Parents of the HS Class of 2019 (Part 1)

Parents of HS Class of 20xx
2301

Our list of schools (currently at about 25) is clustered based on direct costs (tuition and fees, plus room and board – knowing the latter can shift after the first year), safety vs. match vs. reach, size of facilities (which is probably unique to us as D19 is centered on theater tech – we use t-shirt sizes as a measure), Naviance average GPA/SAT/ACT, CDS ranges for SAT/ACT (25th/75th), and type/location (in-state public, OOS public, in-state private, OOS private).

We are also primarily focusing on in-state-but-not-flagship options as we are full pay and do not have enough to cover our EFC. We told D19 (and younger sibling) years ago that we could not cover their entire cost of college, and they would need to be on the scholarship hunt and would need to save money from a job, plus take out some loans. So the clustering in the spreadsheet does put in-state publics at the top of the pack.

We have some OOS privates with known good merit aid on the spreadsheet, but there’s also a HUGE disclaimer about the need for merit. I think it is best to remind us as a family about our financial limitations.

We are also considering the community college to state school transfer option. I’m not a big fan in the case of D19 due to her issues at school (ADHD/anxiety with 504 accommodations) but I do not want to discount it altogether before she takes the ACT and PSAT this fall. My thought is she could take a little longer to graduate from college (2+ years in comm. college then 3+ years at in-state college) but the cost would still be affordable compared to a private school (even one with merit).

2302

@eandsmom Yes, we need to make a plan. Right now, I think H is comfortable with around $50K per year. Wisconsin full price would come in under that. Not a definite safety though. We need more schools that are under than amount for sure.

Many, many schools on our list are $65,000 or so and, if S19 could even get $10,000 in merit, that might be close enough for H to think it’s worth it depending on the fit of the school. I only have schools that actually give merit on our real list.

I have history from our high school (including the kids’ GPA and SAT/ACT scores) from many of these schools showing merit aid received. That might help a little once S19 has taken SAT. Some are tougher than others. Many kids got money from Grinnell, Denison, Oberlin, American. A smaller amount got money at Kenyon, Davidson, Wake Forest, Richmond. I don’t think H is interested in sending S19 to a lesser known school. Even when I mention Dickinson or Knox or Macalester, he thinks no. I think he’d rather pay a little more and send S19 somewhere else. Both my H and I have so many connections because of Northwestern, I think he does put a little priority on WHO you will meet at school as well as what kind of education you will get.

I think I said in an earlier post that I need to have a heart to heart with H about schools that would no doubt cost us full tuition. Again, we need to wait until we get S19’s scores. Then, I’m going to ask S19 if there are any reach schools that look interesting to him. I’ll work on whether those are good fits for good reasons (not that he read that the food is good or something ridiculous like that). Once I have that list, H and I can talk about whether we would be willing to pay and he will only apply to those schools (if there are any that we can stomach that price). S19 is very clear about how expensive college is. He knows we have the money. But he also knows how crazy conservative H is about spending. We live it every day. We will make sure to be uber-clear about cost from the very beginning.

My guess is that there may be just a few reaches that H might agree to - maybe Brown, maybe Carleton, maybe somewhere like Middlebury where we have a friend whose son is loving it for lots of good reasons.

Oh, and H has already told the kids they will do work/study and take the $5000 per year loan so they have skin in the game!

2303

@collegeandi Re merit money, check out the list that @eandesmom is posting on the 3.0-3.4 thread
http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/discussion/comment/20439525/#Comment_20439525

I have some summary tables here
http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/discussion/comment/19801988/#Comment_19801988
Focused on LAC and STEM at LACs, it does have some average merit % and average amounts. Data from collegedata.com

2304

Bear in mind that COA will go up. 65k today, likely shown at 2016-17 rates on most websites will see 3 increases before the class of 19 enrolls.

Merit awards may or may not increase at the same rate.

One thing I do is estimate the cost for year one and then factor in the annual increases. This lets you see the total cost for all 4 years as well as an average annual cost.

2305

Because of the rising COA, I find myself with a strong desire with S19 to stay in-state. Both kids have a set budget based on 529s (mostly provided by a grandparent) and I’m contributing practically nothing out of current cash flow despite the EFC saying we should be able to pay 40% of our net pay.

I feel sort of guilty about it because D16 didn’t even apply in-state (although she targeted schools that don’t have ridiculous OOS costs) If S19 stays in-state, he’ll have enough for 6 years of college with money left over to, um, help pay for his sister’s potential 5th year? It’s really tempting to push him in that direction, but not if he ends up having to go to George Mason U, 15 minutes away from home.

