Teachin'Mine
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Posts posted by Teachin'Mine
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If she could just somehow change her perception of UMass Amherst it sounds almost ideal. With the five college consortium she could take archaeology classes at Amherst too which is very close to the campus. If she liked Smith, Mt Holyoke is also available and Hampshire. Amherst is often rated very highly as a college town and should offer a lot of what she's looking for as far as a hip and happening place.
I'm glad that the archaeology major site was helpful! There's a lot of liberal arts colleges rated in the lower 90s there which may offer merit aid - Wooster, Cornell College, etc.but these may also be "in the middle of nowhere". As their admissions rates are higher, I think the key would be for her to express lots of interest. Maybe she could start by contacting them and requesting info on their archaeology department. If she really likes Smith, she should let them know that too and do her best to score well on the tests and have a strong GPA first semester next year. It sounds like she needs a goal to work towards to help motivate herself to finish strong.
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I hope she has good test days as she obviously scored very nicely on the PSAT.
Here's an article listing some state universities with the lowest cost for non-residents. Maybe some of them have an archaeology major?
http://www.bestcolleges.com/features/lowest-out-of-state-tuition/
You've probably already seen this ... http://colleges.startclass.com/d/o/Archeology
Sadly Sweet Briar rates well and offered good merit aid, but it's no longer an option. Bridgewater came up on another search for archaeology programs in Mass. They offer housing for the first two years I think - maybe a safety?
Just with the bit of searching I've done, I can see why you're having a hard time coming up with good and affordable options. Maybe two years local and then transfer or have her establish residence elsewhere? I'm sure there are lots of other options and it's just a matter of finding them. But I'd have to change my response above and say that I would consider it even without the on-campus housing. I would probably budget for higher housing costs to avoid the worst areas.
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What about UMass Amherst? She could take archaeology courses at Smith.
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If the student found the assignment objectionable, then it would have been the student's role to object. And if that was the case, the time to speak up would be after reading the syllabus which should have happened before the 2nd class even met, if not before registration.
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As this is college, I have no idea why the mother is objecting.
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Is this being considered only for the low cost of tuition? If so, and it's not one your daughter really wants, I'd keep looking. State universities (thinking SUNY) have just about any major and shouldn't cost much more than this (12K plus housing plus meals plus transport) with room and board included. IIRC your daughter is a great student and should qualify for some merit aid? So much happens on-campus at non-commuter schools, so there would be more reasons to want to be on-campus other than just cost and safety.
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Well here's what I had found and had initially posted, but deleted to give others who might actually know or guess a chance to do so. I had no idea before Wikiing.
1. U of Arkansas - MBA U of Tulsa
2. UT Austin
3. UC Davis - MBA U of Chicago
4. U Penn Wharton School - U of Nebraska - MS Columbia - NY Institute of Finance
5. Auburn U - MBA Duke
I found Warren Buffet's situation interesting. He attended UPenn at his father's urging, but after two years he wanted out. I think he was 17 when he began at UPenn and graduated with his BA when he was 19 - according to Wiki. So it must not have taken him long to complete his BA at U Nebraska. Maybe that's why he switched instead of having to endure another two years at Penn? Would love to know more about his reason for the transfer. But it was at Columbia where he learned investment theories from his professor and mentor Benjamin Graham. He chose to go there to study with him after he was rejected by Harvard Business.
I agree with Creekland that the number of students should be taken into consideration, and I also know that CEOs, inventors, etc. can come from any educational background. It has more to do with them and their drive and their intellect and a good bit of luck as well. Three out of the five mentioned above did get their masters degree from top private universities and I'm sure it didn't hinder them just the same as their public university undergrad didn't hinder them in their goals.
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Just realized you're not looking for the answers, but guesses. Oops.
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Some donations are for the renovation or building of the physical campus, but other donations are made with the hope of changing the world for the better. In my opinion both are important.
http://news.yahoo.com/dartmouth-grads-end-global-poverty-21-million-scholarship-173537602.html
In searching for this particular article, I came across so many programs similar to this at many universities both private and public.
