My S25 is pretty good about checking his school email and portal – there was a snafu with his transcript which was holding up his scholarship, so he did follow up to straighten that out. We went to orientation a few weeks back, and he has his student ID and parking pass and final class schedule, and he’s figuring out where/how he’ll have to walk to get to his classes from his dorm. He’s in a single, so he doesn’t have to worry about coordinating with a roommate.
On the prepping for the dorm room – um, no. That’s all me, lol. Granted I’ve done this for an older kid, and I LOVE making a spreadsheet and buying all the stuff. So that’s in the works – I think we’ve acquired bedding and towels and most stuff except toiletries and cleaning supplies. He did tell me that he read maybe an air purifier would be helpful, along with a fan. Yep, those were both already on the list, lol.
Same here! It seems like orientation was a mental turning point for my daughter, from vague procrastinatory anxiety to excitement. I’m not saying my daughter is as focused as I’d like on getting things lined up, but she’s acknowledging ownership of things that need to be done. It’s great!
So… this summer S25 has spent most of his free time playing a computer game that is about designing a world. It’s more complex than something like minecraft, he’s using a lot of math to make sure roads are the right width, with the appropriate angles for turns, that parking lots have the right width parking spots etc. He’s making sure that he has the right amount of roads/sidewalks/parking for the density of housing he’s building, that he’s got shipping lanes established and the right kinds of ships to deliver products and docks built etc. He’s been working on this every day and really is in to it.
So… remember back when he was applying to colleges? He was between two majors - Construction Management and Urban Planning. He applied to seven schools: four only had urban planning options, three had construction management (and two of those had urban planning options). Only one of the seven schools was really good at both construction management and urban planning… and it happened to be in-state. And did he pick that school? No, no he did not. He decided that he really wanted Construction Management, and he picked the only school for CM that did NOT have urban planning or geography (urban planning is often nested under that).
So last night I go to check on him and he was so excited to show me what he’d built in his city yesterday. After talking for like 10 minutes about tons of different features he turns to me and says “huh, maybe I should’ve stuck with urban planning as a major…”
Oh kid.
I think he was being facetious, I don’t think he was serious. And of course he can always pivot if he really wants to. At Clemson he can’t do urban planning, but that’s often something that requires a Master’s degree, so he could still do that if after four years he decides this isn’t the right fit. But man. It took all I had in me to not say “and THAT’S why I wanted you to go to Virginia Tech.” I didn’t even react and he quickly moved on and started talking about his city some more, but I had about a million different things flashing through my head.
I am confident that he’s going to be happy at Clemson, that the school and the atmosphere and the fit of all of that is right for him. He’s been talking about doing Construction Management since he was in 8th grade, so I think he’s going to stick with this and all is well. It was just a moment that caught me by surprise, and a good reminder that he may be heading off to college, but there’s still a lot of figuring stuff out going on.
Good on you, mama, for not saying, “Maybe you should have listened to your mother” – because it would have taken everything in me to not respond with that, LOL.
He sounds like a great kid. (What game is that? My D26 would love it!) And like you said, if urban planning remains an interest, he can pursue it in grad school. It’s all good!
I have been working hard as well to not say, ‘if you would just listen to me’. The procrastination with the roommate group got him assigned to a traditional triple. I am disheartened that the college does this, but hopefully he will be more proactive next year.
We have had some luck with dorm shopping and only have a few more things to get that will need to be order (size 14 shoes). With the triple there will not be any extra storage available so trying to stick with the necessities. We are down to a month as well and he still has some administrative task to complete like the financial portal, math placement so he can register for his last class and finalizing meal plans and transcripts.
Ha, maybe we can trade. The last watershoes/slides available at Target were size 14 and my son is more like a 10. (But we bought them so he’d have shower shoes.)
Oh boy, good for you for sealing your lips shut; I know it took a LOT of willpower! I flirted with urban planning at the end of my undergrad/beginning of my career. My bet is construction management and maybe even a bit of work experience in that field would make him an even better prospect for an urban planning graduate degree and subsequent employment. And urban planning is a grad degree that one can often find excellent evening/commuter programs for. (My night school Va Tech grad degree was in environmental engineering with a sizeable number of urban planning courses transferred in from VCU.) Side note … remember “night school”? I thought it was amazing when the professors started recording their lectures and I could watch them online, with …dialup internet . OMG .
@SpreadsheetMom and @Pandamom2 it’s called City: Skylines 2. It’s a play on the computer / Windows game. He asked me to buy it for him at the start of summer and I really hesitated - I don’t want him getting super absorbed by computer games. But I’m glad I did, not only is he enjoying it, but it requires some decent thought and planning so it feels like not a total waste of time.
He gave me a long and complex reason why he thought v2 was better than v1, despite some reviews to the contrary and I have to admit, I 100% wasn’t listening to a word he said. But the kid feels passionately about this game, so hopefully once you get a chance to get it going it will be fun for you too!
So fall bills have now posted for both my S22’s school and my S25’s school. Having done this before, I’m not surprised to see random extra fees added to the bill. But there are SO MANY.
For S22, at WPI, there are fees for: (1) Health insurance (you can get this waived if you have insurance, which we did); (2) Student Life fee ($238 - this helps fund clubs and activities); and (3) Health and Wellness fee ($390 - this funds the campus health center/clinic thing).
