Not mine but obviously someones.
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No…that’s the name of the podcast. “Your College Bound Kid.”
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OP:
2 other podcast interviews you should consider listening to:
and …
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ahhhhh -thanks
i was wondering if it was by the actor 
not.
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“Your College Bound Kid” podcast college spotlight about College of Wooster:
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“College Admissions Podcast” interview w/Goucher College:
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Completely agree with all the above posters on the necessity of pre calc and 4 years of English if you are applying to a moderately selective college.
I wanted to pipe up about schools like Centre. I know about 20 kids who attend - 100% of the boys I know are athletes and about 50% of the girls. My point is that very small LACs can be very heavy on athletics, especially for boys. It is also very rural but very charming. Centre has a nice reputation without doubt.
If I was in VA I would look at Furman over Centre, simply for convenience.
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Both are similarly distant to Roanoke - Centre just outside the 6 hour zone and Furman a bit less than 5.
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@DadTwoGirls has already mentioned two of the Canadian schools I would have suggested (Bishop’s and UOttawa - I’ll mention as a theatre professional myself that both are strong in theatre and that Bishop’s in particular has an excellent student theatre scene), but you may also want to look at York University’s Glendon campus, as it’s a bilingual campus. Glendon is the LAC arm of York University in Toronto and is in midtown Toronto rather than north Toronto like the main York campus. Glendon has a French Studies major, has a drama minor and an on-campus theatre that even produces plays in French (!) and Glendon is known for its international relations-type programs. It’s much smaller than most of the Toronto universities, with 2000 students. US students can file the FAFSA at Glendon and receive US domestic aid, to my understanding, and there are lots of merit-based scholarships, including automatic entrance awards that might help it meet budget. The weak Canadian dollar right now may work to your advantage–COA will run you about 55k CAD right now (about 38.5k USD at today’s exchange rate).
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The number of varsity athletes at a school can influence the school culture, but I don’t think they’re always influenced in the same way. At some schools I have heard of a big division between varsity athletes and non-athletes, whereas at other schools it’s really not a thing. I think this is one of those things where research on the specific school’s culture will be needed.
A little while back the percentage of athletes at smaller schools (I think I pulled schools with less than 5k undergrads) was discussed here: Rest in Peace: College Closings - #1840 by AustenNut. I pulled some data and provided the source and methodology in that other thread, but thought I would share the percentage of athletes at the schools mentioned in the thread so far.
In alphabetical order:
| School | Varsity Athlete Percentage |
|---|---|
| Beloit | 35% |
| Bucknell | 20% |
| Butler | 11% |
| Centre | 42% |
| Christopher Newport | 14% |
| Colgate | 19% |
| College of Wooster | 24% |
| Connecticut College | 32% |
| Davidson | 27% |
| Denison | 26% |
| DePauw | 33% |
| Dickinson | 25% |
| Earlham | 41% |
| Franklin and Marshall | 30% |
| Furman | 15% |
| Goucher | 24% |
| Grinnell | 25% |
| Gustavus Adolphus | 35% |
| Hamilton | 32% |
| Haverford | 32% |
| Kenyon | 26% |
| Lafayette | 21% |
| Lake Forest | 27% |
| Macalester | 19% |
| Middlebury | 26% |
| Oberlin | 14% |
| Randolph Macon | 35% |
| Rhodes | 26% |
| Roanoke | 30% |
| Shippensburg | 12% |
| St. Olaf | 19% |
| Susquehanna | 26% |
| U. of Mary Washington | 14% |
| U. of Mount Union | 47% |
| U. of Richmond | 14% |
| U. of the South | 31% |
| Ursinus | 41% |
| Vassar | 18% |
| Washington & Lee | 34% |
| Washington College | 41% |
| Williams | 35% |
| Wofford | 23% |
| Xavier | 7% |
In order from highest to lowest athlete percentage:
| School | Varsity Athlete Percentage |
|---|---|
| U. of Mount Union | 47% |
| Centre | 42% |
| Earlham | 41% |
| Ursinus | 41% |
| Washington College | 41% |
| Beloit | 35% |
| Gustavus Adolphus | 35% |