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Great topic! I've been waiting for others to post, but would be interested in this conversation as well, so here I go. Out of the schools dd was accepted to, only one had a rather narrow focus or at least the areas in which they excel are specific to her areas of interest. Should those areas have changed, that option might not have been the best. It was eliminated due to finances, not due to the focus, but while it would probably have been a good fit, I was glad that she chose a school which would help her develop more overall. I was also glad that she chose a school which wouldn't cause undue financial stress.
Yes, if you start with lots of gen eds it can give lots of leeway in which direction to choose. Dd is fairly focused on her areas of interest as she enjoys those courses, and doesn't plan to change her direction at this point. But her chosen school would allow her to pursue just about anything she'd like and is strong in many areas. The problem she has is trying to fit in everything she'd like to study along with fulfilling requirements even though there is a lot of flexibility. She avoided schools with a heavy core curriculum for this reason.
Even if a student were to choose a school based on a specific program, they do have the option to transfer but this can lengthen their time to graduation. Still in most cases it's better to take longer and get the degree you want than to just stick with something you don't enjoy for the sake of the piece of paper after four years. If dd had considered an in-state university which would have accepted all her DE credits, she'd be studying for GREs and be looking at graduate schools. I'm glad she didn't choose that option.
When choosing colleges, none of us has a crystal ball and some students can't visit before applying, so it's a matter of making educated guesses about what might work. Then when the acceptances come in it's a matter of again guessing which might be best. I think it might help to have some college courses already completed in an area of interest to have some idea if that's something to continue with. It's still not certain to be where they'll end up, but they can guess a little better. Internships are likely even better for some students to see what the work involves and to see if it might be a good fit. Unfortunately these are harder to get for most freshmen as many are exclusively for juniors.
Your son chose well and has so many excellent options to explore. I think that deciding you don't want something is a step in the right direction in choosing what you do want. Hopefully next year's courses and talking with professors and advisors will help him narrow down the field. IIRC your son is strong in all areas. I think it's harder for these students to choose just one major as they have unlimited choices. It's also more fun because they have unlimited choices. :001_smile:
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Another one she may want to consider, even thought it's a bit further from the city, is SUNY New Paltz.
The second half of the first semester is spent living and interning in NYC.
Just read a bit more about this, and it's a one semester program which any students from any other
college can apply for. The cost is 12K, but that includes housing for both programs and a meal plan
for the first 8 weeks in New Paltz.
One of the advantages I see of the SUNY universities is that any credits earned should transfer easily
to another SUNY university should a student want to change direction or transfer.
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Ahh, ... TeA! Yep, we've heard about that here on the boards.
I hope that your daughter and her friends have a wonderful (and safe) trip.
Regards,
Kareni
Did anyone catch this comparison of s@x with having a cup of tea?
I wonder if the blogger got ideas from TWTM! Great analogy either way.
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:grouphug: :grouphug: :grouphug:
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Are there any state universities other than yours which offer linguistics and have reasonable in-state COA? Some only require 12 months of living in-state to establish residency. Maybe there's one with family or friends nearby? With a light year of academics and concentrating on health, maybe she'd be ready the following year, or even the year after that to make a move. She could live and work there and still apply as an in-state freshman. If it's at all a possibility, I'd start with a list of the lowest cost universities for in-state and go from there.
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The recent 150M donation to Yale is for a specific project, but it's the large endowments which enable these schools to be so generous with their financial aid. It's also interesting to see the endowments broken down to an amount per student. http://www.reachhighscholars.org/college_endowments.html The link only shows the figures for a limited number of schools, but you can calculate it for others. It's also a good idea to take into account the tuition and COA at the schools when comparing as less financial aid is needed per student if the COA is lower.
Lori that's a problem in a lot of states. Relatively smaller endowments make it harder for the state universities to attract students who need aid, but can contribute regarding campus involvement and service and who would be likely to be generous in their alumni donations should they be able to do so in the future. They can't give away money they don't have and any cuts in state aid are felt by all the students.
