I wouldn’t think of Utah as an obvious alternative to UW if the costs are close, they have very good merit scholarships for 4.0GPA if you can push that SAT score above 1500 (automatic four year OOS full tuition scholarships required 4.0UW/34ACT this year). In addition they have 30 full ride Eccles scholarships per year and are keen to attract a diverse group of students to that cohort group. With an improved SAT score she would have a shot at that, which provides a really good experience for an outdoorsy kid.

While not particularly close in driving terms, SLC is a short flight from PDX and is a doable drive for dropoff (about the same as for us in NorCal - my D chose Utah over UCB/UCLA instate options and loves it there).

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I’m a huge fan of LAC’s but I think the OP’s daughter made a good choice. 200K is far too much of a difference to make Reed make sense.

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Interesting. I have heard good things about Utah but it hasn’t really been on our radar except as the obvious top school in the WUE program for someone coming from WA.

If this pandemic ever lets up, we’ll probably do a summer road trip loop through CA just for kicks. We could do the return loop through Vegas, SLC, and Boise if we wanted to.

On the list of schools to visit: Santa Clara, Occidental, the Claremont Colleges, Loyola Marymont, and maybe USF, USD if she decides she wants a Catholic education to make her grandmother happy. Perhaps also Stanford and USC if we are going to be in the neighborhood anyway for comparsion, athough I don’t think she is motiviated to put together the kind of applicant portfolio to make those a possibility.

Probably not even going to bother to check out any of the UC schools because out-of-state tuition puts them into the Reed price range anyway. And I’m not sure what she would gain by going to Berkeley or UCLA over UW. We have the giant urban flagship right here at home. She can always go to one of those places for grad school.

We are really casting a wide net from directional state schools like Western Washington to high-end liberal arts colleges. I honestly don’t know which are unrealistic and which aren’t. She has an unweighted 4.0 with the usual AP-type transcript. But honestly not a ton of EC stuff other than music and cross country because I let her have a life rather than drive her to be the super student. She is also Hispanic but of upper-class South American roots, not poor Mexican/Chicano type roots. So I’m assuming that isn’t much of a hook, and doesn’t need to be taking a scholarship away from some 1st generation migrant worker kid. Her first attempt which is more or less her “practice” attempt at the SAT last fall was 780 Verbal and 620 math. She had been doing some serious prep work on the math portion to prepare for the March 14 sitting but they pulled the plug on that the very day before. So who knows if/when she will retake again. Maybe in the fall. She thinks she can easily bring her math up to the 700 range based on her practice so that would put her closer to 1500. We haven’t bothered with the ACT and probably wont especially if staying home at going to UW becomes her first choice. Although I have heard that some kids do better on the ACT than SAT. She will scream at me though if I show up with some ACT test prep books on top of the SAT stuff I’ve been making her do!

33

Yes, a particular school can be “worth” the additional price if the family can “afford” what it takes to pay it, and if the extras a particular student gets can make a big difference.

We have close friends who were hardline public school all the way. They attended public programs right through Grad/prof School and have done very well, enjoying a great quality of life all the way. Their two oldest kids did pretty much the same. But then came #3. Being insightful people, despite their beliefs, they took a deep breath and came to the conclusion that 3’s chances of getting through a large flagship university or state directional college were not good. Just maybe, maybe , maybe little LAC would work out. So they coughed up thextra funds, and even then it took an extra couple years, but 3 barely made it. To this day, they feel that he wouldn’t have made it back for his second year without the support of the small school he attended.

There are also kids who have social challenges, need a smaller, more controlled environment , or will be a lot happier at a particular school over another. The question comes down to whether the cost to others in the family, due to the additional cost of a school or really any experience is worth it.

This is something you and your wife need to discuss and then discuss with your daughter. We chose to retire with less, eliminating some scenarios from our retirement life, cutting down on what we’ll have in the reserves to help our adult children, grandchildren because of what we paid to private schools. It’s a done deal for us, so there is no sense running the alternate possibilities. Sometimes I’m pretty sure it was “worth “ it. Sometimes not. Sometimes, really no way to say.

From what you have said about your DD, it appears to me she can thrive just fine at UW. My one son had a roommate, still a great friend, who came from Seattle with a parent who was a long time professor at UW. So, the additional cost to send him to the LAC he attended was substantial over going to the hometown school. But, given that young man’s personality, and some issues he had as a young adult, the smaller college gave him a boost in a way that I felt was important. It doesn’t appear as though your DD has such issues. And who knows, your youngest may be in that situation. You seem to be a parent that is in touch with these things.

