@ohiovalley16, you’ve already got some great ideas for trying to make those big college numbers real & tangible to a kid. Our kid was also NOT excited about the very generous merit packages (full tuition & full tuition plus) from some OOS public flagships. Most of her peers are shooting for prestigious selective schools and her friends are not voicing any concerns about affordability. In her group, it’s all talk of getting accepted. Surely, we cannot be the only family at her high school who will have to make some hard decisions in the spring when we lay out the merit/financial packages, read the fine print, and compare net costs. We cast a wide net for school applications, but all along we’ve tried to stress to her that it’s possible she may have to cross a favorite school off the list if the money doesn’t come through. The best financial deals, so far, are not her top choices, so she might be concerned we will insist she go with the least expensive school. Honestly, we’ve been vague about what we can afford because we’re conflicted about how much we should toss at her undergraduate degree. Opportunity cost!
He is actually very positive now. He is going to have a Skype Call after the holidays with a very prominent sports journalist who is an alumnus and a business journalist who has recieved many awards and is also an alumnus. He is also very impressed by the standing of the schools newspaper top 10 - 15 and literary magazine which is the oldest in the country. He is going to talk more with the students after the break.
i am a journalist. Do not major in journalism. This is what he should do: Go to a college that has an excellent DAILY campus newspaper. I cannot emphasize that enough. A weekly or semi-weekly is just not the same experience. Also, pick a school whose newspaper covers not only university news, but also local, national and world news. The newspaper should be an AP subscriber.
Here’s a list to look at:
http://www.collegemediamatters.com/2015/08/03/best-college-newspapers-2015-ranking-released-by-princeton-review/
All campus newspapers have online versions now. He needs to read them. See which of them appeal to him.
Then on the first day on campus, march right in to the newspaper office and find out how to become a staff reporter. Stick with it for all four years. Try out a lot of different jobs—news, sports, features, digital, copy-editing, opinion. Move up the ranks to various editorships. Try to get one of the top editing jobs by senior year (editor-in-chief, managing editor, news editor). Get summer internships.
By the time he graduates, he will have loads of clips and should feel confident about job-hunting.
Edited to add one more thing:
Try to attend a college whose student-run newspaper is independent of the university—not a university club. See: Cornell Daily Sun, Michigan Daily,
Ha Ha so true, @intparent! mine doesn’t want to eat it for 1!
Can we turn this thread into a drinking game where you have to drink when the words “impressive”, “prominent” or “awards” are used in a post? I’m so feeling that right now.
"Surely, we cannot be the only family at her high school who will have to make some hard decisions in the spring when we lay out the merit/financial packages, read the fine print, and compare net costs. We cast a wide net for school applications, but all along we’ve tried to stress to her that it’s possible she may have to cross a favorite school off the list if the money doesn’t come through. "
@Midwest67 that is precisely where we are right now.
Here’s something I went ahead and did as a very first blush so we’d have some semblance of temporary closure going into Christmas. We’re still waiting on that 9th acceptance, but expect to see it soon and have a general idea of what the aid is likely to be.
We asked her to break the list of 9 schools into thirds - her top three, middle three, and bottom three choices. Not filtered by any parental preference factors like cost or distance. There was a tie between two, so it ended up being 3-4-2. Assigned points like so:
2 points for being in her top preference tier,
1 point for being in her middle tier,
0 points for her bottom tier.
We also observed that the affordability tended to break rather cleanly into thirds as well. Assigned points like so:
2 points for aid already offered that would be sufficient from the get-go,
1 point where the estimated COA would be a bit of a stretch, taking into account aid already offered and annual COA increases, but in the ballpark for being manageable,
0 points if the aid already offered or expected will be insufficient.
At least 4 of those are pending competitive scholarship judgments so the numbers could change. But, close enough to get a quick preliminary score, totalling her preference points and the affordability points.
Out of a possible total of 4:
Three schools score a 3,
Four schools score a 2 (and a couple of those have a chance of rising),
Two schools score a 1.
So we can see an early pattern of what might work out.