2306

Wow, that is a LOT of work @eandesmom! Very beneficial for all of us here! Thank you!!

@liska21, great data collection! It will definitely help a lot! Thank you!

I think this will work better.

@homerdog, this sounds reasonable. This way the kids know that we don’t want to constrain them.

@Gatormama, I like that “financial reach” concept… very creative! It is a different way of looking at colleges.

George Mason is a great college, @eh1234. I hear what you say though.

2307

@gatormama We should buddy up for this ride. My D19 is being groomed, if that’s the right word, for assistant stage manager next year – and she is locally famous for sacrificing the best grades she could get for spending more time at her school’s black box tweaking the lighting board and whatnot. :confused:

2308

Our first official college visit is under our belts! It was really, really eye-opening on several levels.

It was at Drew University, in Madison, NJ. It’s a very suburban area of the state – wall to wall residential and retail stretches of big-box stores – but the college campus is compact and self-contained. The campus has a lovely “forest,” they call it – an impressive grove of trees throughout, with a great tree canopy over most of it, though obviously with it barely being spring, there was no leaf-out. The enrollment is 1,450 students. Expensive - $64k+ COA. They have theater and lacrosse, and a friend’s sister went there and works on Broadway, so it was worth visiting.

I figured it was going to be a fit for D, at least in terms of how she liked it, because of its size mostly. She goes to a very small private school with only about 300 students, and I’ve been assuming big schools would simply overwhelm and intimidate her.

Well, she might still be intimidated by the big unis, but I was WRONG about this school. Wow. She thought it was too small!

Her impressions: The cafeteria, though it had spiffy upgrades (pizza oven, Mongolian grill/hibachi station, faux stone wall with fireplace), was too similar in size to her cafeteria. The model dorm room was tiny, and had no A/C. The black box theater didn’t impress her very much. The buildings were kind of blah.
We sat in on a Q&A panel with a half-dozen students, who didn’t resonate with her either because they were all upperclassmen and already intensely into their specific majors and she didn’t get any freshman feedback.

My impression: heavy duty marketing (I guess that’s probably SOP on visit days) and at least a couple hundred people made it crowded and pretty unappealing. I’m glad we went for an early bird tour at 7:30 a.m. before anyone else was really there. The tour, with just one other student and parent and our own tour guide (a senior premed), was very informative and personal. My own dorm room in the Dark Ages was much bigger than the one we saw. I thought the campus was nice, and I think those trees would make it great once they leafed out. There were a few nice newer buildings for arts and sciences but nothing hugely impressive. The student union was pretty small.

All in all, I wasn’t wowed. I think it was too small for me too!
Which is good, that unless there’s a massive change in direction and requirements, that we’ve already knocked one off the list, albeit one that was never really a serious possibility.

2309

Thanks for posting such a detailed review, @Gatormama! We’re on a similar theater-track (theater tech) as you and had Drew on our list. We did not do a full visit, though – just a drive through/around and D19 was not impressed enough to ask for a full tour.

2310

FWIW, S17 was wowed by the black box at Ursinus. We have pretty amazing facilities at our HS, better than several of the colleges on his list so it takes a lot to impress him.

2311

@orangefish My D19 isn’t organized enough to have an actual track, per se, but she really loves theater tech. It’s her biggest (read: only) in-school EC activity.

2312

Oh, my DH showed me this story on his phone as we were listening to the rah-rah-school pitches in the Drew cafeteria, which probably affected my assessment. In a nutshell, the school’s credit rating was lowered for the second time in a couple of years; now at junk status.
http://www.nj.com/education/2017/03/pricey_nj_college_gets_stung_by_credit_agency_junk_rating.html
Earlier story (2015) here:
http://www.nj.com/education/2015/12/why_wall_street_is_skeptical_about_an_nj_colleges.html

Both stories make the point that small & expensive private LACs are seeing sharp drops in enrollment because parents are shying away from the COA.
Also, there are going to be fewer kids in 2019 - I am thinking this will be better for ours, in terms of acceptances and hopefully FA as well.

2313

@Gatormama I can see where fewer people applying may be helpful for admission , but I believe that the affect for FA will be negative not positive. With fewer people attending , expenses remain high to keep the school running which may actually result is less money for FA, especially merit . Businesses and alumna may be less likely to donate which would also reduce funds. Fewer people applying would also would also affect selectivity and ratings which would again most likely affect admissions . Schools have closed in the past.

