@eandesmom: That exists, in a lot of different forms. I know that Carnegie Mellon offers Engineering & Public Policy as a second major. There are a lot of public policy-oriented majors at a lot of different schools that could go in that direction, too, and while looking through programs with my daughter, I recall seeing a lot of international relations programs with stuff like that as a primary track within the major (often with the developing world as a particular focus).
** QOTD: ** For you merit chasing, financial aid needing families (not said in a derogatory way at all :)), are you allowing your child to apply to a reach school that you know isn’t affordable, just to see if they would get in?
QOTD
My D13 will be a senior in college and she is majoring in Medieval and Renaissance Studies.
She has a campus library assistant job in the special collections department. She handles many 100-year-old first edition books. She wants to go into archive and preservation in a museum or a library. She likes old things.
My D17 wants to major in History and minor in Women’s Studies (or Gender Studies or whatever each college calls it.)
An aside for our language experts. Carolinamom2boys is asking on the Class of 2016 thread about Chinese, Russian or Arabic for use in cybersecurity jobs. This would be for starting the language in college, and I think the question is to help decide which language. From the avatar, her kid must be going to College of Charleston.
http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/discussion/comment/19758723/#Comment_19758723 if you want to PM or post there.
@itsgettingreal17 we are one of those families with a budget. We make too much to qualify for any aid, but have 4 kids, so we have to be careful with how much we are able to give each child. I guess you could say we are after merit money, but it is more important that our D17 finds the right fit within our budget. We are letting her apply where she wants. All of the schools are within $5k of our budget. If she decides to go for her reach and would happen to get in, we will make it work, but we/she would rather she graduates from UG with no debt.
@itsgettingreal17 Re QOTD Applying to non-affordable schools
No!! Btdt. It really is a huge time and $$ suck. When I think about how much money we have wasted on college apps (and funding CB!!), I realize it is just feeding the competitive monster. I don’t like the process and yet I have funded it!!
Honestly, by the time spring rolls around, my kids have pretty much made up their mind anyway and they really don’t care anymore. They are sick of the entire process and just want it to be over.
Chasing merit: We’ve told our daughter she gets to apply to precisely one no-merit-aid school, basically to see if she can get in even though she’ll definitely not be going there. It came down to Colgate or Wellesley as her one such school, and she’s decided on Colgate for it.
Re: QOTD.
We are merit chasing, living in the “donut hole.” I.E. the FAFSA is much more impressed with our finances than I am. So, we can’t afford our full EFC. I can sit down and do a budget where we can afford the equivalent of our state flagship, but over that I can’t see how unless everything went perfect or we took on debt.
We are allowing D '17 to apply to a few unaffordable schools that give merit aid. We are up front that she can apply, be accepted and still not be able to attend if she doesn’t get merit aid. (And the odds for several of the merit scholarships are quite long.) We call that a “financial rejection.” This strategy worked well for DS '14, we will see how well it works for D '17.
My daughter wants to go to vet school. So undergrad as cheap as possible is the mantra. So no expensive reach schools (or expensive non-reach schools for that matter). Should have 3-4 to pick from that make sense in terms of economics.
@HiToWaMom So cool! The description of your D13’s experience is amazing. My dd would love that (just throw in the foreign languages.) She loves books. She spends hours upon hours reading older lit. I think I shared that she was ecstatic when she found an 1800something copy of Marmion. She was in 7th grade and used her own $$ to buy the book. It is one of her most prized possessions.
@Dave_N – love this line: the FAFSA is much more impressed with our finances than I am.
** QOTD Applying to unaffordable schools **
No, we have never allowed our children to apply to schools that were clearly unaffordable. Too much energy, too much time, though we had fee waivers so it wouldn’t have wasted money. To be fair, we’re in a bracket such that the most affordable schools were Ivies and MIT, so we didn’t really have too many that were simultaneously a reach and unaffordable. U Michigan and all the OOS flagships for engineering for DS’15 come to mind though.
We did allow DD to apply to a small private college that had the exact approach to her major that she wanted, knowing that the only way she could go was if she won the competitive full tuition scholarship. She was invited to the scholarship interview but didn’t win it 
. Probably just as well, b/c she has such amazing opportunities at the school where she ended up.