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Praying for both of you. :grouphug:
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Praying here too. I don't know if it's already diagnosed or not, but if not, you may want him to try going without gluten and see if that helps. Hope his last school day is a good one. :grouphug:
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She may want to look at the Fashion Institute of Technology. It's in NYC, part of the SUNY system and has total COA for OOS of 31K. Not for profit and has a great reputation in the industry. Here's a link to their business majors. https://www.fitnyc.edu/2856.asp
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The one thing I truly dislike about these threads is the underlying current that name brand will always be the superior experience, every single blinking thread. To trot out commentary that it's ironic that homeschoolers for whom B&M options weren't good enough, but who'll just accept any old college, is downright insulting. (Not directing this part at you, Jenny.) The unspoken implication is that "good" parents will supply that "perfect" college experience; if you can't or won't, then welcome to the crappy parent club.
I have not worked my backside off the past eight, going on nine years, to just randomly drop my son in "any old college." We'll make, as Jenny in Florida put it, "a thoughtful choice." For example, ds wanted to go to a particular (more elite, I guess) school. He discovered that the economics department there was ranked only 2-3 positions higher than one of our state schools. The price tag difference between the two is over $100,000! Sorry, but I don't see the value of "the name" in this case.
I love my son, but I also love my dh. He has worked hard for us, easily 60 hours a week, for over 20 years so that I can be at home with the kids and they can have some lovely extras. I may drive a car not built in this century and the great room furniture has covers, but our kids have lacked for little in the way of comfort, health, safety, and joy. When my youngest graduates from high school, dh will be 59 years old. I have no desire to lose him because we opted for a name brand college and the stress that the extra debt entails as that time of life. My hope is for a good LAC that meets ds's academic needs and our budget. I'd do and have done a lot to get there, but I won't sacrifice our future as a family to do so.
I'm so sorry, but you inferred what was never implied, written or otherwise.
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Heck if the bumper sticker is the goal for anyone, they can get that easily enough. Aside from the academics, our goal was affordable choices.
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But I didn't see anyone saying that "any college" is fine or that all college options are equal. What many people said is that they are concerned about the price that children and families are paying in money and stress and all kinds of other ways in the frantic pursuit of admission to a specific kind of college, just because it's that kind of college.
We have young adults who are, apparently, killing themselves because they either don't get into the "right" college or feel that they aren't succeeding once they are admitted.
We have kids giving up childhoods and pounding Starbucks in order to stay awake long enough to complete schoolwork they may not even understand and participate in extracurricular they may not even like because their families have been told those things will get them into said colleges.
There's a huge, huge gap between accepting that as "normal" and shrugging and saying that any old college will do. There's an enormous range of good and great and great-for-that-student colleges in between those two extremes. Most of us -- even those of us who do value education and chose to homeschool because it was the right choice for our families -- live in that in-between land. Our kids are happy and academically challenged and enjoying their college years and going on to careers they choose.
Making a thoughtful choice that is different does not have to mean accepting "less."
I'm not disagreeing with you.
Finances have to be considered. Better for the student to attend the college they can afford for 4 or 5 years than ignore affordability and end up having to drop out before graduation.
As has been mentioned in this thread, there's another thread on the high school board which addresses cost issues, so I was including that in my reply here. It is hard to separate the two. Some don't understand how anyone could choose to spend 30K or more for a private high school. If money wasn't a concern, I'd have considered that option. But that is not at all my reality. Some of the top private schools are amazing in the breath and depth of courses offered and in the prep students receive for rigorous college courses. Saying that doesn't take anything away from what dd did do in high school. Saying one is great or possibly better doesn't make her experience any less. Kwim?
I love following what you son and daughter have accomplished and how they take advantage of opportunities. You've done a great job in your role as guidance counselor!
