Choosing a University

2024-05-15 Wed
school

For the last year or so a lot of our family's attention has been focused on helping our son figure out what college to attend. He ultimately picked a place where we think he'll be happy, but it was a lot of work sorting out all the details to make a decision. In this post I want to write down some thoughts on what we learned so we'll have a better starting point when we go through this process again with my other son in a few years.

Good Scores, but a Competitive System

My son worked hard in high school and did very well by our standards. He had nearly all A's, a respectable SAT, multiple APs, and a few varsity letters. We discouraged him from taking on more APs because we were worried about burnout and had doubts about the quality of some of the AP teachers in our high school (eg, students getting all A's in one class but then getting a 1 on the AP exam). Other students piled on more clubs and awards than our son, but I'm proud of his results and relieved he found a balance between work and happiness.

Our son didn't have a major picked out, but he was interested in a medium-sized school that was located somewhere interesting and had a path to a UC-level degree. California's school system is complicated, as it divides its schools into three tiers for different needs: the UCs serve "research-bound" students, the Cal State schools focus on "profession-oriented" students, and the Community Colleges serve students that want a stepping stone. While everyone wants to go to a UC (research or not), Livermore's Los Positas Community College was a distinct possibility because it's highly ranked and offers transfers to the UCs after two years.

Unfortunately, there are several things that make the UCs a mess right now. First, many of the UCs are overcrowded and lack space, funds, or willpower to expand. Nearly all the schools are doubling up their dorm rooms. Some don't have dorm space for sophomores and are located in places that don't have any affordable housing options. Second, the UCs are currently test blind, which means that they don't look at your SATs during the selection process. While I believe this makes it slightly harder for wealthy families to game the system (I know someone that paid $7k to have their kids coached on beating the SAT), it also means that everyone is thrown into a big pile without a simple metric to help sort them out. Given the prevalence of ChatGPT use among my son's peers, I also wonder if it makes any sense to have the essays as part of the admission process. Finally, there are a massive number of students applying, with each school receiving between 80k-100k applicants a year. The numbers are pushing acceptance rates down, which means you have to look at each school and gamble on which major will give you the best chance of getting accepted (eg, CS is extremely competitive, but some schools have data science or cognitive science majors that might be easier or better).

Spreadsheet

Our son applied to enough colleges that I had to make a spreadsheet to keep everything straight. We basically did three waves of applications: UCs, Cal States, and then out-of-state schools. We spent the most time on the UCs because they came first and had the earliest deadline (though it was easy to submit to multiple schools). The Cal States were much simpler and required almost no info (even Cal Poly, which is one of CA's most desired schools). The other schools were last. I had thought we'd apply for more, but my son was burnt out by this point and doubting whether he wanted to go to school at all. The shotgun approach gave mixed results. He received rejections from Davis, Irvine, Santa Barbara, and Cal Poly Slo. He got wait listed at Riverside and San Diego, with the former going positive in the summer and the latter negative just before the Fall.

Here's a top-level summary of the important parts:

|------------+-------+-----+-------+-------+---------+------+-------+--------|
| School     | Cost/ | Div |   SAT | Small | Student | Male | Under | Travel |
|            | Year  |     | Upper | Class | Faculty |      | Grads | Time   |
|------------+-------+-----+-------+-------+---------+------+-------+--------|
| Chico      | $24k  | 44% |  1186 |   37% |    20:1 |  46% |   13k | 3h     |
| Monterey   | $22k  | 64% |  1263 |   29% |    23:1 |  40% |    6k | 2h     |
| SJSU       | $27k  | 78% |  1370 |   21% |    24:1 |  52% |   27k | 1h     |
| San Marcus | $22k  | 71% |  1100 |   17% |    21:1 |  42% |   13k | 2h     |
|------------+-------+-----+-------+-------+---------+------+-------+--------|
| UCSC       | $42k  | 61% |   N/A |   28% |    23:1 |  50% |   17k | 2h     |
| Riverside  | $42k  | 88% |   N/A |   22% |    24:1 |  48% |   23k | 6h     |
|------------+-------+-----+-------+-------+---------+------+-------+--------|
| RIT        | $47k  | 31% |  1450 |   48% |    13:1 |  66% |   14k | 8h     |
| St Mary's  | $44k  | 57% |  1260 |   68% |     8:1 |  44% |    2k | 1h     |
| U. Denver  | $43k  | 26% |  1400 |   56% |     8:1 |  44% |    6k | 3h     |
| U. Oregon  | $54k  | 34% |  1370 |   38% |    19:1 |  45% |   19k | 3h     |
| OSU        | $44k  | 31% |  1380 |   28% |    19:1 |  51% |   29k | 2h     |
|------------+-------+-----+-------+-------+---------+------+-------+--------|

