But in the OP’s situation, it is Furman University versus College of Charleston Honors College so the academics are equal with C of C offering more options academically & socially.
OP: If your daughter has not visited Clemson University, she should as the location & setting are quite different than either C of C or Furman University.
I would choose Furman. I am wary of schools that have introduced honors colleges and are not rigorous across the board, sorry.
There are different honors colleges, my daughters at UDel and Clemson felt there were very helpful, my son at another university didn’t apply to his because it was known to be a waste.
I have been following the creation & development of honors colleges since the early 1990s. Honors colleges can make a very significant difference in the quality of education received.
C of C Honors College provides a lot of meaningful benefits to students that are worth one’s time to research.
Ehhhh - Furman has historically had wealthier students but now they have to discount heavily. Historically it was religious - now it’s not.
In this case, if the student is truly interested in commercial real estate finance and they should look at the curriculum, one has to- and one doesn’t.
just because US News says a school is better doesn’t make it so. Harvard has failures. Hofstra has studs.
My C of C kid is in a job program with many Ivy, top perceived public and top LAC kids.
Look at work - we had a Harvard Law working for a Fairleigh Dickinson til a recent retirement.
Look where you live - my area of 7 figure houses range from Auburn to Ms State to UTK and Bama to Long Beach State and Lipscomb and Vandy. I met a young couple - one graduated Cornell. The parents bought the house.
Long term outcomes are defined by the students, not where they attend.
Budget matters too. The parent noted Furman is cheaper - that matters. Furman has been buying kids. Like other privates, it’s that or have no revenue.
Even if CofC wasn’t Honors, it doesn’t mean it’s worse for the student. Always pick major over school name. The parent also mentioned Poli Sci. Charleston has the Mroz Instutute and is outstanding.
Of course they do. They’ll find eligible guys somewhere. But even when you factor in all of the students at The Citadel, it’s still a 59:41 female:male ratio.
could be different – and I hope they are. 3 schools in New England we looked at were so-so. I would still want to be at a school where virtually all of the students were on the same IQ+EQ level as me.
Nice to hear and hope it is so. I should note that my best friend and his brother went to C of C. I just think being around a complete student body of the same IQ+EQ level would be better. I also think its a bad precedent to have students that are “other” than you at a college/university.
This is pay to play. Who goes to the most expensive, perceived top schools? The wealthy and the poor. Look at the wealthiest schools - typically less than half get need aid, sometimes a third or less. You have Ivy level talent at every flagship in America. Your most NMFs are Bama and Florida. Not sure about today but two years ago 25% plus of Tulsa’s class was NMFs.
There are trade offs - the most common is money - as you’re experiencing on your other thread.
Typically those thinking their kid is smartest will find out it’s not close to the truth, especially in fields like engineering. And there’s brilliance, frankly everywhere. And there kids that can’t cut it - pretty much everywhere too. Some, like Harvard, give out so many As….i think 60% or 2/3 mandated that they hide the less successful.
But this is a case where a finance major and a “commercial real estate finance major” will compete head to head. The former gives many options professionally; the latter is narrow and limiting AND for many employers in commercial real estate, offers no clear advantage.
You just can’t slice the bologna so thin. There is no silver bullet here- and no guarantees that with such a narrow major, you’re going to get a great job in commercial real estate (a volatile industry by anyone’s math). What happens when a kid graduates into a job market like 2009/2010/2011 when developers were sitting on their hands and banks weren’t writing loans and mall/hotel/Class A and B office space operators were waiting out the recession?
I put the two curriculums above to see. They are very different.
Interestingly, at Furman the student was going to be in Poli Sci which tells me they need to dig deeper into is a business degree truly right for them. What sounds interesting at the macro level and from a tour may not be when the student goes deeper.
OP knows this is about the boyfriend. In this case, you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t.
It could be, though, the student visited Charleston, which is vastly different than Furman and fell in love. We went to 30 or so schools. Charleston was 4th. I told my better half that day - this is where she’ll end up no matter where she gets in. Some kids just - upon visiting - they just know. My daughter cut her list - 16 to 8, 8 to 4, 4 to two - when she told us, even though she had schools like W&L - it was a big yawn. We already knew.
Maybe this student truly had a similar feel, forgetting the bf…no different than my other kid and Bama when he was going to Purdue engineering. The feeling he had after visiting Bama was so overwhelming that it became the - I don’t care where I get into - this is it.
So maybe this happened to the daughter ?
In the end, they can study finance or Poli Sci at both and commercial real estate finance, which has a very different and interdisciplinary curriculum at only one. So I don’t think it’s substitutional to finance.
Whether you think it’s too narrow or they can get to the same place as a finance degree isn’t relevant if it’s truly what the student wants.
And you will find excellent students at every school, not all families can pay for more selective schools, which is why many chose publics with merit and honors colleges. My UDel student was 8th in her class of 300+, 9 AP’s with 5’s, 34 act, turned down Villanova (the reachiest school she applied to) due to cost. My Clemson daughter had almost the same stats (9.95 uw but 33 act), only applied to target/safeties and was accepted with merit to 20 schools. There are very bright students without wealthy parents (but parents who do not qualify for FA).