But we’re setting it aside for now. For the first half of January the focus will be preparing the FAFSA. I hope some of the work invested in the CSS Profile will translate over, but we will see.
Irrelevant. Look at big schools that are graduating working journalists. If I had been the EIC at The Michigan Daily (I wasn’t, didn’t go there, just an example), I would love to hire kids from The Michigan Daily.
“Many good points here about reading the fine print for Honors Colleges / Honors Programs. That’ll be its own tab in the spreadsheet - privileges, GPA for retention, requirements for living on campus, service hours.”
Re: the fine print on scholarships. We noticed a few schools where the full tuition awards did not apply towards study abroad programs. We were told there were separate study abroad scholarships available, but how much and how competitive? We don’t know. There’s another column for the spreadsheet!
^^^ Yes, @Midwest67 ! Not to name any school in particular, but we happened across a study abroad opportunity within an honor/scholar program that costs, well, less than $10K but not by much. Not to worry, scholarships are available!
Come to find out the “scholarship” covers less than a third. Tough choice to make if “everyone else” in the program is going and the everyday COA has been stretching the parents to begin with! These things don’t show themselves in the NPC.
One school offers two $4K stipends for “experiential” (abroad, internship, etc.) with their Presidential Scholarship. I think that’s the exception, most schools are more like the first case I mentioned. So that $8K is not something to overlook or take lightly, though we won’t push.
"Surely, we cannot be the only family at her high school who will have to make some hard decisions in the spring when we lay out the merit/financial packages, read the fine print, and compare net costs. We cast a wide net for school applications, but all along we’ve tried to stress to her that it’s possible she may have to cross a favorite school off the list if the money doesn’t come through. "
No, but you might be amongst the first families to have a range of acceptances and financial offers to bring reality to the whole thing. Lots of people wait … without success … for those fabled Ivy League or OOS prestige flagship scholarships or don’t really look up the correct Cost of Attendance and forget to add up all the fees, so just look at say tuition at $35K and don’t think that is that bad.
Lots of families are basically not telling their kids there will be issues with paying $60 or $70K. Lots of families keep finances somewhat hidden from their kids, either they are trying to lay low or they are pretending to be richer than they are.
So basically, at some point this spring … lots of families will decide that snowflake is not going to their first choice school, is not going the prestige OOS flagship (specifically UCs, UMich, UVa, etc) … but will go to their public flagship or a lower ranked private with a scholarship or sometimes a high ranked private with a scholarship or a good OOS flagship offer (Bama, tOSU, UMd Bannaker, etc).
So you are ahead of the curve, and likely way ahead of the curve for many of your son’s peers.
You certainly can feed his excitement about the more affordable schools and play with the debt calculator (it takes a few days, but most kids can understand $900 a month for 10 years is a pretty big payment for that $100K difference). And, assuming you have given your kids some chances to explore financial realities and cost-benefit analyses, some of these things will become clear too.
In many schools, the tide turns slowly during the spring from … hey, we are all going to our top acceptances … to … hey, we are all going somewhere good that our family can afford (and probably more people are just privately making those decisions too).
So I had two conversations this weekend with parents facing a dilemma similar to the OP’s. In one instance, the family was going to need to “dig deep” into the family budget if the kid chose the lower merit award school. This seemed to entail eliminating a winter vacation and keeping the car an extra year or two. In the second instance, the plan seemed to involve selling plasma or an essential organ.
OP- we don’t know how important the money is to your family’s financial well-being. For some families, the difference between a kid taking the biggest award is the difference between not going to college at all, or the family being thrust into true financial hardship. In which case the answer is easy- take the money and run. For other families, it’s the difference between maintaining the current, comfortable standard of living and having to trim around the edges.
And parental age is important- a 50 year old breadwinner vs. a 63 year old breadwinner. How much of a financial cushion exists already- mortgage almost paid off, two employed adults, both with health insurance, both with life insurance. Regular (and maximum) contributions to a 401K vs. a retirement plan which consists of social security plus a few hours a day as a greeter at Walmart.
If a kid has grown up with an affluent life style and is suddenly being told to take the cheapest option, that’s one scenario. If a kid has grown up knowing that penny pinching is a group activity- and the only way to keep everyone healthy and fed, then that’s something else.
