<p>Hmm! I wasn’t reading this thread, but today, this happened to us! Son is still waiting to hear from his first choice schools, but today one of his safeties (UCSC) notified him he’s a Regents Scholar, with a full ride – totally meeting the cost, with no loans or work study. Just flat out grants for the whole thing. </p>
<p>And suddenly, he’s like, “I thought I would just be comparing schools, I didn’t think that even with an EFC 0, there would still be big differences in aid!” As much as it’s a safety, four years without loans is pretty good…and it’s got him thinking.</p>
<p>Our D chose the free ride to the Honors program at a top-10 public. The clincher was that we agreed to take the checks we would have written (full pay family) to the top 25 LAC’s she got in and apply those toward her grad school costs. She seems really happy ith her choice, and this gives her the freedom to pursue her PhD and teaching goal without the burden of figuring out how to pay the grad school loans.</p>
<p>anxiousmom
I’ve been away a few hours to sleep…much nicer in here now!
D took the NMF full scholarship to Arizona State as a Music Performance major (Flute) changed to BA in Music (Music Hisotry) and is now in a PhD program (Musicology) at at top 25 CC/USNWR Private U with a full fellowship
S is a freshman in the Honors College at University of South Carolina in Sports Management with their highest scholarship for OOS students…the McNair and also has a Lieber scholarship thats given to NMF’s,along with a departmental scholarship.Amongst his perks were a free laptop and a 2,000 study abroad stipend.
Ask me sometime about the flack we received from his HS Principal over where one of the 7 NMF’s from 2006 was choosing to go to school…something along the lines of not wanting to publicize the name of that school in the same news releases as Dartmouth,Yale,etc.</p>
<p>Well, we live in South Florida. Woke up today to find a large palmetto bug prancing across the living room curtain… He is no longer with us… </p>
<p>Anyway, I don’t think we played this game very well. My DD wanted a small school (but I made her apply to UF just in case), with geology and civil/environmental engineering (but Wesleyan was a favourite so she applied there anyway), not in the south (but I made her apply to Rice because I felt it was a good fit for her otherwise). She ended up applying to 13 schools ranging from safety to reach. At the last minute, she decided to change her Brown application from RD to ED. Much to our surprise (and delight), she was accepted. However, this leaves us (EFC = too high to qualify for aid) trying to figure out how to pay for her tuition. We’ve been paying private school tuition for 14 years now, so we’re used to tuition taking all extra money - the difference being that Brown’s check will be much larger! One advantage we have at this point is that we’ll never know if any of the other schools would have given her significant merit aid. (We didn’t do a good job choosing schools for potential merit aid.) Assuming they wouldn’t have will make future payments much less painful. UF’s decision to significantly decrease merit aid to NMSF’s also helped - although even with the money, I would have had a hard time sending DD to UF. She is tired of the heat and I think the school is much too large for her. Having only one child, makes these decisions much easier, as we don’t have to worry about how we will also pay for the next one(s). I know this doesn’t really help those of you trying to make a decision now but I thought I’d throw it into the mix. Good luck to everyone in finding a school that meets the needs of your child.</p>
<p>Curm, as an aside, a close friend of my DD’s just received her acceptance to Rhodes. She was over yesterday and excited that I knew so much about the school (thanks very much for all your postings!). I mentioned that I had heard great things about the school from the father of a current student. She was really happy to get positive feedback as not many people down here have heard too much about Rhodes. There’s a good chance she’ll be headed there next year.</p>
<p>dstark, we have hotel reservations to see Pitt on Honors Day, April 13. DH is trying to talk S and I out of going to look at it, but I don’t think that’s right…they offered a scholarship and we can afford the darn place if S likes it. H, though, graduated summa and PBK from Hunter College and then had his pick of grad schools and sees nothing wrong with S doing the same. I don’t necessarily see anything wrong with it either (as long as I keep my nasty naggy prestige demon nicely sedated) but think that S should make the decision based on fit, not parental pressure.</p>
<p>HeliMom, for me it’s less a matter of prestige and more a matter of spreading your wings. You live in NYC, I think Hunter College isn’t far enough away no matter how good the price is. :)</p>
<p>good morning! i know all these decisions are highly personal, but let me put in 2 tidbits on “fit” and the idea of going away being a plus in and of itself.</p>