| Randolph Macon | 35% |
| Williams | 35% |
| Washington & Lee | 34% |
| DePauw | 33% |
| Connecticut College | 32% |
| Hamilton | 32% |
| Haverford | 32% |
| U. of the South | 31% |
| Franklin and Marshall | 30% |
| Roanoke | 30% |
| Davidson | 27% |
| Lake Forest | 27% |
| Denison | 26% |
| Kenyon | 26% |
| Middlebury | 26% |
| Rhodes | 26% |
| Susquehanna | 26% |
| Dickinson | 25% |
| Grinnell | 25% |
| College of Wooster | 24% |
| Goucher | 24% |
| Wofford | 23% |
| Lafayette | 21% |
| Bucknell | 20% |
| Colgate | 19% |
| Macalester | 19% |
| St. Olaf | 19% |
| Vassar | 18% |
| Furman | 15% |
| Christopher Newport | 14% |
| Oberlin | 14% |
| U. of Mary Washington | 14% |
| U. of Richmond | 14% |
| Shippensburg | 12% |
| Butler | 11% |
| Xavier | 7% |
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If you’re talking top 100 private LACs, you will need to get comfortable with the idea of spending $40,000-$50,000. These schools typically don’t stack merit aid and need-based aid, so it is pretty unlikely you will get below what the calculators are spitting out. And even below the top 100, I suspect you would struggle to find a school at $25,000. Those schools are very dependent on tuition.
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Yeah. I looked back at the NPCs I’ve done so far; most are in the 30s with a few outliers in the 40s. I think home equity and aggressive retirement savings may have operated against us in a sense, but the die is cast and I am just calling it “a good problem to have.” I think we are going to need to expect to pay more and be happy if we end up having to pay less!!
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The balances in actual retirement accounts are not used in the financial aid calculations. Do you have your retirement savings in actual retirement accounts?
I have a suggestion which I think might help with targeting colleges. Your son is a homeschooled student using online classes. These can be very different than in person, group classes. Is there any chance he could take a community college course in the summer…so he can get a feel for this?
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There’s lots of colleges that could be less. But they may not be the types of schools that you have interest.
Then you have to decide that trade off of what’s important - money or the experience.
Ogelthorpe in Atlanta could be an option- likely mid-high 30s. They match UVA tuition for those qualifying.
But you have beautiful state schools in Wise, CNU, and UMW so you’ll be able to have your cake and eat it too.
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Thank you! Yes he has taken in person classes also—he’s in one now that is US government. Going great! He much prefers them to online.
Ours are all 401k and Roth IRAs but my understanding is that they can include the amount you’re saving for retirement annually, not the nest egg itself. I may be wrong. We save the maximum amount we can, so we take home a lot leas than our gross income, if that makes sense.
St. Louis University. Has a Bachelors to Masters Accelerated French Program.
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For FAFSA purposes, annual retirement contributions are no longer added back to income to calculate an SAI.
Some CSS Profile schools might still add contributions back to income though. You can tell by running different scenarios in CSS Profile school NPCs.
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Not anymore since the simplified FAFSA. No way to know what CSS Profile schools will do.
We also contributed the max to our retirement accounts for a LONG time. The advice we were given was to maximize these contributions before college tuition bills. In a worse case scenerio, we could stop those contributions or reduce them when college tuition was in the mix…but we would have a nice nest egg earning interest during that time.
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Great-perhaps it won’t ding us too badly! Many of the schools we are considering are CSS profile schools, so maybe there’s still some risk that those contributions will be counted as income, but we’ll see!
We have run the numbers and if we totally quit adding to the retirement now & never added more, we would still be able to retire comfortably, so knocking that down for a few years and investing in college instead could end up being a reasonable strategy.
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A college can include what it wants - a CSS school.
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