QOTD: We are desperately chasing merit (think Rocky chasing the chicken). We are also in the donut hole, mostly because of a (never again recurring) spike in income in 2015. We are considering an expensive reach (ED) that fits his profile well, with the expectation of a NO-GO. If he’s accepted and the (need-based) financial aid is adequate, then maybe. HOWEVER, he won’t apply if the application will take a disproportionate amount of time.
EDIT: It should be noted that a reach he is considering has been pounding us with mailings that imply that they are extremely generous with financial aid. Their marketing material has even stated that families with income over $200,000 have received need-based aid.
(I am posting challenged today…that shouldn’t be a laugh in my QOTD. Oops!).
D is asking about applying to an Ivy just to see if she can get in (I’m betting that’s based on the chatter at camp this week). The Ivies are absolutely not affordable for us and I wouldn’t be willing to pay $65k+ a year for undergrad. So I just can’t see bending on this one. For me, it seems like wasted money on application fees. I’m thinking a reasonable compromise is for her to apply to Notre Dame if she completely falls in love with it after her summer program, and if she gets in, wins the full tuition (huge long shot), and prefers it to her other options, I would pay for her to go there…huge long shot buy may appease her.
@STEM2017 Yeah, I roll my eyes at those marketing materials, because what they fail to tell you is that those families are usually quite large with multiple in college at the same time and they receive a pittance.
QOTD: Yes, I would let S apply to a financial reach if there was some hope of money. It paid off for D15 who applied to a lot of schools (9 total) that were unaffordable simply because she wanted a small LAC and was chasing $$. She got a lot of small merit offers ($5,000 to $24,000, but not enough with the gap), and actually was offered a full ride competitive scholarship to one of her top choice schools. Without that, she would have ended up at the state flagship, which was affordable. And we were going to make her apply to Princeton because their definition of need is quite different than FAFSA’s, but she ended up not needing to apply to P. The private/Ivy schools can define need however they want to, and Princeton has the most generous definition of need.
Perfect timing for QOTD2 from our perspective. S and I are having a sit-down, no-holds-barred session about college selection tomorrow evening and H and I discussed already that he could choose one financial reach school just to see. Not sure what it will be though – S has a hard time deciding if he likes a school based on online information. Unfortunately (from his perspective), we will not be traveling across the country to visit all the schools he might decide to apply to.
So, I’m very interested in hearing the reports on UT, Ole Miss and Bama from you all.
QOTD1: S’s mechanical engineering major is probably the opposite of unusual. Is it the most popular major for the class of 2017? However, D14 is interested in sustainable farming and nutrition, which came out of nowhere as far as I can tell. She suddenly started investigating dietary and agriculture customs and practices all over the world on her own as a HS senior. She entered college as undeclared, took some nutrition classes which weren’t really what she was looking for, switched to a major that was discontinued and is now working on a general horticulture major. She hasn’t decided exactly how to make a career out of her desire to see suburbs filled with native plants instead of sod and people to eat real food grown locally.
QOTD Applying to unaffordable schools
We are not looking at merit as much as we are affordability. Neither my D nor I want to spend the emotional energy (or we are just too lazy) to apply to to a university that we know she is highly unlikely to attend. She is not happy about applying to her super-safety, but she is willing to attend there in lieu her first two years at a CC.
QOTD: My S is applying only to schools where there is at least a chance of it being affordable. His list is still pretty uncertain, but the only non merit $$ schools on the list are Harvard, Princeton and Yale. Based on the NPC they are the only schools that agree with us as to what we can afford to pay, so he might apply to one of those, probably Princeton. On the other hand they aren’t engineering powerhouses, so he might not bother when he sees how complicated the applications are. My guess is he will leave those schools until last, and then his decision about whether or not to even apply will depend on how the EA applications go.
Unusual Majors: S was really interested in a Marine Engineering/Naval Architecture major. But there are so few schools that offer that major he decided it wasn’t practical to pursue it for undergraduate. Most of the schools that offer it are either military (Naval Academy, Coast Guard) or not affordable (U of Mi, Va Tech). So he has decided to do mechanical eng. for undergraduate.
@Dave_N Love that line about FAFSA. I think the same but couldn’t have put it in such a succinct sentence