Another thought. While there are some lower ranked colleges which hold their students and classes to very high standards, the top colleges are top for a reason. The classes are hard. Students who are used to straight As will likely have an adjustment period. Our role as guidance counselor doesn't end the minute they get their high school diploma. We need to keep the message that grades alone do not define them. They need to know that the goal is not perfectionism but learning. And once they've chosen where to go, they need our support and validation. Really sad thread on CC recently written by a senior about how his father just couldn't accept that he didn't get into a particular college. The son got into his number one choice, but Dad couldn't let it go. Sad.
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The only reason I can think of to re-take it is if it was done without writing. If it was ACT with writing and 35, she's done!
I would suggest that she focus on the PSAT and SAT and SAT IIs as has been suggested. Congratulations to her!
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I feel I should stipulate that I have no skin in this game: While I freely acknowledge that either or both of my kids could be Ivy material, neither went that route. And given their areas of interest, neither graduate schools nor high-powered law firms will ever need to be impressed by the names on their degrees. My younger and last student is happily enrolled at the college of his choice, so I won't ever have to supervise the high school preparation or college selection process again. And given that both of mine are thriving, I don't feel the need to defend their choices to anyone.
I have to say, though, that I look at a lot of these stories and see a certain amount of confirmation bias.
For example, while reading the story above, I can totally see a story from the other side about a student who attended a good-enough school and got excellent grades and got into the same medical school, thus "proving" that it doesn't matter where you go to college.
Similarly, people who attend prestigious colleges probably do get jobs in which the names of the colleges they attended are noticed and considered a plus. Consequently, they assume it's important to have attended such a college to get such a job. But the many others who get similar jobs at other firms/companies at which name brand colleges don't matter as much will happily tell you that attending an Ivy doesn't matter.
The only reputable studies I've seen done of this issue suggest that students who were admitted to highly selective schools and chose to go elsewhere do about as well by every identifiable measure as their peers who attended the more prestigious option. So, while I'm willing to stipulate that for some small number of fields, attending an Ivy or "Ivy-equivalent" might open some doors, my gut tells me that, for the vast majority of students, the number and type of door opened may be less significant than many of us think.
Edit: I went searching for a good link to any of the studies I remembered reading about. I haven't found a link yet to any of the original material, but here's a quick summary of the findings of one of those studies:
http://www.quora.com/Does-attending-an-Ivy-League-school-really-matter
(Formatting is from the original article, so the italics and bold are not mine.)
Krueger and Dale examined sets of students who had started college in 1976 and in 1989; that way, they could get a sense of incomes both earlier and later careers. And they determined that the graduates of more selective colleges could expect earnings 7 percent greater than graduates of less selective colleges, even if the graduates in that latter group had SAT scores and high school GPAs identical to those of their peers at more exclusive institutions.
But then Krueger and Dale made their adjustment. They looked specifically at graduates of less selective colleges who had applied to more exclusive ones even though they hadn’t gone there. And they discovered that the difference in earnings pretty much disappeared. Someone with a given SAT score who had gone to Penn State but had also applied to the University of Pennsylvania, an Ivy League school with a much lower acceptance rate, generally made the same amount of money later on as someone with an equivalent SAT score who was an alumnus of UPenn. It was a fascinating conclusion, suggesting that at a certain level of intelligence and competence, what drives earnings isn’t the luster of the diploma but the type of person in possession of it. If he or she came from a background and a mindset that made an elite institution seem desirable and within reach, then he or she was more likely to have the tools and temperament for a high income down the road, whether an elite institution ultimately came into play or not. This was powerfully reflected in a related determination that Krueger and Dale made in their 2011 study: “The average SAT score of schools that rejected a student is more than twice as strong a predictor of the student’s subsequent earnings as the average SAT score of the school the student attended.â€
Sorry for the large text, but wanted that sentence to stand out. It is for this reason that studies have shown that the students who benefit the most from an elite college setting are those who are from lower SES families, or first generation or in someway do not have the same background as the "typical" students. The student who fits in comfortably at an ivy college would likely have come from a higher SES family and would already have made many contacts through family and social connections. Those connections will help them when it comes time for applying for jobs whether they attended an ivy or another college with a lesser reputation.
