I received an email over the weekend from a mom who is stressing about whether her accomplished daughter would be better off attending a liberal arts college or a journalism school.

I happen to be a graduate of the the nation’s oldest journalism school at the University of Missouri (see photo) and I’ll share some thoughts after the mom’s note. If you’d like to weigh in,  please use the box at the bottom of this  post.

Regina’s Note:

Hi Lynn,

I enjoy your college blog and I have learned volumes about how to evaluate colleges/universities.

My daughter is a junior, very bright and driven. She has a 3.94 GPA and she attends a very academically competitive Christian school. She’s a varsity level athlete in volleyball and track and field. She hasn’t take the SAT or ACT yet but from the PSAT and PLAN test she scored pretty well. Swarthmore, Reed, and Rensselaer, Dartmouth, Brown and a swarm of other universities have been writing and sending her mailers since her PLAN test in sophomore year.

She is highly involved in athletics and her father and all (4) of her uncles played college football so she has high level of appreciation for the sacrifice and discipline that comes with maintaining top academics and being a high performing athlete.  She thrives in highly charged academic environments. She wouldn’t mind the opportunity to play college level volleyball, but she would only play at a school that benefits her overall plan.

Some Possible Journalism Schools

Based on the research I have conducted from the sources you provide, I believe she would best be served at a liberal arts college since she is a very cerebral and engaging student. I think the opportunity for her to be taught by professors would serve her best overall for her future.

She has a passion, however, to have a career in sports communications/broadcasting/public relations in the industry of professional athletics.  So she had identified Syracuse University and the SI Newhouse School of Communications or UPenn and the Annenberg School for Communication.  We have discussed between the totally different approaches between these two schools. Additionally, they are world’s apart regarding providing for financial need. We are definitely in the category of a family who needs financial assistance. I am a recent widowed mother of two.

What is your advice in this situation? How can an education at a liberal arts college meet the needs of someone determined to make a career in the field of communications/public relations? Does it even matter as an undergraduate? She does plan to get a master’s in mass communication and I know that more students from liberal arts college have success with admission and graduation with higher degrees.

Oh yes, she also does not want to stay in the West. She is determined to go East Coast or  Midwest or New England area but nothing on the West Coast.

Any advice you can give is greatly appreciated. I have been studying the Carnegie Classifications and the College Results online but I’m sure any word from you will help to make the information from these sights more meaningful.

Thanks.

 My Response:

Regina covers a lot of ground here, so I’m just going to number my thoughts.

1. Obviously as a high-achieving student, your daughter enjoys a tremendous amount of options. Only your daughter can answer what type of school she should attend. She sounds like the kind of teenager who would excel wherever she lands. I think the most obvious solution would be to continue to explore both liberal arts colleges and journalism schools. Preferably you can visit and whether or not that is possible, email/talk with professors and students at those schools.

I wrote a post two years ago about this issue when my nephew, Tommy O’Shaughnessy, was debating whether to go to Missouri’s School of Journalism or Truman State University, a public liberal arts college. He is now a sophomore attending Mizzou and he’s hoping to get admitted into the J School. Here is that post:

Which Is Better: A Liberal Arts College or University?

2. I appreciate your daughter’s interest in a liberal arts college which comes with smaller classes and often far more interaction with professors. A student can make the experience at many universities more like a smaller school by qualifying for its honors college.  For instance, the University of Missouri’s School of Journalism encourages top students to apply for the MU Honors College.

3. If she attends a journalism school, ideally your daughter would be in smaller classes once she actually starts taking classes in her major. This is something she should inquire about when talking with students and professors.

4. You don’t need to attend a journalism school to obtain a job in communications. I can’t think of anyone that I work with over at my CBS MoneyWatch gig that attended a journalism school. That said, a plugged-in journalism school can help students find that first job. If you go that route, I would recommend narrowing your search to schools that enjoy tons of ties to the industry and can help with internships and jobs.

5. I question whether your daughter would need a master’s degree in communications. I’m wondering how she would benefit if she already knows how to write and communicate well? (My husband’s got a master’s in journalism degree from Columbia University as a way to get the heck out of Alaska and his dad picked up the tap.)  You might want to think hard about this, particularly with money tight.

6. Just because schools are sending your daughter literature doesn’t mean she would get accepted no matter how accomplished she is. To find out why, read this post that I wrote in September:

Should You Be Flattered By a College’s Red Carpet Treatment?

7. This is obviously a side issue, but your daughter’s chances of playing sports will improve at a smaller school. At Division I universities, student athletes can essentially become employees of the institution. They have little time for anything else and they can be limited to the major they choose because of the sports time commitment. Division III can be a superior choice for a scholarly teenager.

