Did anyone apply for Fall '07?

MilwDad
Wed, 17 Jan 2007 15:23:55 +0000

northeastmom – I know how you feel. I enjoyed visiting Knox with my son, but if we had known going in that he would simply be outside the objective parameters for merit aid, then we would not have invested the time in visiting and applying. That may sound a little harsh, but there are similar great LACs, and the extremely substantial cost differential between (in this case) Knox and other schools that apparently have more flexible (or at least different) critieria for merit aid is not going to be overcome by the good feeling on a visit or the great literature. I just don’t think it’s credible to say that schools as good as the ones we’re talking about are, individually, so much better than each other that cost becomes irrelevant. For most of us, parents and students alike, cost is never irrelevant. (I’ll leave that kind of thinking for the poor folks who believe in their soul that an Ivy League degree is somehow a magic ticket to success unavailable anywhere else.) And this is particularly so given the very substantial cost difference between LACs and good public universities, a cost difference that merit aid at the LACs only ameliorates but almost never removes entirely. Maybe a simpler way to put this is that everyone has their breaking point. Most of us parents who are looking with our kids at good LACs probably have decided that the cost differential between a good public U and a good LAC that provides some merit aid is not the breaking point. But for many of us – and certainly we are in this position – the cost differential between a good public U and a good LAC with no merit aid is the breaking point.

Again, I don’t want anything I’m saying here to be construed as a criticism of Knox. They have far more experience than me in selecting their students and choosing which of them deserve merit aid, and they certainly seem to have done alright for themselves. If I didn’t think Knox was such a fine school I wouldn’t be disappointed. Having said that, I have since found that some LACs do publish their outside objective parameters for merit aid. (An example is Beloit.) That doesn’t tell a kid that he or she will get merit aid, but it at least tells you that it’s possible.

I guess the good news is that this is our older son of two, and we are learning a lot of lessons we can apply to the process two years from now.

By the way, the GPA issue vexes us too because we simply weren’t aware of how much importance was placed on this by colleges, and while we always encouraged our son to get good grades, we didn’t think there was anything healthy about being obsessed by them, and a solid B+ average, given the coursework, didn’t seem like an issue to us. We are a lot more interested in broader learning, and our son is the kind of kid who spends a lot of time in the evening reading historical books, literature and news and political periodicals that have nothing to do with his coursework. That manifests itself in his standardized test scores much more than in his GPA.

I have since come to appreciate (maybe appreciate isn’t the right word) that a lot of gamesmanship goes on from high school to high school because of the apparent importance of GPAs to colleges. My son goes to a very good public HS. I went to a college prep school, and recently I learned from a close friend whose son goes to that same school that it is not uncommon for the counselors to recommend to students, late in semesters, to drop courses in which they are not excelling so as to (artificially) boost their GPAs! The idea of that would have been preposterous when I went to school. But that was a time when, as a friend of mine was recently quoted in a headline story about our flagship state university, one only needed to walk upright to be admitted.