(Skip to the end to see the list of top three college by graduation rates.) When trying to identify the cheapest colleges (or most affordable or hidden bargains or whatever your preferred terminology happens to be) it’s probably a good idea to keep in mind the saying, “you get what you pay for.” Unfortunately, too often this means that people just assume the more expensive product is the better one. The same is often true of colleges especially since it’s so difficult to actually figure out what you’re paying for. If you’re able to step away from the shiny attraction of prestige and brand names, I have a suggestion: graduation rates.
So your first question is what would a homeschool mom know about how to get recruited to play college baseball? Simple, it’s like everything else in homeschooling–once our son decided that he wanted to play baseball in college we realized that we would have to figure out the process ourselves. A lot of what we learned can be applied to anyone trying to play college sports but the specifics here will be on baseball.
I think that the greatest unacknowledged truth in college admissions is that if you’re good enough to get into an Ivy League school then you are good enough to handle being rejected by them.
It seems that weekly, if not daily, you’ll come across another story about how today’s generation has been coddled with self-esteem trophies since their first little league game and have been told that their clay pots are special no matter how lumpy and cracked. This has an especially insidious strain in high school sports that can undermine a player’s chances to get recruited to play college baseball.
(See list of cheapest colleges by acceptance rates at end of post.) Budget, affordable, bargain, best value are all different ways at getting at what are the cheapest colleges in the United States? There are multiple options you can use as the number to rank colleges to determine which is the most affordable. More on that later. And some lists will actually divide schools up by geography which can be useful. But do you know what is the most useful way to classify value colleges regardless of how you define value? Acceptance rates.