@momtogkc I like that size of school, a lot! Not that Miami is on our radar but still, good to know. It seems like there is not a lot in betweek 20K+ schools and small LAC’s…
That’s the size of CofC. It’s a Goldilocks school for my son .
@eandesmom I know - it is about the same size as UVM! I know you have a kid there, we looked and D loved it but she isn’t sure she is ready to handle the weather. @carolinamom2boys Seems like D is going to need a Goldilocks school - UVM too cold, UM too Florida-ish - maybe COC will be just right.
I am going to Charleston for a music festival in April, D isn’t coming but I am definitely going to check out COC!
@momtogkc it’s definitely cold at UVM. Well at this time of year. I heard whining about it being hot in August and Sept lol.
The size is perfect.
The kid is skiing today, so there is that!
I think 6,000-7,000 undergrads is a sweet spot but almost all of those are private suburban universities with low acceptance rates. And we will be full pay at all of them.
S19 has two schools on his list in this category right now but hasn’t visited either yet. Both are reaches. I’m expecting that he will like the size as it seems ideal for pretty much any student. If he feels they are too big, then we know for sure we’ve got an LAC kid on our hands!
@momtogkc It’s a nice size school. It has an liberal arts focus . It is an urban school, so if your daughter wants traditional college setting, it may not be a good match.
So I decide to order through inter library loan The Gatekeepers from the College where I work knowing that it might come from my S19’s high school nearby since I saw they had a copy. Sure enough it was and then I noticed oddly that the author had signed the copy. As I begin to read the book, I find that he hails from my area. A little more digging and I find that he actually graduated from our high school!
There are actually a lot of schools in the 5,000<size<10,000 range that don’t have low acceptance rates, but most of them are underfunded regional publics (often former normal schools), and many of those have a relatively limited set of majors.
@dfbdfb of course. In our state, the directional state schools are really struggling. So much to the point that I forget about them. Even the C students at our high school are likely to go somewhere else for college.
@homerdog Yes - I think 6,000ish sounds really nice - we are going to see Elon and possible William & Mary sometime this spring so we will get to see that size school soon.
@carolinamom2boys Liberal arts focus is perfect, she isn’t sure if she would like an urban feel yet as she hasn’t seen any schools like that. In my head I can only imagine NYU and BU.
@momtogkc We have plans to see William and Mary at the end of March. I’ll be sure to share our impressions!
@momtogkc - We visited Elon a couple of springs ago and I was pretty impressed with the school, although we didn’t like the open house because it was too crowded. Yes, the size was great and the campus was absolutely beautiful, one of the prettiest I’ve seen. My D didn’t end up applying but I think it’s a great one to visit if you like the look on paper.
Had a little, tiny breakthrough today. S19 told us he doesn’t see himself in the sciences. No bio, no chem, no physics. After that declaration, my husband put a little bird in his ear about data analytics. (Can you tell he’s trying to make sure S19 has some quantitative major in hopes of good job prospects?) S19 looked at him sideways. He doesn’t even know what that is. Mr. Homerdog thinks it might be wise for him to be a math/stats/data analytics major and then he can second major in whatever else he wants.
This may very well be our compromise especially since S19 is good at math and he can pair it with pretty much anything (econ, political science, environmental studies, psychology, sociology, etc.) We would never MAKE him major in something but we both think he might like it. Most of the LACs on his list make it really easy to double major and still have space for other classes that look interesting to the student. With hard science out of the picture, it may become easier to evaluate schools.
@homerdog That is a good choice . When my DS16 was searching for internships there were quite a few for Data Science and Analytics in a variety of settings, especially in DC.
Well my D said yes to the prom dress!! It is conservative, classy, elegant and she looks beautiful in it. Best of all, she hasn’t stopped talking about it for the last 3 hours 
^ SOOOOOO jealous! We are still in the throes of prom dress hell. And on the above thread, until my recent departure from corp america, I was part of a data science team. Very good prospects for jobs and it’s very interesting and varied work. The key thing missing in most candidates for jobs we found was ability to speak english and connect the dots between the business and the data. Usually you get one and not the other. It’s a very cool field.
@amandakayak Do you know if there’s much difference between a data analytics major and a stat major? I’m looking at some course catalogs and there seems to be a lot of overlap.
I’m a HS Class of 2019 student graduating a year early, finishing with my stats courses for that major this semester. My university does not have a data analytics major, but from browsing other course catalogs, I think they are very similar - math core, low-level CS, Bayesian modeling; however, data analytics majors tend to take more machine learning and database courses.
For instance, these are the courses I have not taken equivalents to (from the data analytics curriculum at Ohio State):
CSE 2231 Software II, Software Development and Design
CSE 3241 Introduction to Database Systems
ISE 3230: Systems Modeling and Optimization for Analytics
CSE 5242: Advanced Database Management Systems
ISE 5760: Visual Analytics and Sensemaking
The first two CS courses would be part of the CS minor at my university; the third course is sometimes offered as special topics, but it won’t be during my time there; the last two courses don’t exist, as far as I know.
@CharlotteLetter I think some data analytics degrees have more computer science and some have less. I need to look into it more. Our S19 is not interested in programming. It seems that schools are jumping on the band wagon to add a data science undergrad major when most students can prepare themselves for a data science job just as well with a statistics degree.
A former student of mine (English major with a linguistics emphasis in both her undergrad and masters work) is currently working on an informatics PhD. It’s really a very wide-ranging field—my former student is working on the data parsing side (particularly getting the parsers sifting through the data to recognize that, f’rex, the word like can mean a lot of different things depending on context, and you can’t just blindly lump them all together and expect your analysis to make sense), while the more stats and comp sci type people in the department are working on the sorts of issues you’d expect people with their backgrounds to work on.
It kind of reminds me of my D17’s interest in neuroscience—the first thing she had to figure out was what kind of neuroscience she was interested in, since depending on the program you might be looking at something that’s mainly biochemistry, or psychology, or anatomy, or cognitive theory, or…