Some states do have smaller publics, though not all do, and the emphases vary (some focus on liberal arts and are LAC-like, others focus on engineering).
And this - I’d pay for the unique option that costs more - is why this wasn’t such an issue when my older son was applying to schools. He wanted a small STEM school, we didn’t have that. So what we are paying for him is right at our max, and about the same as what we’re questioning for Clemson. But it’s a different and unique option, like Kalamazoo in your example.
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True. Or may be commuter-ish, have various other unfavorable qualities that made it a poor fit. I guess it depends family to family but to us, it was more than just where can you get academic degree. It’s also about growing as a human being, spreading your wings and discovering your best self. That is not a one size solution. To us, we had a $50ishk budget. If a top 20 was in the budget or an OOS public was in that budget, it didn’t matter to me as long as kid was happy and was getting a good education regardless. I did not want to say - if not top 20-50 then in state public is your only option (which may not have been best fit for any number of reasons — felt commuterish, no marching band, shut out of competitive major, etc etc). I believe one will be successful where one is happy. And if I was willing to pay $50k for say Case Western, I’m willing to pay $50k for UDel as well. Not going to force kid to go to CC or UMBC. He worked too hard to not have some choice. Now if he needed to go to grad school after 4 years, I would have encouraged him to take that cost into account for total budget, knowing that May mean difference between loans or not. He has a good head on his shoulders - had that been in the calculus, he likely would have chosen UMBC. But he’s on a 4 year path so that was not an issue.
Not necessarily. Even some of the ones I didn’t name are pretty popular, including the one in our city.
We have a solid plan for paying for 4 years of any college for our 2 kids and they were/are able to apply where they wish.
With D22, the nuances of this decision didn’t come into full view until we were presented with real options (she is our oldest so I think we just couldn’t imagine what we might think and feel once it was time to make decisions).
D22 applied to OOS publics, privates and UCs (in state for us). It wasn’t until we visited UMichigan for accepted students day that I realized we would be paying double+ for a very similar experience (and prestige level) as she could have at UCLA, where she was accepted just 2 days before our trip to Michigan. I didn’t love that feeling.
It was really just luck that D22 agreed that paying OOS for Michigan was unnecessary when UCLA was an option. It came off her final list. And it happened that she loved UCLA more than Michigan (again, luck). Her other top choices were small liberal arts schools (Smith and Kenyon) and we would have been happy to pay for them. It was the OOS public that made me pause.
With S26 we have had to think hard about how we feel about this. Of course, he will have the same opportunity to choose a school as his sister but, boy, in state tuition is a dream. I realize CA has dozens more in state options than many states so I get why people might not have this same pov.
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I recently talked to a parent whose child’s list consists only of private or OOS public. The list is short. The parent thinks that a bad experience the child had in 8TH grade is going to make up for a low (by CC standards) GPA. No in-state public was on the list.
I get the sense that some people think they can will things to happen in college admissions. The wishful thinking is, “I have the money to pay for prestige, therefore, my child will certainly get in somewhere that I view as prestigious.”
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When I have kids, I hope I have the financial means to send them anywhere- that being said, I do not want to be 100k/year for a subpar fit. I don’t care about the prestige or ranking, but I don’t want to pay if it’s not a good fit for my child.
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It’s hard to say. Parents, like myself, want the best for their kids. Unfortunately, prestige is a luxury most middle class families can’t afford. It happened with us. Our daughter wanted to go away to college, but after taking an inflationary hit having to move to an area with a better high school, we just couldn’t afford it. She opted to go to community college for the first 2 years, and she’s thriving. We can afford the last 2 years.
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It really depends on how it is discussed. We certainly had the discussion. For one of mine, the OOS public was just as good (both in number of students, education quality, and major) as his first choice private, at a much reduced cost. His reasoning for the private was primarily location and he agreed that it wasn’t worth the difference in cost.
For some families, the in-state flagship is a good choice both academically and financially. I couldn’t see spending a lot more on a similarly ranked and sized OOS public just to be out of state, but was willing to pay more for a smaller OOS public with his major.
I agree that if the message is top 20 or you have to go to the local U, that is a lot of pressure. But if the message is you can go anywhere within budget BUT cost, and educational quality will be considerations in the final choice, that may land differently. There are private schools that I honestly don’t think would have been worth the higher cost compared to local/OOS public schools in terms of available majors, quality of education, networks, and opportunities.