<p>fit. we were under a tremendous amount of pressure from a teacher at hs to send D to Rice (a wonderful school, mind you, my niece went there, and i’ll be flattered to the day i die that they accepted her), but as i say, no money. well, being ocd i try to see if they’ll up the finaid in late april - guilt is overwhelming me, she needs the “best” school, right?</p>
<p>ok, Rice has a wonderful finaid office, D is NMF, they want her, they up the offer with a larger grant after reconsidering our personal situation. what does D do when so informed? she storms off into her bedroom, slams the door and refuses to speak to me the rest of the day. finally she emerges and says, look, i want to go to Pitt, i like it there, it feels like home and no place else i’ve been to does, that’s where i want to go. fit.</p>
<p>going away. it is an education in and of itself. for the right kid. this one’s sister is at the local state u and could never have handled some of the situations my Pitt D has had to contend with, not the least of which was having an emergency appendectomy at UPMC with only her friends to help her through it 'cause we’re 1200 miles away (we arrived a few days later on an already scheduled trip for parents weekend). on the way home for Thanksgiving, there was a huge snafu in Dallas and D and about 8 other Pitt students had to help each other negotiate getting other connecting flights and deal with huge lines and a real mess of cancelled flights. a true bonding experience. two of the kids were twins from texas (i think) where one of them goes to Pitt and one to CMU, so they get different schools, but the parents get the same city to make logistics easier.</p>
<p>there is a tremendous amount of stimulation and growth that occurs when mom and dad aren’t a short drive away. for certain kids that is so impt (for them) that if it takes a scholarship to make it happen, it is the right thing to do.</p>
<p>Cheers, a couple of pages ago, you asked why S would be deployed for only a month (give or take a week). He is in NROTC. Part of the program includes a short summer tour each year (which he is paid for). It where the “real life” training comes in.
After Freshman year, they spent a week each with Naval Aviation, Submarines, Surface Warefare and the Marines to experience what each specialty was like. This summer (after soph year) he will be doing the job of an enlisted sailor. Next summer (after jr. year) he will be doing the job of a Jr. grade officer to prepare him for the real thing when he graduates and commisions in 2009. This has nothing to do with the Reserves but yes, he is in the Naval Reserves too. They signed the papers for that the first week of soph. year.</p>
<p>mercymom, i totally relate to both aspects of your post. Both describe my son’s situation, although as you say, the farther away school and lower-down-on-the-prestige factor school are not for everyone.</p>
<p>My S had probably exactly the same feeling about Tulane as your D does for Pitt. He couldn’t/didn’t choose to stay after they scratched his major post-Katrina. He’s at the “better” school now; but it’s not better for him.</p>
<p>One side note: because he has also been to yet a 3rd school (small LAC) due to Katrina, I’ve learned that even kids who find their “home” at school A can find a second home at school B. Both of those schools were great experiences for him.</p>
<p>since this thread has a gazillion posts already, this may have already been said by others, but as to this free vs. $$ choice, not only is it individual as to the child but as to the child and the family they belong to. what i mean is for us, we may have made a different choice for our Pitt D if she’d been an only child. the same income with only one child would have meant not only a larger share of the income could go to this kid, but it would have been that way for the last 18 years. more college savings would be in the bank for her, less money would have been spent on her siblings education, insurance, summer camps. we wouldn’t be thinking about how to help her sister pay for grad school (which in her field, audiology, you cannot get a job w/o a doctorate). we wouldn’t be paying for voice and piano teachers for her brother, and trying to swing it so he can tour with an honor choir to a festival in Austria this summer and then to sing in various churches in Italy.</p>
<p>if we eliminated the other two kids, then there is a very good chance the Pitt D would be a U of Chicago D. she also wouldn’t be an engineer if we’d chosen the life of the mind, and she loves engineering, but if money were no object i think we’d have picked Chicago over both Rice and Pitt and she’d have said no to engineering.</p>
