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.
The list of colleges you apply to will make the biggest difference in how much you actually end up paying for college. Think about it in the most simplistic terms, your local community college is going to be a lot cheaper than Harvard or Stanford.
The problem is that most people don’t create their college list with affordability in mind. And unless you’re willing to pay the full cost of college, this can be an expensive mistake.
Even if finances aren’t a primary consideration, most people don’t do a very good job of creating a college list.
Given that paying for a college education now rivals buying a house, it isn’t surprising the New York Fed reports that “Balances of student loans have eclipsed both auto loans and credit cards, making student loan debt the largest form of consumer debt outside of mortgages.” Faced with limited financial aid and the prospect of the equivalent of a mortgage payment upon graduating from college, families can’t help but ask if “college is worth it?”
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.
Students may be accepted at ten colleges but they can only attend one. When they finally decide which school to attend, students become part of the college’s yield rate. The yield rate is the percentage of accepted students who actually end up attending the school. So you figure the yield rate for Harvard would have the highest rate around, right? Wrong. There are eight other schools with rates higher than Harvard’s 81% including the College of the Ozarks.
It’s getting near the end of the year and like most bloggers, I’m taking stock of the year to see what has been successful, popular, and what I might want to reconsider for the coming year. In the interest of killing two birds with one stone (my need to look at the analytics while coming up with another post), I’m listing the most popular 50-50 Highlights list posts below.
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.
There has been a lot of discussion of simplifying the FAFSA. The argument is that too many low-income students don’t apply because they are intimidated by the process, don’t understand that they can qualify for significant grant aid, or don’t have all of the required information. All of these are legitimate concerns that can be resolved without reducing the application to the size of a postcard.
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!
