My eldest is graduating this May with the same major they entered with, so there’s ONE kid who didn’t change!
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Is there a Junior year burnout phenomenon I don’t know about similar to Senioritis? My Junior has mid-terms this week and is not doing as expected. He has lately seemed seriously annoyed with his dad and I every time we speak to him. I am running out of patience. He has lofty goals and I am afraid he’s losing focus! He’s unorganized, his room’s a mess ugh!!!
Our junior son has been a pill this year. He’s still pulling off good grades but has decided that his dad and I are too involved in his life and even the smallest requests are unreasonable. Requests like “let us know where you’re going” are an insult to his very soul 
It’s a bummer, he’s my sweetheart kid that I was really looking forward to having these last two years with (D23 is away at school). The last few weeks have been a little better so I’m holding out hope, but he’s a trial right now.
Sounds like he’s stressed and taking it out on his safe people. I’m sure he’s frustrated things aren’t going as expected too. Maybe ask him if there’s anything you can do to take something off his plate or to support him?
Fwiw, my super high achieving kid’s room is always an unbelievable mess. (My oldest who is graduating college this year, not my junior in high school.) I’m talking hoarder level mess. Too much going on, too many important things to focus on that keeping their room tidy is not on their list of priorities. They’ve decided they need to make enough money as an adult to outsource keeping their space tidy.
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S25 also struggling. All As first quarter, now having a hard time keeping up with executive functioning issues and shortages of ADHD medication. I remember last winter was a challenge too. Ugh.
Edited to refer to S25 (our junior)
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I don’t know if you remember, but my D25 wants to major in Linguistics. Most of the schools I’ve listed a few weeks back offer a linguistics major that is not TESOL. It is really interesting how very different the programs are. D25’s list is mostly large publics. I’ll be interested to hear if they end up applying to some of the same places (if you care to share)!
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It’s widely known that many of the nation’s high-prestigiosity colleges don’t offer merit aid, just need-based aid. Id there a list of those anywhere? I (honestly and deeply) respect their stance, but since we’re a Big Merit Aid-chasing family, it’d be good to have a full list of who definitely isn’t going to offer cash so we can take them off the list.
(Bonus points if there’s a way to filter out colleges that only offer token merit aid, as well—e.g., Carleton’s only merit scholarship is $2k to NMFs, which against a $78k COA is honestly kind of silly.)
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Great question. I haven’t seen a list*, but you can eliminate pretty much every school listed in the top 30 on the US News “Best Colleges” List. These either don’t offer merit money at all (like the Ivies, MIT, Stanford, CMU) or offer so little/to so few, that you can count them out (Duke, Chicago, etc).
Add the most popular public flagships like Michigan, the UCs, Georgia Tech in that latter category. The next tier down - UIUC, UMD, Purdue, etc give a bit more merit money (but not a lot) to top students.
To chase big merit money, you’ll have to go much further down the prestige list.
You might find this thread helpful to identify such schools:
(* - maybe start a new thread to crowd source and create such a list?)
Just a quick chime in to note, in case @dfbdfb isn’t aware, Purdue is quite reasonable in the grand scheme of things re: cost. It may net out to be like getting a lot of merit somewhere else.
ETA: if you do crowdsource, Case and SCU give quite a bit of merit. Though neither are cheap to start.
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Yeah, agreed, net price is what’s ultimately important. Like, C19 got a merit scholarship to Mississippi State that in raw dollar numbers wouldn’t even have been half tuition (not half of COA, half of tuition) at, say, Harvard, but because of the much lower COA she ends up getting a degree for well less than $100k total, which in today’s market is pretty delightful.
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This was totally my son. Any attempts at actually talking to him or asking about plans was me being “totally obsessed with him.” He still stinks at communication and rare do we get a real glimpse of whats going on. Hes the same way with his dad so good to know its not just at my house (divorced since he was 5).
Thoughts on “commuter” schools? D25 is 3.0 low test score kid and some of her more target schools for acceptance and our budget seem to be more commuter type schools with low percentage of students on campus. She wants a smaller school feel anyways (however she gets that as even big schools can feel “smaller”).
Looking at Adelphi for example. Has higher TE chance and the majors she is interested in. Data set shows 4900 UG with 30% typically living on campus. My daughter thought maybe she would get “better dorm options”.
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I transferred my last year and a half from Ole Miss to Marymount University in Arlington Va. Went from a top 10 party school to a tiny private school where I was a commuter (and 5th year senior). I went to classes and went home, was not involved in anything else at the school but didn’t care, I worked, and focused on class. I am assuming it was a commuter school because of its size, location and high acceptance rate. If I had gone straight there as my 17 year old self I probably would have hated it.
Particularly for “commuter colleges” that have residence halls (e.g., the one I work at, which has residence hall space for IIRC 500 students out of a bit over 10k), the res-life student experience can be quite positive.
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Yup there is:
You can sort by the various columns, so if you sort by the percentage of students receiving non-need-based aid you will get a list of all schools, from 0% to 99% receiving aid, and you can see the average aid award. It says it was updated in Nov 2023 and so far seems accurate based on my spot-checking comparisons with common data sets.
Jeff Selingo’s buyers and sellers list has the info as well, but I find the college transitions list easier. (Here is Selingo’s info - Which Colleges Are Really Buyers and Which Are Sellers - Jeff Selingo
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D25 is applying to 4 schools commuter schools, and would live on campus. I think like someone said above, it could be a great small community in an otherwise large institution. For my daughter, she would definitely need to feel like the school is her new home.
She would be an OOS and live on campus and I am trying to figure out just how many students stay on campus that may “negate” it being a “commuter campus”. Adelphi for example seems to have 7 dorms and about 1500 dorming undergrads (their CDS says 30% of 4700 undergrads live on campus).
Exactly. This will be important for my daughter as well. She is much more introverted and shy compared to S23.
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30% is honestly pretty unremarkable—31% of students live on campus nationally, though that average is skewed downward by the 13% of colleges with no campus housing.
But even then, what “off campus” means can be misleading—my C19 has lived off campus this year and the last, but she lives closer to her classroom buildings than when she lived on campus. Also, places we can I think all agree aren’t considered “commuter colleges” don’t always have majorities of students living on campus—see, for example, the 36% who live on campus at New York University, or the 36% at the University of Southern California, or the 27% at the University of Michigan.
ETA: And those aren’t even cherry-picked to yield low percentages, they’re honestly just the first three CC-beloved colleges that came to mind for me to look up. Not randomly selected, certainly, but I strongly expect they’re not outliers.
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I wish they broke it down looking at freshman who live on campus because I think that sets the tone.
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Montclair State in NJ is considered a suitcase school even though a large number of students dorm. They just leave for the weekend. A few specific programs are more involved with campus life like the arts kids since a large portion of them are from a far distance. So even if 30% live on Adelphi campus how many actually stay over the weekend? I’d reach out to the school directly but try and talk to actual students for the real experience.
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