<p>in some respects i think of Pitt as Chicago lite. the city of Pittsburgh gives D the feel of Chicago too (if that sounds crazy, remember we are from a small town in the deep south, the 'burgh is BIG to us). i’m just being brutally honest now. we all love Pitt and it’s working out great, but we had to make this decision as a family, not just for one kid, no matter how smart she is. plus, she is very happy, she chose this school, and she’s not so off the charts that Chicago is the only place where she could find oxygen to breathe.</p>
<p>i wish the best of luck to all those making decsions this year. after march madness comes april agony. </p>
<p>and if it doesn’t work out, you can always transfer!</p>
<p>“if we eliminated the other two kids, then there is a very good chance the Pitt D would be a U of Chicago D. she also wouldn’t be an engineer if we’d chosen the life of the mind, and she loves engineering, but if money were no object i think we’d have picked Chicago over both Rice and Pitt and she’d have said no to engineering.”</p>
<p>Mercymom, there are a lot of wes in the above post.</p>
<p>Would your daughter have chosen Chicago over Pitt if money was no object? Is she choosing engineering because of the practicality? Would she rather study the “life of the mind”?</p>
<p>I noticed the “we-s” too. I just got off the phone with a friend who has 2 girls in the throes of admissions angst (one a transfer). She goes a step further and says thiings like (“I hope I hear from XYZ College today!” I’m trying to step aside and let my child take the reins, but not always successfully. However, with the financial issues, of course there’s a “we” involved.</p>
<p>Finances, definitely a we (and the we might be just the parents). I’m not criticizing, I’m just trying to figure out what mercymom’s daughter thinks.</p>
<p>i wrote this really long post and it wouldn’t let me do it. so here’s the short version. when she interviewed at U of C she told her interviewer she really didn’t know whether she wanted to go to a school like that or to a large state school with a football team. she also didn’t know if she wanted to give up engineering to go to Chicago (which doesn’t have it). that was in september.</p>
<p>she got the $$ from Pitt in Dec. still didn’t know about it, so H said he’d only pay the airfare to see it if she got an interview. she got the med school interview, so the two of them went. i stayed home 'cause i wasn’t interested. for me it was Rice or Chicago, whichever was more affordable.</p>
<p>H and D went to see Pitt in Feb. for the interview, did the tour, sister-in-law drove down from NY state to visit them. they all fell in love and came home with a bag full of stuff, grinning from ear to ear and i was done for. it was over, the decision was made.</p>
<p>over xmas D and i talked and she said U of C was the only place she had a slight twinge about, but there was also a twinge of it being sooooooo intellectual that maybe it turned out for the best. plus she loved all the matlab, programming, the machines in the engrg labs, her friends. she totally loves the city of Pittsburgh and all the freedom she has.</p>
<p>this is the kid who figured out how to work her sister’s electric train when she was 6 months old, built ridiculously complicated lego sets at 6 years old (she actually put both these things in her “why did you pick engrg” power point).</p>
<p>U of C sent her lots of their newspaper to read after accepting her in Dec.; told us a lot more about the place. there was a tremendous pull to the intellectual atmosphere there, but… i guess there was always that “but”. </p>
<p>Pitt was definitely her decision. if you want more details, pm me.</p>
<p>mercymom, I was just curious as to your daughter’s thinking. You explained it well.</p>
<p>A friend’s son was deciding between 3 schools. The son visits them all. He decides it is between A and B, C is out. He wants to revisit B because it is a little smaller than he thought he wanted. He visits B. He really likes B. He loves the location of B. He tells his mother he is strongly leading towards B. It’s B or A.</p>
<p>Two weeks later, he chooses C, the school he originally rejected. He decided C had what he really wanted. Weather. Close to home, but not too close. The academics were fine and the school had strong school spirit and sports teams. The girls were very good looking too. ;)</p>
<p>I like to watch how people think. :)</p>
<p>PS I didn’t mention the schools because the schools don’t matter. They really don’t matter on CC. :)</p>
<p>My college choice was easy and I never wavered, but when I was deciding where to go to law school I practically didn’t sleep for three days. It was between A, B, and C; I had a strong preference for A or B, which were both similar and utterly different. There were several points in those three days where I was a whisker away from choosing C so as not to choose between A and B. I ultimately chose B, in large part for the stupidest reason imaginable: I was frustrated by my inability to get a relationship going with a girl, and it was far enough away that I would never see her again. </p>
<p>B was perfect for me, and the “girl” and I have been married for almost 24 years.</p>