Cost Constraints / Budget (High school students: please get a budget from your parents and use the Net Price Calculators on the web sites of colleges of interest.)
Change to:
Cost Constraints / Budget (High school students: please get a budget from your parents and (have them) use the Net Price Calculators on the web sites of colleges of interest. If you have no cost constraints, please state “no cost constraints” rather than something ambiguous like “no budget” or “N/A”.)
Current:
Weighted HS GPA: (must specify weighting system; note that weighted GPA from the high school is usually not informative, unless aligned with the recalculation used by a college of interest, such as CA, FL, SC public universities)
Are we voting? If so, I vote for keeping the chance me the same.
The suggested revision for costs is just too wordy.
Some high schools do not do weighted GPAs at all. Some only report weighted GPAs. Very often the formula for these is not clear to anyone (I’d be happy to discuss this issue via message as I have a LOT of experience with this).
Agreed. As has been discussed in another thread, just saying “budget” has led to confusion on both the part of the OPs and the readers. Other suggestions were “cost is not an issue” or “my parents are willing to be full pay”. Or maybe “cap (maximum) willing or able to pay” (because some are able, but not willing to pay above a certain amount.)
I thought we asked students/parents to not include weighted GPA but to indicate class rank, courses taken, etc. to help indicate rigor. Weighted GPA can be confusing. Example
For budget, I would like to somehow say total cost of undergraduate education and point out that it includes tuition & fees, housing, food, transportation, materials (books, computer, etc). I would also like to notify them (remind them?) that the maximum a student can take in student loans is $27K.
Exactly. I would rather eliminate weighted GPA altogether. Even if we know the weighting system used by the HS, we still would focus on the unweighted GPA.
Good idea. Just have to qualify it with ‘most’ students have the $27K limit, and that we are talking about federal undergrad student loans. Obviously students/parents can get more from private sources and some colleges are also in the loan business.
One of my pet peeves is when OPs say that they are too lazy to calculate their GPA.
Another is when they don’t capitalize the names of colleges or use abbreviations like idk or ngl. I know it is a generational thing, but it makes it difficult to read.
The same questions often get asked because the same type of vagueness around cost constraints or weighted GPA gets posted frequently. It would help others help the OPs if the OPs can be nudged to provide clearer information in the first post.
Previous revisions of the template have addressed similar issues. For example, back when the template did not start with domestic/international student status, there were many threads where it was not revealed that the OP was an international student until many posts in, making previous replies inaccurate.