Many high school students are attracted to the idea of attending college in an urban environment. Never mind that most probably don’t participate in the activities unique to such environments once they move in, the desire is there. Although sometimes I suspect it’s more of an “I don’t want to go to school in the sticks because I can’t find a good bar” but let’s not be cynical.
If you’re trying to figure out how to pay for college, if you’re looking for the best merit scholarship opportunities, you need to understand the basics of supply and demand in higher education. Why? Because we charge students to attend college. Granted, the way we pay for higher education is a complicated mixture of public finance and individual contributions but it’s still part of the market place. There’s a reason why colleges bury high school students in an avalanche of slick brochures and social media invitations–colleges are competing for students willing to pay to attend their version of the “collegiate experience.”
While college visits aren’t always possible, I don’t think the available virtual campus tours are the solution either. Don’t despair, there are useful alternatives to a college tour but it won’t happen with just a click of a mouse. Yes, it’s a do it yourself alternative but it can be just as useful as a campus tour and a lot cheaper.
As I work with college data, I learn about different variables and add them to my data sets. I also occasionally create a variable to more accurately capture a concept or value that I think is important when trying to figure out how much college will cost. This is why you’ll see multiple posts on some variation of a list of colleges with the best financial aid. And because of the variation, you’ll always find some colleges on one list and not another. Well, I’m adding another list of colleges to consider for merit aid.
As I’ve been up dating my spreadsheet, I’ve been reviewing information on college quality and affordability. Looking through the data and how people use it has gotten me thinking about the latest attempts by the government to rate colleges, college rankings, and what makes a good education. As usual, I ended up with more questions than answers.
The following are suggested tips for preparing for the college admissions interview. These are all general recommendations. If you have specific information that applies to a specific college, then certainly go with it. I really don’t think there is one answer for all situations so of course these are suggestions and not rules written in stone. They are based on the experiences with my son and wading through countless websites and college admission books.
It’s September so that means we all get to find out the best colleges for the coming year, thanks to US News Best College Rankings. I’m sure all those students who started at Harvard this year wish they had gone to Princeton instead since Princeton is ranked as the best college in the nation. And those at Yale must be heartbroken to be sharing the number three spot with the University of Chicago when as recently as 2010-11, Chicago was barely in the top ten. How the quality of their education and future prospects must suffer trailing Princeton and Harvard!
If college graduation rates were high school graduation rates, every politician, pundit, and policy wonk would be in the mainstream media talking about the crisis of college dropouts and devising ways to tie faculty evaluation to student graduation. Not that such an approach is necessarily the answer. After all, given the situation with high school graduation rates, I’m not sure that we would actually come up with any solutions but, boy, we sure would be talking about it.
There are common stereotypes of public and private colleges. Public universities offer a much lower sticker price than private institutions while private colleges have the reputation of being small and personal but expensive. And while these perceptions contain some truth, you really shouldn’t let them limit your college search.
