@mommdc - not sure I understand. Can you please elaborate? Thanks.
@ccinfo2, I agree with @SnowflakeDogMom, but that’s just my opinion. Our DD16 had a similar situation. She wanted to go to Purdue. She received about 10k per year merit from Purdue, but OOS would have been about $44k. She was NMF and had full rides a few places and ultimately decided to go to UTD where she has a full ride. She does plan on getting a Masters degree, so she says she will go to Purdue for her Masters degree. She can use the money I saved for her for her a Masters degree and that money is hers regardless of whether she gets a Masters degree or not, I saved it for her for college and she earned it by getting a scholarship.
Hey to all the fellow Cinci Bearcats out there. DD just got the Orientation registration dates for Engineering! She is now signed up! I hope this isn’t a mistake, but she wanted to sign up as soon as possible so we are doing it the day after we get back from our 2 week Europe trip (her graduation present-it’s just the 2 of us going), our flight gets back at 5:30 the night before. She wanted to do the orientation as soon as possible so classes don’t fill up, so we are going with it. She is super excited for orientation, and to be done with high school, to start college, all of it!
@shelleee Coming home from Europe is a lot easier with the time change than going there - so she should be fine from that stand point. Hopefully though you don’t have any flying delays. I would be reticient to commit to being anywhere because the airlines are so inconsistent.
@ccinfo2, I am sorry, I don’t know much about the UC system, or UC Berkeley, but I thought I heard people complain about impacted majors, like CS and such, not sure if economics is part of that.
I guess that causes a difficulty in getting into the classes you need to graduate on time.
Hopefully one of the CA posters here with more knowledge can explain it better.
But I guess that would be something to check into.
@zomaya99 congrats to your D on all those fantastic acceptances. I was wondering why she applied to so many other colleges though if she got into her first choice EA? was she deferred and then admitted?
https://ls.berkeley.edu/advising/planning/schedule-planning/choosing-major/high-demand-majors
^From UC Berkeley. It seems that there are some high demand majors that you might not be able to declare.
@ccinfo2, one other consideration between UT and Cal is how much collaboration vs. competitiveness is apparent in the student body. I have read that Cal students lean more competitive whereas UT students tend to be less intense. I would put Rice in a similar category as Duke and Cal. Of course there are always exceptions and it may vary across majors.
Comp Sci, for example, may be more competitive both in terms of getting into the Dept at Cal and how students view their fellow students. Again, always room for exceptions. When we toured Duke and Cal last summer, my impression was that the students seemed very intense and not too happy as compared with UT, UNC, USC (Southern Cal), and other universities visited!
Adding to that, as posted by @mommdc, less flexibility in getting the major you want or that it may take five years to graduate because you could not get the classes you wanted due to the large student body, I would again lean towards UT and the instate tuition for a solid public university education.
@momtwin, thanks for the validation. Sometimes facts are just facts as the commercial on CNN goes :-). By the way, I miss the Bay Area and would love to live there again, just would not want to live in Berkeley near campus. On the other hand, there are some great Thai restaurants in Berkeley!
Hi @stemmmm. I think our situation is pretty typical. My DD was accepted EA to Yale and $0 financial aid. If the financial aid had been there we would have rescinded our applications to the other schools. When we dove deep into the appeal process we realized that having an offer from a “peer” school would make a difference, we went forward with the remaining Ivies and top schools. We did drop three other schools and she withdrew her acceptance from Pitt very early on so the money she received there could go to someone else.
When I tell you that all of the offers were all over the place? It’s crazy! Same financial information. For the record though, my spouse is self-employed so the calculators were just wrong. We also had a major change in income from 2016 and 2017. The financial offers ranged from $0 to 50% off the cost of attendance. So we are appealing with the best financial aid package we received. We are still waiting to receive the financial aid package from Yale.
My advice to anyone next year that needs financial aid is to wait until all of the packages are in because you really don’t know what it will be. Especially families with someone self-employed.
Just back from spring break in the Dominican Republic and I see that I have missed a lot. Have only scrolled through but congratulations to all on their acceptances! Exciting times ahead for all.
DD has known where she’s been going since before Christmas since she applied to a combination of rolling, EA, and one ED so the details of some of these decisions are fuzzy now for me. Her ED school actually was the second-to-last decision that she received strangely enough, since some schools, like Miami OH gave her a decision 2 months before their official EA notification date. Here’s the rundown, in no particular order.
Eight applications, all acceptances. Merit at all schools except her ED school of course, ha ha. DD did not do any honors applications since she was accepted to her ED school so those would have been moot. I’ve listed what I remember.