Here is a post that I wrote for US News & World Report on athletic scholarships:

7 Things You Need to Know About Sports Scholarships

9. Use a net price calculator. With money a concern, be sure to use a net price calculator to get a personalized estimate of what each school on your daughter’s list will cost! Here is one of my posts on these calculators:

College Cost Calculators: Getting Wildly Different Answers

8. I flew back to my alma mater in December 2010 after I was asked to be the commencement speaker at Mizzou’s J School. It was a tremendous honor and I’ll never forget it. For all you would-be journalism majors out there, you might be interested in what I had to say:

School of Journalism’s Commencement Speech

Good luck! Anybody else have any suggestions?

Lynn O’Shaughnessy is the author of The College Solution, an Amazon bestseller, and she also writes a college blog for  CBSMoneyWatch and US News. Follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

During my college workshop at the University of California, San Diego, on Saturday, I asked the parents in attendance this question:

What percentage of high school seniors do you think got accepted into their No. 1 college last year?

One dad blurted out, “Six percent.” From the other side of the room, a mom provided this answer: “Two percent?”

I was surprised by the low-ball answers, but it certainly illustrates something that is not surprising at all — families are stressed about college.  I had no idea, however, that some parents are that pessimistic about their teenagers getting into good schools.

The actual percentage of students who manage to get into their top choice is actually quite high at 76%. The number of students who received acceptance letters from their first choice school did decline from 78.9% in 2010, but it’s still represents great odds.

These figures come from the latest annual study from UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute that has been surveying college freshmen, who attend four-year institutions, since 1966. UCLA surveys more than 204,000 freshmen, which when adjusted statistically reflects the responses of 1.5 million full-time freshman.

 College Freshman Facts

I thought I’d share with you some of the fascinating facts about this year’s college freshmen.

 Freshmen are self confident.

While American teenagers perform poorly on math and other standardized tests compared with students from plenty of other countries, the Yanks excel in self confidence and that comes through in the latest survey. Nearly half of freshman believe they are either in the top 10% or above average in their academic ability.

It’s understandable that so many teenagers think they are hot stuff academically because of the number who graduate from high school with inflated grade points averages! Here are the UCLA stats:

Interestingly enough, 25% of college freshman thought they would need tutoring or remedial work in math.

Students seem to be taking high school a bit more seriously.

High school seniors spent less time partying, more time studying and tackled more Advanced Placement courses.

Freshman stay within two hours away from home.

Freshmen continue to stay close to home for college. While there are plenty of  students who don’t have the maturity or the money to attend a distant school, far more should be considering this alternative. The number of students attending school 500 or more miles away actually dropped this year from 15.5% to 14%.

Here are some blog posts that I’ve written in the past about the admission advantage you can capture by casting a wider net when looking at colleges:

Where Most Students End Up Attending College

Where Are the Freshman Coming From?

University Reveals the Secrets of Winning Merit Scholarships

 Teenagers aren’t applying to as many schools as you may think.

Twenty one percent of last year’s high school seniors applied to seven or more schools, but an equal number applied to only one or two.

 Freshman are becoming increasingly liberal on social issues.

An unprecedented 71.3% of freshmen indicated that same-sex couples should have the right to marry, which is a 6.4 percentage point increase over the response that freshmen gave in 2009. Support for same-sex marriage was 99.3% among liberal, but even many conservatives (42.8%) approve.

Lynn O’Shaughnessy is the author of The College Solution and She also writes a college blog for  CBSMoneyWatch and US News. Follow her on Twitter.

I wrote a post for my CBS MoneyWatch college blog on Friday that blew out Antioch College’s server.

How did I do that? Actually, it wasn’t me. I was just the messenger for the liberal arts college that had a dramatic announcement to make.

For the next three years, Antioch College in Yellow Springs, OH, is offering all its incoming students full-ride tuition scholarships. With this year’s tuition valued at $26,500, each four-year scholarship is worth at least $106,000. It doesn’t matter what your family’s income is, every accepted student will get the same deal.

The offer will be even better for some students, who file for financial aid and can’t afford the room and board, which is currently $8,628.

Why?

Obviously, when you write that a college is handing out six-figure scholarships to all its students, it attracts a lot of attention. So what is the catch?

As I mention in my CBSMoneyWatch post, Antioch, which was founded by abolitionists in 1850, is crawling out of the grave.

Thanks to horrifically poor management, the liberal arts college shuttered its doors in 2008. Loyal alumni went ballistic and their donations helped to bring the school back to life. The reborn school’s first class (35 students) showed up last fall and Antioch is in the process of taking applications for the next crop of freshmen. Antioch is aiming for 65 to 75 new students in the fall and hopes to have about 300 enrolled students by 2015.