Some comments:

Scholarships and Deals

The list price for many of the out of state and private schools really made us question whether they would be worth it. However, most of these schools sent scholarships or deals in their acceptance letters that helped drive the cost down. As summarized below, everyone but U of Oregon had a deal that dropped the price down to something that would be competitive with UC costs. These number are consistent with what other people have told us (eg, U of Oregon rarely gives a good-enough discount because they know they're a top choice for Californians). 

|-----------+------+----------+-------|
| School    | List | Discount | Total |
|-----------+------+----------+-------|
| U Denver  | $79k | $36k     | $43k  |
| St Mary's | $78k | $34k     | $44k  |
| RIT       | $76k | $29k     | $47k  |
| OSU       | $59k | $15k     | $44k  |
| U Oregon  | $66k | $12k     | $54k  |
|-----------+------+----------+-------|

One special call out here: the Western Undergraduate Exchange (WUE) is a great way to students in western states to save money on some schools in neighboring states. It's a reciprocal program that allows out-of-state students with good grades to get cheaper rates (eg, 1.5x the in-state rate). Oregon State University offered this to our son, but other schools like U of Utah, U of New Mexico, Boise State, U of Hawaii, U Colorado Denver, etc. participate.

In theory, there was an option for us to get in-state tuition in some schools in Texas via my employer. However, the only schools that were appealing were UT Austin and maybe TAMU, and admissions were extremely competitive for out-of-state students (they only allow 10% out-of-state, so the scores are very high). My wife doesn't want to have anything to do with Texas, so it was an easy one to write off.

Watch out for Prison Food

On every tour we took there was some talk of how great the food was. It sounded frivolous to us, but it turns out that food quality can be a serious problem in schools. A friend's son reported that the food at RIT was really bad and that he had gotten sick from it enough times he had to work out alternative options for the meal plan required by his dorm (seems common). People are reporting that universities are looking for cheaper food options, which means they sometimes work with companies that also serve prisons. Interestingly, we read that UCSC students protested bad food service from Sodexo in 2004 and got the school to replace it with UCSC Dining.

Tours and Advisement

We visited a lot of different types of campuses over the last few years. Too many, actually. We saw about 10 schools in CA, 3 in Boston, 2 in Oregon, and 2 in Georgia. While many of the visits were more of an excuse to wander around somewhere while we were on vacation, the trips wore all of us out. Most campus tours are a complete waste of time. They may tell you what each of the buildings is for, they rarely tell you why you should be interested in the major.

The University of Oregon really stood out in terms of selling the school. The visitor center had sample dorm rooms you could explore without having to crawl over other parents in a campus tour. They also had a small theater with a tile display for presenting an overview of the campus. Before the session started, they showed nature videos from around the state and listed the drive time to get to each place. It was clever of them to sell Oregon to the (mostly Californian) parents- I can see how it would be fun to come visit and go explore the rest of the state. It made UC Davis's video "In the middle of.. Everywhere!" seem extremely flimsy.

Oregon State University's orientation also impressed me. One thing they did was help us schedule a one-on-one session with an admissions advisor to talk about majors and the exploratory studies program. The advisor talked about how they had a path for students to try out different majors before committing to one. Interestingly, exploratory students at OSU often wind up graduating on time and before other students because the courses count towards a degree and students often lock in better when they're presented with options and are given a chance to choose on their own. I was impressed that a large school would have people available to meet with prospective students. At the end of the session, I wanted to go there myself.

Don't Believe the Rankings

The last comment I'd like to make about our college search is that there's a lot of phoniness going on in all directions. The same way that students game the admission process, schools game the college ranking systems. For example, UChicago is famous for blasting out mailings to every student it can find (our son got his first flier in 9th grade). It does this so more people will apply. With a fixed number of slots, this means that the school appears more selective, which in turn boosts the school in some of the college ranking sites. We noticed that other schools like Northeastern seem to be following the same plan (see this article). The college ranking systems themselves have their own biases. US News lists 19 factors they use in their rankings, each with its own weighting factor. Some of these factors are really useful for some people, but not so important for our situation (eg, first-generation graduation rate).

The Fiske guide (above) did turn out to be a good reference for sorting schools out. It was easy to get overwhelmed by the number of schools that are listed in it, but their star ranking system seemed to match my expectations for schools I knew about. One feature that was really useful for us was the "overlaps" box, which listed schools that were similar to the one you looked up. This info helped us draw comparisons between schools (eg, WPI is like Rose-Hulman but near Boston).

In any case, I think our son is happy with where he decided, and we're relieved to be done with the whole process. Now all that needs to be done is for him to do the hard work and for us to cough up the money.