For S25, at Clemson, there are fees for:
(1) Career Center fee (self explanatory, and only $4, but seriously, you charge for this?);
(2) Athletics fee (this is to support athletic events - don’t tell me that non-football events are free and then charge me $150/semester);
(3) Matriculation fee (what? Apparently you have to pay $5 every semester you remain a student?);
(4) Mathematical Sciences Lab Fee ($200 for a math lab? My other kid goes to a STEM school and I’ve never had to pay for a lab. I guess I could see it better if it used materials of some sort, but this is for MATH);
(5) Campus Recreation Fee ($90, ok, normal);
(6) Physics and Astronomy lab fee ($200 - again, why the cost for the physics lab?);
(7) Technology fee ($119 - I have no idea what this is for);
(8) Design/Build Program Fee ($750 - ok, this is a lot, but his program will require materials, so I get that. But damn, good thing we can afford an extra $750/semester…);
(9) Transit fee ($80. What is this? There is no free transportation to the airports. Is this paying for the campus bus?);
(10) Health Fee ($182 - ok, this is the health center, that’s at least a normal charge);
(11) Activity Fee ($40 - wait, I thought the Campus Recreation Fee was for activities. How is this different?);
(12) Software License Fee ($21 - ok, not much, but again, don’t be telling us that you offer all this software for free. You don’t. I’m paying for it, just not at point of service time.)
So for WPI kid I’m paying an extra about $625 in fees (and for the fall semester he’s in five classes with labs, none of which have fees), and for Clemson kid I’m paying an extra $1840. Even if you take out the high fee for his specific program, that’s still about $1100. I’m not saying that the school shouldn’t charge for this stuff, but for the love of god, put it in the regular tuition so that there are fewer surprises when the bills come out.
Other than being annoyed at the way Clemson bills (seriously, don’t charge me for something that is $5 for everyone, that’s stupid. Add it to tuition.), today I am grateful that our 529s are in decent shape, as we were able to use 529s for both boys this fall, and it won’t be a double hit on our bank account. We weren’t able to put enough into 529s for four full years, but we planned it out enough so that we’d never have to hit the bank account for both boys at once. And for that, I am grateful.
I agree with the general and specific critiques here!
However, as a long-time physics teacher, there are consumables / equipment in physics labs that could cost $$. I’m still irritated that I taught at a school where we had to buy our own lab equipment (or skip labs I guess) and I bought things like spring scales, mass balances (expensive!), wooden egg models for egg drop, etc.
Yeah, I’m cranky about lab fees in general - I feel like that should just be a required addition to the tuition, rather than a random nickel and diming effort. If you are an R1 research institution, you should assume that students will be taking labs, and add those costs to tuition. But if I’m going to have to pay fees for labs, then I’m definitely less cranky about physics lab fee than I am math lab fee. (Also, I don’t understand what one does in a math lab. It sounds like time to work problem sets in a small group. Which is great, and important to do. But that doesn’t have things that cost money that I can imagine. Kid has to bring his own calculator if he wants one. And if this is a software cost of some sort, then that should be part of the software or IT package fees.)
I honestly think that part of this is how Clemson is managing their budget. They’ve been able to say that they are holding in-state tuition flat for the whatever number year now (OOS keeps going up 3%). I figure part of the “holding tuition flat” calculus involves charging fees for things that at other schools might be part of tuition (because seriously? $4 for a career center fee? With about 25k students, that’s about $100k. Did they just need to hire another person and that’s how they did it?)
Maybe? That would make sense given that Math Lab and Physics Lab have the same fee, and I’d assume that physics uses more materials than math - if they aren’t paying for materials, maybe they are paying for TAs? If it’s salary related, then I still think it should be looped in as just part of tuition. No one charges fees based on different salaries, otherwise if individual students have to pay for salary fees then I would think students would pay less for a giant lecture course than a small seminar course because if the professors are making the same amount of $ it has to take more students to cover the salary of the seminar prof than the giant lecture prof.
I have no problem with paying TAs, or with paying for materials, or heck with paying for any of these things. I just (1) find it disingenuous to have them all be separated out from tuition and (2) am annoyed that at prospective student visits and tours they talk about things like “free sporting events”; “free computer software”; “free campus busses”; and “free printing” - all of which I’ve heard - and then it’s clearly not free, but costs that are billed per semester. I really am ok with paying for these things, as it’s part of the experience of the college and makes it possible for them to do what they do - I’m not arguing with their budgeting process. I just feel like they way they are handling costs and discussing fees is not a great way to do it.
Lab/course fees are, by law in some states and by policy in most others, fundamentally different from tuition.
Tuition is supposed to go toward the overall functioning of a college or university. Lab/course fees, on the other hand, are supposed to go (either entirely or at some high percentage like 80%) entirely and only to the benefit of the students taking the course for which there is a fee.
This is because some courses are simply more expensive to offer, especially those that require consumables or software that has to be frequently updated or equipment that wears out, and so it is perceived as unfair to charge students who take fewer of those courses as much as students who take more of them. (This is also the logic behind differential tuition between colleges at a university, or for charging different amounts for undergraduate and graduate courses, or even—less frequently—for lower- and upper-division undergraduate courses.)
Thank you! This, then, makes sense. I guess that is not the law in Massachusetts, as my WPI kid has never had a lab fee, and has certainly taken many labs over three years. But clearly, it is the case in South Carolina. And I get it for the consumables and software, but I’m really struggling with why math - it’s a business calculus course - has an extra lab fee. Especially because there is also a separate fee for software, which is the only thing I can think of for math. All students are required to have a personal laptop, so it’s not use of a computer. Oh well. I guess at least mystery solved on why the separate lab fees.
. OMG .
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