@ljberkow Actually, housing doesn’t come on a “first come first serve” basis, it’s lottery based. I believe that after all the summer NSO sessions are over, housing is then assigned. Here’s more info on it if you’d like the specifics. https://www.umass.edu/living/assign/priority
Congrats to your daughter for getting into Brandeis and Northeastern, both are amazing schools and both are extremely prestigious (especially since Northeastern is rising in the ranks and its acceptance rate continues to drop every year). As with money, I would have to agree, unless a student has parents who are making well into the $200-300k a year, the cost of attending an expensive private school with poor financial aid just deters students away no matter how prestigious.
@rayword45 About the RAPs, there’s actually only a few that require you to dorm with a RAP-mate (one in particular is the Isenberg RAP that I joined). If you aren’t in one of these restricted RAPs, I believe you’re free to choose your roommate as long as the both of you stay in Central and in the building that your RAP is in. If you want more info on which RAP is restrictive, just look it up here: https://www.umass.edu/rap/programs Just select the RAP that you joined and see if it says that roommates are restricted (the vast majority aren’t).
About that thing with Holy Cross, they gave amazing financial aid to the kids in my school. Most of them are paying less than $4k (and some are even going free). There are 5 kids from my school that are going there.
P.S: As for the OOS aid that Amherst has that you guys are talking about, from what I heard, usually the in-state students have the worst financial aid of the bunch (which is to be expected considering we’re paying essentially half of what OOS students have to pay). However, this is also why there’s a financial aid appeal form. Heard this as a rumor, but apparently Amherst has been known to give out a lot less money than they actually have.
That’s why if you go to a school like Worcester State (which has a combined cost of around $23k vs Amherst’s $28k (that’s in state cost)), you could end up with a cost of -$13k at WSU (yes, the - sign is supposed to be there) vs paying $10k at Amherst after financial aid (which is the situation that I had).
Bladehunter - Can you talk more about the Isenberg RAP?
Did you like it? Did you meet a good group of people?Was it a close floor?
Also, how involved were you with faculty in RAP? What outside things did you do?
What were you overall impressions with the program? thanks
@tojo107 I think @bladehunter is an incoming first year student so won’t have experience yet with the program. Seems to have done a good amount of research to be so knowledgeable and helpful already, though.
@BladeHunter Even if you’re making $200K to $300K, $260K for four years of college costs are extreme. Then, consider a second or even a third kid and then consider grad school. $66K per year is $100K per year before taxes. Sure, kids can take on some debt, but that’s ridiculous. You are going to see more and more people who make in those ranges considering UMASS a great option. $260K to Northeastern and Brandeis is a serious transfer of wealth to these universities. Some parents will do this for their kids. I’m paying the full $26K for my daughter plus expenses and I will be thrilled that she will graduate with no debt.
@crowlady Hahah, thanks for the compliment. I’ve actually done extensive research on all the schools I applied to just so I knew what I was getting myself into. Glad it payed off. 
@tojo107 Yeah, sorry to break the news but crowlady is right, I am an incoming first year student. For what it’s worth, I heard that the Isenberg RAP is actually quite close with each other. As for group of friends, it all depends on if you’d like the people who join this year or not. Every year, the students are different, so there’s no way to really answer that.
@ljberkow Well, if you’re making $200-300k per year, 4 years of college would be about 1/4 your income over those 4 years. I honestly feel like that would be just fine (and if I was making that much and it was gonna cost me ~$250k to bring them through 4 years of college, I feel as if I could live just fine with only 3/4 of my income available per year). However, as for my parents’ case, I really can’t even afford $26k a year. Glad Amherst gave me a break with my financial aid, however, gonna fill out the appeal form anyways cause $10k is still stretching it for me.
file this under its better to be lucky than good…my son got the phone call yesterday, he’s off the wait list and will be enrolling with the rest of the freshman class in the fall…wow what a process, thankfully its now complete…
@BladeHunter how much do you think it costs to pay $260K to a college? Seriously, you would need $380K in wages before taxes.
@ljberkow Hell, say it would take 1/2 of your income over the next 4 years to pay for it. As long as you aren’t putting through more than 1 kid at a time, I still think you could manage just fine. $100-150k per year is still very livable, even for a large family. However, I could see where the problem comes in if you are putting multiple children through $260k colleges at the same time.
Between taxes, mortgage, property taxes, retirement funding, utilities, and food, and other obligations how fast that goes bladehunter. Yes, two at once is not that easy either. Of course, after that is graduate school and parents want to help their kids with that too. As I wrote earlier, to pay $65K a year, you need to make $100K per year. Yes, if a parent has more than one child, you are looking at debt, either having a child take on debt or taking it out of equity in your home. Just so you know, when you make any reasonable amount of money, the FAFSA loans are pretty much limited to $5,500 per year. More and more kids from upper middle class families are finding their way to UMASS. In other parts of the country, many kids don’t “have” to go to private schools and those families and the states themselves focus on state university programs.
@ljberkow True. However, there are some ways to mitigate the costs of graduate school. One would be to go to Ivy leagues which have massive endowments and have been known to give quite a bit of money for financial aid. Drawback on this is that usually only the best of the best actually get into these programs, so either work your butt off or find another way to get that degree while still being able to not go into an endless hole of debt. Whatever it may be, graduate school can definitely put a dent in anyone’s financial stability.
The thing with public universities in other parts of the country, many public universities across the country can compete with even the best private schools. Take the UCs for example (primarily UC Berkeley), which total in the top 5% of universities in the world. And for in-state students, CoA is actually comparable to that of in-state for schools like UMass.