Yes you are absolutely right – The wealthy and the poor. The middle class can get in but has to pay full price despite many schools amazing endowments.
Typically those thinking their kid is smartest will find out it’s not close to the truth, especially in fields like engineering.
Agree
And there’s brilliance, frankly everywhere.
To some degree yes – but I believe being at a college where the whole student body has a similar intelligence as a cohort is really important.
I would still choose Furman over C of C.
I have to agree with this. While I don’t share Publisher’s strong preference for large universities over LAC’s, there are definitely pros and cons to consider; so now that the student has realized that a larger school could have advantages, it only makes sense to give her other larger-school options due consideration. Clemson, while it’s more than double the size of CoC, has a very strong reputation and a range of programs that should check all of the boxes. I realize she got a great pitch for the real estate finance program at CoC, but (as with tsbna’s rather exhaustive comparison with Furman’s course offerings), I suspect they’re overselling its uniqueness. The Financial Management major at Clemson offers multiple emphasis areas, including real estate. Being even more specialized than this, in undergrad, would not be an advantage for a pre-law student, and (as Blossom already pointed out) likely isn’t a true advantage for an aspiring real estate finance professional either. Clemson appears to have strong pre-law advising and could prepare her well, whether she pursues a business/real estate career or sticks with the law school plan, or both.
Presumably she would have gotten an Honors offer from USC too, correct? This is also worth considering, as the Honors College has a great reputation. The business school here has a real estate major too, if that’s really the focus she’s looking for (although the merits of a broader degree should be considered).
If I were in your position, I wouldn’t be indulging the refusal to visit these schools anymore. It was one thing when she was laser-focused on Furman. But now that she has been swayed by the visit to CofC, Clemson and USC deserve the same opportunity to win her over. I’m not some strong-arm-tactics authoritarian parent, but at this juncture I would be comfortable making visits to all four schools a condition of funding the one she chooses. It’s not too much to ask.
Would the parental reaction by any parent be different because she wanted to change her college choice so she could go to school with her best friend rather than her boy friend?
I agree with seeing all (I’m a big fan of visits) but is this really the reason a - going to Furman for poli sci chose C of C - or was it the boyfiend’s mom. The student just found a major offered at one, not the other (perhaps).
The good news is - the daughter is beloved by the boyfriend’s family…..the boyfriend, don’t know - but his mom, yep 
I tend to think - if someone loves C of C for the tiny size and urban-ness, a U of SC could work because its campus is compact for a large school and urban…..but a Clemson would be unlikely to work.
But it never hurts to visit…ever.
I would venture that even the student herself probably can’t sift out, at this point, exactly why she prefers CofC. Is it just the bf? Is it the particular academic program? Is it the size, the vibe, the city, the coast? We can all theorize but there are a lot of complicated feelings at work here, and the student is less likely to gain further insight through pure introspection (or from the opinions of people who don’t even know her) than by getting out of her bubble and experiencing some additional options so she can compare and contrast attributes with greater and lesser appeal. I don’t think we have to pick apart her motivations. The important thing is that she still has more than three months to make a final decision. IMHO, she should be encouraged to stay in a “divergent thinking” mode - gathering information and exploring possibilities - and leave the “convergent thinking” phase of final decision-making for a couple months from now. She already made one evidently-premature decision; no need to make another. Keep options open and visit the other schools - you never know how those experiences might shed light on what she really wants, even if she ends up at one of the two current front-runners.
you are correct- it’s it about the commercial real estate. My daughter is clever. Mom and dad aren’t happy with the idea of following the boyfriend. Grandpa is paying for college. Grandpa owns a lot of commercial real estate- I seriously doubt the interest is genuine. She’s never shown an ounce of interest in real estate before this tour. And I might be too cynical, but I can’t help but think if she had taken the tour with a blindfold on she would still say she was smitten. My job is to let her make mistakes without letting her drive off a cliff. I need to know that COC is not driving off a cliff and I feel better about that.
I would have a hard time with this - and it has nothing to do with the names of the schools. I shared here before that my daughter’s very good friend turned down her first choice school to stay at the state school her boyfriend was attending. He dumped her in September - about 2 weeks into the school year on her birthday. Needless to say it was a pretty horrific freshman year. Personally, I’d say zero about the boyfriend and everything about the best choice for them. Long distance is a whole lot easier than when I was young - and I managed it. If it’s meant to be, it’s meant to be.
Without knowledge of the boyfriend’s feelings, this may not be good news as the boyfriend may feel pressured to continue in the relationship in order to please his mother rather than himself.
Leaving high school for college at the age of 17 or 18 is entering a transformational period of growth and change. Parents should step back from injecting themselves into a short-term (5 months) high school relationship (assuming that there is no abusive or other dangerous behavior occurring in the relationship) in order to allow their child to enter into young adulthood.