So here’s a maybe weird, maybe sane question, but either way it requires a good bit of setup to give the details of my d19’s specific situation.
D19 and I have been making a starting list of schools for her to investigate. It’s become pretty clear—particularly after she fell utterly in love with calculus this past year—that she’s going to head in the direction of industrial engineering rather than industrial design, so I started out by building her a “big list” of all of the schools in the country that have ABET-accredited (plus those in Canada that have reciprocal EC-accredited) programs in industrial, materials, and/or manufacturing engineering. These are kind of niche engineering disciplines, and so the big list isn’t as big as one might expect—172 schools, plus the two in-state options that offer engineering (though neither of them offer any of those fields).
Next step, which is the one we’re working on together: Since she’s child two of four, and since she’ll overlap her older sister (D17) for us paying tuition, cost is an issue. So we’re going through and getting rid of all the places with high price tags that don’t give merit aid (or where getting merit aid is at the likelihood of winning the lottery—D17 got one of those, but D19’s stats aren’t quite the same level).
Well, this being engineering, most of the schools are publics (with a surprising number of the privates that offer these fields being HBCUs—industrial and manufacturing engineering seem to be overrepresented in HBCU offerings). This means we’re running across some interesting cost differentials.
Take, for example, Wisconsin. Lots of schools in the University of Wisconsin system offer these fields: Madison, Milwaukee, Platteville, Stout, and Stevens Point (though the latter only marginally, with paper engineering, accredited under general engineering). Out of state list price for Madison, as the flagship, is just over $50k; all the other regional-campus-type places have out of state list prices between just over $23k to just over $30k—and whereas Madison offers rather little in merit aid to out-of-state students, most of the other campuses are reasonably generous with it, especially when considered as a percentage of their base cost.
It seems to me, from a financial point of view, that in cases like this a regional campus is the way to go (especially given that ABET accreditation is ABET accreditation no matter where you have it), even—maybe especially—if it turned out that it ended up taking D19 an extra year to finish (the bane of the public university). Of course, I’m faculty at a regional-campus-type place myself, and so I understand that they’re more likely to be undercapitalized and the faculty overworked and so on, but I also know that a good student can do well pretty much anywhere.
So, finally, the question: Is there any reason for a student like my D19, with good but not worldbeating stats (and a quite uneven grade record in compiling those decent stats, and pretty consistently getting in the high 20s but never 30 on practice ACTs) and a longstanding focus on her field of interest, to target “high-end” schools at all?