To me, fit is difficult to determine based on brief visits,reputation, and review of websites. There are some obvious fit issues - a kid that wants a residential college with strong sports might not be happy at a school where everyone goes home on the weekend. A school with strong Greek life and limited nerdy activities would not be good for some kids. Beyond that, however, most kids can find their people wherever they go.
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I actually “get” the idea of paying for a “good enough” school. In our case I would say “good enough major/recruiting options.” (I know, many people would disagree with this). My kid’s first choice was Johns Hopkins. I said we couldn’t afford it and they couldn’t take out enough loans to pay. Georgia Tech was second best in the world by some standards for expected major, so we would have paid for that, for intended major. BUT, one kid wanted to go to NYU and major in TV and Film or something like that. We would not pay for that, and again wouldn’t sign for any loans. When one kid was applying to grad school to be a school counselor, we encouraged them to go for the LESS prestigious school, with the much cheaper cost. They took loans and went to the more prestigious school.
We told kids how much we would pay, and that loans (to be paid by kid) would be limited to the federal loan amount.
We did wind up “upping” the amount we paid, because one got a pretty big scholarship for a really good fit, for example.
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Fit is an interesting concept. I agree that there are some preferences that must have priority—like academic programs… a kid who is determined to be a nurse should choose a school where that is an option.
But other preferences are far more nuanced, and they don’t take into account all of the changes a kid can experience as they go from a 17 year old making a big life decision to a 22 year old graduating into their future. Lots of kids can bloom where planted and plenty of others transfer out of their choice because it wasn’t the perfect fit they believed it to be. Paying for “fit” has its own risks and assumptions.
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Paying for “fit” is also a luxury. For most families, cost is the number one driver when choosing a college. Many middle class families scrimp just to afford the in-state flagship, let alone being able to afford a $50k+ private or OOS alternative. Because CC tends to skew highly educated and UMC+ it is sometimes hard to remember that (and I’ll freely admit I fall into that category myself).
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Affordability is probably the most important “fit” factor, along with suitable academic programs and majors. Other “fit” factors are usually luxury preferences.
However, some students will find acceptable fit at a large range of colleges, while others may have difficulty at all but a few colleges. In the latter case, that can be a problem if the student cannot afford or is not admitted to those few colleges.
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Here was our approach:
“Here is the, ‘pile,’ for any and all schooling. Spend it how/where you want. Residual of pile will be yours to use for things we consider, ‘reasonable,’ (eg down payment on house, maybe a new car - not six months of vacationing in Europe). Use all the pile in undergrad, and any grad school costs are on you. Choose a lower cost option or a place with scholarships and keep the remainder of the pile for grad school or the types of things listed above.”
I would have never dreamed of limiting majors or choices of schools based on an expected ROI.
In the end, ds had a range of options from merit-based full-rides at in- and out-of-state U’s to full-pay at elite schools, to choices in the middle. We did not qualify for need-based aid. We were fortunate that the, “pile,” would have covered any university. This was 11 years ago, however. We do only have the one ds.
He chose to spend the entirety of the pile on undergrad and attend Stanford. And, I lied to him, because I covered about 60% of his MBA program when he returned there four years later. That’s the better direction to break a promise than saying I would pay for something and then not.
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My d22 had a classmate whose parents were the textbook parents on this topic. Starting in elementary school, they contributed to their d’s college fund based on her grades. If she got a less-than-perfect score, they contributed less. In first grade. The pressures on this kid were appalling.
Her parents told her that they would pay for Stanford. Anything else, she had her college fund, and that was it. The family income was high enough that she was not eligible for financial aid. When she was waitlisted at Stanford, they didn’t want her to commit anywhere else. It’s a good thing she did, in fact, commit to a school that met her budget and had her major. And it’s good that she did because she never came off the waitlist.
This kid is doing brilliantly, but social media bragging aside, her parents made it so much harder than they needed to.
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This is insanity…
One thing is to promote college education like “If you will work hard in school you can become an engineer like mom or dad”, and another is telling 7 years old that you are not putting money for college due to failed spelling quiz…
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I also hate the idea that parents are obligated to pay for college at all. They are not. There is no law that states that people need to pay X amount for their kids’ education. It is kind of assumption that good parents should do. But why?
Ideally, adults should work and then pay for their education themselves.
Almost anybody can afford Stanford after age of 25 with financial aid independently from mom and dad.
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“Ideally, adults should work and then pay for their education themselves.”
Avoiding that kind of thinking is what I believe allowed my family to create generational wealth. My great grandparents sacrificed to send their kids to college. That allowed my grandparents to be debt free and earn good money at a young age. They then were able to pay for my parents’ education, my parents for mine, and me for my kids’.
