Anyone who has been paying attention to college costs and financial aid has probably heard that there really isn’t one set sticker price for college. It’s a lot like airline tickets. People sitting next to each other on a flight probably paid very different amounts for their tickets depending on when they bought them. Like airline tickets, very few families actually pay the sticker price for college.
Everyone knows that the college has become expensive but just applying to them can set you back a nice chunk of change as well. Application fees are hitting $100 for some institutions. Think about the next time you hear about some student applying to 20 schools.
(I’ve updated this post with the most recent rankings.)
Sorry. It’s the reason why traffic slows down on the opposite of the freeway from the accident. We just can’t help but look, if just for a second. And while the list of 50-50 schools is going the opposite direction of the US News College Rankings, they did come out this month and we might as well get it over with and look.
Students interested in majoring in engineering don’t have the luxury of waiting several semesters before starting work in their major. The demanding sequence of courses requires students to begin major requirements as freshman. Even starting as freshman, engineering majors often take more than four years to graduate.
When looking for a college, it’s a good idea to keep geography in mind. Apparently most families do but not in ways that will improve financial aid or enhance the student’s college education. According to The American Freshman: National Norms Fall 2016, 53% of freshman attend college within 100 miles of home. Only 17.3% enroll at a college more than 500 miles from home.
The following is a guest post by Kevin Newton who specializes in helping students apply to college in Europe.
For many people, the chance to get a degree in three years by studying in Europe is already a considerable savings of time and money. However, for those students interested in a career in law or medicine, a European degree can mean even greater savings. This is because, unlike in the United States, there isn’t any separate undergraduate degree requirement.
The following is a guest post by Kevin Newton who specializes in helping students apply to college in Europe.
For many people, the practicality of paying for a degree in Europe is a seemingly insurmountable hurdle. After all, since it is in Europe, surely it has to be more expensive, right? It is pretty well-known that American universities charge international students considerable sums of money to study stateside, so most expect the same for American students in Europe.
The truth is actually quite different. In many cases, studying in Europe is a much cheaper option that studying in the United States.
The first colleges founded in the colonies were religious-based institutions. Today over 500 colleges and universities have some sort of religious affiliation representing approximately one-third of all four-year institutions. Among 50-50 colleges, 41% of institutions have a religious affiliations.
With all of the negative perceptions associated with college testing (ACT and SAT), why would I bother to use them to rank 50-50 schools? The most basic reason is that despite the efforts of groups like FairTest.org, the SAT/ACT are still a fact of life for most high school students.