2314

@JenJenJenJen My D19 has only one in-school EC (theater) as it takes up SO much time! She does not want to be a performer, though – definitely a designer, and would prefer not to be only a technician. That’s as far as we’ve gotten to.

2315

@OrangeFish EXACTLY! Theater/theater tech takes up soooo much time. I’ve been worried because my sophomore isn’t exactly an A student to begin with, and getting home from theater on school nights at 9 or 10 means not completing her homework before crashing too. It would be one thing if it was a varsity sport – adcoms understand that time commitment – or if she was the lead in school plays, but all that time spent running lights or whatever, I see the time commitment but it feels undervalued by adcoms IMO. What do you think?

2316

@jenjenjenjen – you just described my D19 perfectly! She is hardly an A student anyway, but she LOVES her theater family, and she does her homework (as time permits) while she is at rehearsals for hours. But she has to get up pretty early for school (we leave the house just after 7 AM) so the long rehearsals do not allow for lots of totally focused on homework time. She is a designer (make-up) in this spring’s show, so she is collecting everything as she goes right now to possibly be included in a portfolio for theater tech reviews.

We have been told by some in-state theater program people that the time commitment is understood, and they like to see a well-documented portfolio. But this works for theater majors and not so much for non-theater (like engineering, or business, or insert-non-theater-major-here) programs.

2317

I think it very much depends on the school. If you target appropriately, the time spent in theater is absolutely recognized. My S17 is a B+ student with the test scores to match. He did not go for super selective schools as he was hunting merit but one school actually referenced his theater work specifically in his acceptance letter and he did recieve one non major scholarship for it at another school.

Here is my take to be blunt. My kid would likely be a B+ student regardless. That is his academic level of interest. While the time spent on theater (and music and environmental and political activism lol) makes keeping that B+ more of a challenge and adds stress…what he gains in terms of being a far more well rounded individual, is worth the tradeoff.

The whole world can’t be type A.

2318

D leaves the house at 6 am, gets home at 6 or later every single night during the school year (more like 9 during the musical, and oftentimes 9 when there’s a 7 pm lax game) - granted, we’ve caused some of this with having her in school so far away.
That said, I agree that she wouldn’t do the work necessary to be an A+ student, regardless of time commitment.

After great sturm und drang, we finally got her matched with a peer tutor in chemistry and that starts this week. I only hope it’s not too late to bring up her C.

Also, today was Day 2 of college weekend. We attended a huge college fair in NYC. No top-level schools at all - no Ivies, prestigious LACs to speak of; the PSU booth was mobbed, which was about the highest level of school there.
But D got to talk to reps from Trinity in Dublin and University of Sydney and University of Hawaii - talk about exotics - and that was very inspiring to her. I can’t see her going so far away, but her eyes were certainly shining. We also chatted with my alma mater, UF, and FSU (which I did grudgingly, and they tomahawk-chopped me just to rub it in) as they have an automatic OOS tuition waiver if you hit certain stats. I don’t have my notes with me but I think it was 1390 SAT/30 ACT.

2319

@Gatormama I love the indepth review. The bare trees makes me think of a piece of advice for everyone. If there is a school YOU really want the kiddo to like consider season, time/day of week, etc. to present it to it’s best light. With our D15 we added UVA to her list of schools to visit (against her wishes). We went on a cold, cold day in late January and she was very unimpressed. She did apply because we basically made her. In the end that is where she attends now and she loves, loves, loves, loves, loves it. It turned out to be the unexpectedly perfect fit for her. But it was an unhappy spring and summer because she had been so negative about it for so long. (We didn’t force her to go there. We gave her the option of debt free undergrad or massive student debt and she made the responsible choice).

2320

@Gatormama I love the indepth review. The bare trees makes me think of a piece of advice for everyone. If there is a school YOU really want the kiddo to like consider season, time/day of week, etc. to present it to it’s best light. With our D15 we added UVA to her list of schools to visit (against her wishes). We went on a cold, cold day in late January and she was very unimpressed. She did apply because we basically made her. In the end that is where she attends now and she loves, loves, loves, loves, loves it. It turned out to be the unexpectedly perfect fit for her. But it was an unhappy spring and summer because she had been so negative about it for so long. (We didn’t force her to go there. We gave her the option of debt free undergrad or massive student debt and she made the responsible choice).