$200k can buy a lot in needed support if such need arises. When it is an amount that is not a big deal, it isn’t an issue but when you have to bring up the cost, then it is.

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Don’t assume that by applying for merit-based scholarships you would be “taking a scholarship away from some 1st generation migrant worker kid”. The applicant pool tends to include a disproportionate number of families who are unable or unwilling to pay a relatively high EFC. Amongst my D’s classmates the vast majority are middle class or above.

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OP. Trust your instincts. If you were economically indifferent Reed could be a fantastic choice. If not, it’s moot. Aside from the fact that UW is such an incredible school. I believe all the COVID modeling being used by the administration comes from UW. Pretty important important stuff.

In my estimation, based on the story above, if I had a son who would take 6 years to graduate being a full time student without the ability or desire to go to a professional school, I would say that was perhaps a missed opportunity.

No way would I recommend spending 200k for college, plus the 50k per year in lost earnings for six years just to say you barely made it out of a liberal arts college.

500k in costs for a 23 year old has an economic time value of money that’s really monumental.

Also there are certainly other ways to navigate a prosperous life as an entrepreneur, skilled tradesmen, professional solider or LEO in some locales. Community college while working and working towards a degree.

Sometimes the drive by us parents for “college at all costs”, creates some of the problems we hear about related to college debt. Large sums for positions and that don’t have real roi. And perhaps not seeing a passion, talent or strength in your child in another valuable career.

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I didn’t mean it that way. I’m not going to have her chase down any independent scholarships designed to help Latino kids get a leg up. That would feel wrong. And even though she is technically a first-generation child of immigrants (at least on her mother’s side) she isn’t exactly who they have in mind. But if some affluent school wants to toss her an extra dime because she checked the Hispanic box on her admissions application and they want to boost their “diversity” numbers then fine.

37

Note that there are public LACs, which can be relatively inexpensive for in-state residents. Some are not too expensive even for out-of-state students (e.g. University of Minnesota - Morris and Truman State). For some reason, people here tend to think of “private” and “expensive” whenever LACs come up.

The state of Washington has a public LAC, Evergreen State, but it may be too unorthodox in the wrong ways for someone who would consider Reed or UW Seattle and want to go on to graduate study.

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Yeah. Not really interested in Evergreen, although it is the closest in-state school to our home other than our local branch campus WSU-Vancouver. I haven’t been there in ages, but from reports it is somewhat struggling to maintain relevance and recruit quality students and seems to have kind of lost its way in recent years as education has shifted more towards practical outcomes. They seem to be shifting their mission more towards non-traditional students and such. In my opinion, WWU is the far better option for those looking for a somewhat smaller and more liberal arts type public school experience. It is mainly undergrad focused and a big teaching college as that was its original mission. But every year is becoming more competitive as it is getting the overflow from students who didn’t get into UW or who just don’t want to deal with the giant university in the big city. We were quite impressed when we visited last summer. Beautiful campus. It isn’t our daughters first choice but she liked it enough to put it on her list. They also have generous merit scholarships for in-state students so it would be our cheapest option by far. It would be about $12,000 less than UW with the merit aid they offer based on grades/SAT scores that my daughter already meets. We need to go back and take a harder look at the science offerings to decide if it would prepare her adequately for future biomed type grad studies. We just popped in to take a look and did the generic tour.

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Look around. $200K is not worth it. My oldest, she of the username was enamored of Reed but ended up at Denison. My younger D ended up at L&C and Loved her time there. If you really want a LAC then look around. If that’s not important then go with UW which is a great school.

40

Even if the costs were similar, it’s going to be tough to beat UW for bio-med research, that’s one of its best attributes. A friend of ours sent their daughter to UW, pre-med (out of state) and she loved it there and is in med school now. See how your D does with the other LACs in CA, in terms of admission and money, but given the sacrifices your family is making, save the money.

“She is also Hispanic but of upper-class South American roots, not poor Mexican/Chicano type roots. So I’m assuming that isn’t much of a hook,”

That’s a very interesting nuance you picked up, in the sense that colleges want to feel good about saying they helped first-gen, URMs, whose parents didn’t go to college, the family is low income, and they’re going to provide the income mobility that this family needs.