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First of all, great topic/issue. SO many students deal with this from their parents. I have a lot of strong opinions about this. What I’m about to say is not meant to be disparaging to a specific person here and is not meant to be a personal attack to specific posters.
I think:
- Parents who have these rules are totally out of touch.
- Parents like this are setting their kids up for problems with anxiety, depression, or a host of other mental health problems.
- Parents like this need to get a clue. It’s way harder to get into whatever they think is a ‘good enough school’ today than it used to be, if their definition of ‘good enough’ is something like a US News & World Report-ranked top 20/top 25 college/university.
- students don’t want to disappoint their parents.
- These parents end up sending the message to their kids that the kid(s) aren’t good enough unless they go to a ‘good enough’ college.
- Parents need to get the notion out of their heads that where your kid gets accepted to college is not a report card on how you did as a parent. It was bad enough back when all of our kids were babies and the parents were sort of competing about whose kid started walking first, or whose kid was potty trained first, whose kid started talking first, etc., etc. IT’S NOT A CONTEST! GET A GRIP!
- Parents who tell their kid that they’re willing to pay more for a ‘good enough school’, but actually don’t figure out until it’s too late what they actually can afford are not doing their kids any favors. Like the student at D24’s high school from 3 yr ago, whose dream school was NYU. Parents refused to tell the student what they could afford to pay per year, wanted to save face in front of their kid, lots of pressure for kid to apply. Kid actually got admitted to NYU. Then reality set in. They didn’t qualify for need-based financial aid and their family couldn’t afford the high cost per year. So the kid did not enroll in the dream school he got admitted to. He enrolled at the one in-state public which he applied to. He’s doing well there, but it was a huge let down and the parents were really embarrassed.
- Parents also naively assume that everything will just magically fall into place job & career-wise if their kid goes to Tippy Top University. Guess what? It doesn’t always turn out that way. Ok, so your kid gets one of the coveted Computer Science spots at Berkeley, where some of the lower division major classes have 1-2k students in them. Like, large enough classes that students are sitting on the floor and there aren’t big enough lecture halls to fit everybody. Or like now, how a lot of those Comp Sci UCB grads are having a heck of a time actually getting a job after graduation. They all thought that graduating from UCB would magically open doors, they’d get flashy programming jobs at some start up in Silicon Valley. But nobody’s hiring and the $$ dried up for new jobs. Guess what? You’re gonna have to be willing to move and live in another part of the country, or take a lower end job than you had originally planned for.
- OR…worse yet…your kid gets into Fancy School, you & your kid have convinced yourselves that this will be their ticket to Easy Street in life…and then your kid is a couple of years post-graduation and applying for their 2ND job after college and your kid actually says in the interview in the most elitist tone you’ve ever heard that they should hire him just because he went to Harvard (this actually happened where I work & I was involved in interviewing the person; the guy was clueless and a total elitist jerk who thought he knew more than anybody else in the room just because he went to Harvard. We did not offer him the position).
Or sort of a flip-side twist of this issue…an example from one of D24’s close friends:
Friend’s parents are from a large South Asian country. Friend’s parents paid for Friend’s older brother to attend college. Older Brother is still in college. Friend’s parents pressured her to get accepted to Fancy Schools. Lots of “But you should apply to Berkeley” and stuff like that.
Only the twist is that Friend’s parents refuse to pay a dime of their daughter’s college. Attitude was “Nope, we’re paying for our son, not you. You’re just a girl. You’ll have to pay for it yourself. But you have to go to a Fancy School. Hey, how about UCB or Michigan or Stanford?”
On top of that, pressure was “Go to a Fancy School or else you live at home and figure out college on your own and you’re not allowed to go away to college and you live here until you get married.”
Friend is currently living at home and commuting to in-state public university in the metro area. Ironically, Older Brother is also living at home and attending in-state public university, but the parents are paying for his car and tuition. Meanwhile, the younger sister, D24’s friend, has to fund everything (including transportation) herself.
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My great grandpa used to say, “if your kid isn’t better than you, either you failed your kid, or your kid is weird.”
Obviously more of a traditional mindset- but my takeaway is that a good parent will provide more for their kid than what was provided to them- that is what built generational wealth for my family. My great grandpa could only afford his love and support to my grandfather. My grandfather worked extremely hard and sent my mom to private school, even though it was a financial strain. I’m thankful that now I can go to private college and it isn’t putting a stress on our family’s finances.
In my opinion, it’s about giving all you can give.
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