But I hope your son has a bunch of exciting options to think about, and finds a way to pick a college which meets everyone’s needs.
And I agree with Brantly. Writing, editing, photo-editing, managing a campus daily is better experience than any single J-class.
"“In many schools, the tide turns slowly during the spring from … hey, we are all going to our top acceptances … to … hey, we are all going somewhere good that our family can afford (and probably more people are just privately making those decisions too).”
@PickOne1 I was briefly tempted to print off that last paragraph and frame it.
And indeed we have seen this play out at her HS in prior graduating classes. We keep that year-end issue of the school newspaper that lists where all the grads ended up enrolling (self-reported). It’s just a little hard right now when we hear “X’s parents say they can pay for her to go to Y even if she doesn’t get any more scholarship money.”
I’ve gently suggested that maybe X’s parents have all the information they need, and maybe they don’t (figuring in tuition and R&B increases? hidden program fees? etc.), or maybe their financial situation is simply different from ours. But I haven’t made a big deal, because I don’t need to be coming across as beating up on her friend’s parents.
It’s hard to bite my tongue and watch for that spring scenario to play out, but it’s what we have to do. And hey, maybe one of those schools WILL surprise us with more money than expected. At least we always know where we stand.
I totally agree with brantly
@Midwest67 your situation sounds just like ours, including the lack of excitement on D’s part about big scholarship schools and our intentional vagueness about our true limits.
@ohiovalley16 I am going to try your calculation with D’s schools.
@MotherOfDragons I like your idea. Of course I like pretty much all drinking games…
OP, glad your S is feeling more positive about this option. and I hope that if it’s where he ends up, that it’s a great fit. Many good ideas above to consider if this school doesn’t look like it will pan out.
@ferrarepatrick73 I have been reading Dan Barry’s ,“This Land” column for years. Perhaps your son can intern with him? BTW I was able to guess the sports journalist you mentioned above. I would pay big money to have a martini with him. Another great intern possibility.
Really? Syracuse is widely considered to have one of the strongest writing programs in the nation at the graduate level, incredibly hard to get in, and their undergrad program is reportedly very strong also.
The “award” of which the OP speaks is an essay contest specifically for sportswriting, and the prize is a scholarship. 31 schools currently participate in it, including such schools as Valdosta State in GA (another strong sports school which has a journalism minor). Since SB seems to be a big sports school, it is perhaps not surprising that they heavily recruit budding sportswriters like the OP’s son, and do well in the scholarship competition. A very worthy undertaking, but not exactly the same thing as some general award for writing from a highly select list of journalism schools. This is not to put SB down, but perhaps put it in perspective.
My S is a working journalist. He majored in something else as an undergrad–his school didn’t offer journalism, even if he had wanted to study it at that point–and went to the Columbia School of Journalism for an MS. He graduated with a job at a regional daily paper. He didn’t have a scintilla of journalism experience in college.
I think that the route Brantly describes is a great one.
OP- this happened to our family too… Son received full tuition scholarship plus honors perks to a great college… then was accepted to an Ivy where we will have to pay full tuition. It will come to over 270K. We do have that money saved so it isn’t going to bankrupt us to pay… we are not rich at all just scrupulous savers … but still 270k vs free is hard to swallow, so I feel your pain!!!
What gets me is if we had bought a nicer house, redone our kitchen, gone on vacations, and lived beyond our means in luxury just making payments on things, then my son would have gotten full tuition covered at the IVY.(our income is less than 60K)… but it is set up so you are penalized for saving!!!
That is what is so infuriating about the current FA system. People who do the right things and save for college get penalized, while those who do not can reap tremendous advantages. A family’s net worth when they have school-aged kids is not about “privilege” or “being fortunate”, but it is about lifestyle choices and the willingness to save money over a long period of time.
I’m not sure that’s completely true. If you’d invested all that money in your home, cars, etc., the Ivies would likely expect you to tap into a lot of that equity. They look very closely at all your holdings, spending, etc.
FAFSA schools, which look primarily at income, are different, of course.