We often read stories of the students who overcame obstacles and gained admittance to top colleges, but they are very much in the minority of students on those campuses. For many of them, I do think that their choice of college matters. As the ivy colleges and some of the other elite colleges are the most generous, I think it's more likely that they would choose that college over others, so their experiences are probably not reflected in those studies. They're targeting students who were accepted into an elite college, but chose to go elsewhere.
Bottom line is that each family needs to make choices which work best for their student and their family and their finances. I just think it's ironic that on a homeschooling board, where many of the families chose to homeschool because they felt the other options weren't good enough for elementary school, junior high and sometimes high school, when it comes to college the thought is that any one will be fine. And sometimes "Wherever College" does have to do since it is what's affordable. It's up to the student to find the opportunities and to take advantage of all that's offered wherever they attend. Dd had an incredible experience at her DE college, which is unranked. She also had very nice options last year and thankfully some were even affordable. Had she not already done DE, CC would probably have been her financial safety.
So different options can work out well, but I wouldn't say that all college options are equal any more than I'd say that all elementary schools are equal or all high schools are equal. We all have different budgets and different priorities and need to make the best choice out of the options we have. And Jenny I completely agree that all of us have our biases. Dd wasn't admitted to the few ivy colleges she applied to, but that doesn't mean that our opinion of them and the education they offer changed, but it is human nature to reflect more on the negatives than the positives. And it's also human nature to think about all of the positives the chosen college has to offer. That's a good thing! I'm sure that's what this young man and his family are doing.
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Unless it has been stated in article I didn't read, I do think his family is middle class. His dad is an engineer and him mother is a manager. I didn't read anything that suggested they are high level employees. (I know if I was working full time, we would still be solidly middle class.) Did the articles ever state he would be full pay? I think that has been people's interpretation of the scenario, not the stated one. One article stated that the financial scenario when the older sibling finished college would dramatically increase his costs. (That could be part of the NPC estimate that they weren't prepared for>)
FWIW, I agree fully with your last comment. We haven't paid $25,000 total for a 4 yr degree. We can't afford to.
No the specifics aren't mentioned, as they shouldn't be for privacy reasons. I am not at all assuming that they are a full-pay family. Yes they were anticipating having to pay more once their other college student graduated and the costs would require sacrifice on their part. They also said that they want him to go into medical school or graduate school without carrying over student loans from undergraduate.
Here's an excerpt on Harvard's aid policy:
- 20% of our parents have total incomes less than $65,000 and are not expected to contribute.
- Families with incomes between $65,000 and $150,000 will contribute from 0-10% of their income, and those with incomes above $150,000 will be asked to pay proportionately more than 10%, based on their individual circumstances. Families at all income levels who have significant assets will continue to pay more than those in less fortunate circumstances.
- Home equity and retirement assets are not considered in our assessment of financial need.
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I thoroughly understand her sense of injustice. Some professors distinguish between excused and unexcused absences. In the future, if she knows she'll need to miss class for a legitimate reason, she might want to talk with or email her professor ahead of time. This may have not changed her attendance grade for this particular class though. I've read that some professors check attendance randomly to encourage students to attend all the time since they won't know if or when attendance will be taken.
Another thought which may help in the future, and which she may have done already, is to go to office hours and get to know the professor. When they see a student regularly, they're more inclined to think favorably of them and to give them the benefit of the doubt when requesting an absence. If she felt that she knew this professor, she might have discussed her attendance grade in person before grades were submitted.
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The CEO of the top 5 US corporations all went to public universities for undergrad
in The College Board
Posted
LC thanks for all the info on Buffet. Very interesting! While not all professors are equal nor all grad students are equal, overall I'm more in favor of attending classes taught by the professors themselves. I have no idea how much of the teaching at the Ivy colleges is done by grad students vs professors currently.