Auburn (merit)
Butler ($21K)
Clemson (merit)
Elon (merit)
Loyola-Chicago (long before they made the final four LOL) ($18K merit, honors??).
Miami Ohio ($23K merit, plus University Scholars and Honors program)
Ohio University (merit)
Syracuse (no merit)
Syracuse decision came the night of December 19 and we left for Europe the next morning. Thank goodness or DD would have spent two weeks hunting down Wi-Fi and checking her portal obsessively.
DD was over the moon with the Syracuse Newhouse acceptance. It has been her #1 since freshman year of high school and with an acceptance rate below 10% a definite reach.
And with that, I am done with the college application roller coaster!
@shelleee Nursing only had three orientation dates, so we, too, signed up for the first one. May 29 - sandwiched nicely between graduation and my other daughter’s adult black belt testing. I was really hoping we wouldn’t have to choose between them (black belt would have had to wait until December, which would stink). Is your daughter going to stay on campus?
Congrats on all the amazing school acceptances! My daughter came home last night from a Rube Goldberg project meeting saying that a lot of the amazing kids she knew were shut out of a lot of good schools - one kid had a 35 ACT, multiple sports, etc., and was outright denied by UWSTL. Dang. These kids have many choices, obviously, but it was surprising - this kid took calculus as a freshman. ^:)^
Our final tally is a bit complicated since he was applying as a music performance admit, there were separate admissions decisions from the music school and the general university, and some schools he dropped before finishing the music application. But I am going to call it a record of 10-1-1.
Admitted both university and music: USCal, FSU, Trinity-San Antonio (non-audition), Miami-Fl, Furman, Loyola-NO, Fordham (non-audition)
Admitted to university but did not complete music app: ASU, USCarolina
Admitted to university but denied music admission: SMU
Waitlisted: UNC
Denied by music school, which also meant a university denial: Vandy
I live in CA and it is common knowledge that at most of the UC’s it isn’t easy to get classes and there is a real chance that you won’t get through in four years. I know there are exceptions but it isn’t uncommon to not finish in 4 years. Schools are just really full, my DS didn’t even apply to any UC’s. They are really great schools just really crowded.
I’ll do a final tally:
Accepted:
Colorado School of Mines, Honors
University of Michigan
University of Wisconsin
Virginia Tech
Cal Poly SLO (invited to honors)
University of Washington, direct to engineering and honors
Dartmouth
UCSD
Denied:
Stanford
MIT
Georgia Tech
UC Berkeley
Still up in the air where he will be next year. Decision to be made May 1 most likely!
as @lbf said, the UC system is known to be overcrowded and 4 year graduations are not common. I don’t know “stats” but this has been the norm thought for years and years. My SIL is a high school teacher in the Silicon Valley, when my DD went and toured UC Santa Cruz and Cal last year, my SIL warned us of the 5 year grad situation as well as issues with housing, getting classes and of course the OOS price tag.
@lbf I just joined this forum to respond to your question. UT Plan ll is excellent. When combined with McCombs, it really is one of the most elite and valuable educations in the country. Plan ll students have a"golden ticket". They can sign up for any course in any school, even closed courses. The program in well endowed. The support system is phenomenal.
@lbf we will likely be looking at a similar decision next year, and the only hesitation I would have is that my kid has lived within a 5 mile radius of UT Austin his whole life.
Ok my kid is officially driving me CRAZY. He has 7 admissions and 2 waitlists. It is April 3. I thought he had narrowed it down to 2 schools, 1 requires him to take some loans (USC) and the other is loan-free (UMN).
So I say to him, hey, maybe we should eliminate some of these schools? But NO. Apparently he “hasn’t decided.”
Does he want to revisit? NO
Is there more information he needs? NO
Does he want to sign up for housing anywhere else? NO (He has already signed up for what I think are the two top choices.)
Talk me down.
Hang in there, @Booajo! If he’s signed up for his top two, then no harm comes from waiting, right? I mean, except for harm to your sanity. 
Having the extra options, even if he’s pretty sure he won’t need them, is probably comforting for him, a stress reliever against “What if something goes pear-shaped? What if I change my mind?”
May 1 is only a few weeks away. Hang tough!
@juststaycool My DS wanted to go “away” to school. At the time we lived in a state with two instate options and a hefty state scholarship that would have been insane to walk away from. The more favorable of the Univ options was 8 miles from our front door, so, 8 miles he went to a dorm and in his world, he could have been 1000 miles. He had all the same opportunities that he would have had, had he gone a further distance to school. He lived in/on/around campus all 5 years even tho, we were 8 miles up the road. 