If you’re interested in applying to Antioch, it’s not too late to apply. The admission deadline is Feb. 15.

Don’t Believe Everything You Read

Antioch College is one of the 40 colleges that the late Loren Pope, a former New York Times education editor and college counselor, wrote about in his classic book, Colleges That Change Lives: 40 Schools That Will Change The Way You Think About Colleges. Pope wrote the book, which has been incredibly popular for many years, after becoming an unabashed and tireless champion of liberal arts colleges.

The last edition of Colleges That Change Lives is outdated — the most recent version came out in 2006. I thought it was unfortunate and embarrassing that the book was praising Antioch after its (temporary) demise. Pope should have known before updating his book that Antioch had been in what one alumni called a “slow-motion decline” for many years. Here is one graduate’s harrowing account  of Antioch College’s demise.

In my own book, The College Solution (the second edition will be coming out this spring!), I used Antioch’s press coverage to illustrate that you can’t believe everything you read about a college. (That advice applies to college rankings too!) For instance, months before Antioch folded, US News  & World Report‘s Best Colleges guide singled out Antioch for its small class sizes (the school had very few students left!) and its “outstanding” internship program.

Colleges That Change Lives

While Colleges that Change Lives is outdated, I do think that it is a wonderful book to get a sense of what liberal arts colleges are all about. Coincidentally, my two children happened to attend schools that are featured in the book — Beloit College and Juniata College. The 40 colleges profiled in the book formed an organization, Colleges That Change Lives, and you can find information on all these school on its website.

As a group, the CTCL colleges make appearances throughout the year;  here is the link to where the schools will be holding events in 2012. I counted appearances in 22 cities.

Lynn O’Shaughnessy is the author of The College Solution, an Amazon bestseller, and a workbook, Shrinking the Cost of College. Follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

More from The College Solution:

Measuring the Generosity of Colleges

The Colleges Where PhD’s Get Their Start

Financial Aid: Bait and Switch

The federal government has been trying for years to make the Free Application for Federal Student Aid less complicated.

It should get kudos for the effort, but millions of parents still mess up when tackling this financial aid form. But bless its heart, the federal government is trying, in what might be it’s biggest push ever, to make completing the FAFSA far less painless for the vast majority of families who wrestle with it.

What We’ve Been Waiting For

Here’s the big development, which has been years in the making: After you’ve filed your federal income taxes you can retrieve the tax information through something called the IRS Data Retrieval tool. Actually this tool was available a couple of years ago, but for reasons not worth getting into, most families weren’t eligible to use it.

With advances in IRS technology, this data retrieval tool should now be extremely helpful to most tax filers. With the click of a button, the tool will allow you to transfer your IRS tax return information to the FAFSA website to complete your financial aid form. The data retrieval feature is scheduled to be available beginning Feb. 1.

The Benefit of the New Tool

Completing the FAFSA with data directly from your IRS tax form is expected to not only make the process easier, but also cut down on errors, which should lead to more accurate financial aid awards.

If you aren’t already electronically filing your tax returns this will give you motivation to do so. That’s because once you file your tax return, the numbers in the return should be available for FAFSA purposes in one-to-two weeks. If you file a paper tax return, the data won’t be available for six-to-eight weeks.

For the first time, applicants, who indicate that they have already filed a federal tax return, will be directed to use the IRS tool. Applicants who haven’t filed yet, will be asked to use the tool once they have completed their 2011 federal tax return. The same goes for families who want to correct or update their filed FAFSA

This won’t be convenient for families who won’t get their taxes done until closer to the April 15 deadline. Unfortunately, parents typically can’t wait that long because schools often impose earlier deadlines for financial aid, as do many state aid programs.

If you file the FAFSA long before you complete your taxes, you can estimate the  FAFSA figures that require your tax return. Applicants, who estimate their taxes for the FAFSA must use the tool after they file their returns to update the financial aid application.

Who Is Eligible To Use the Tool

Here are the three criteria for using the tool:

• You must have a Social Security number
• You must have filed your 2011 federal tax return
• You must not have changed our marital status since Dec. 31, 2011

If you are married, but file separate taxes, you can’t use the data retrieval tool.

Some schools are requiring that families use the data retrieval system or are strongly recommending it.

I found a nifty tutorial on the Data Retrieval Tool on a California State University website, which I think you’ll find helpful.

Let’s hope this new tool will make everybody’s FAFSA experience a less stressful one this year!

More from The College Solution:

Measuring the Generosity of Colleges

How Does Financial Aid Work When You Are Divorced?

Financial Aid: Bait and Switch

My Upcoming College Workshop:

I will be holding my next two college workshops at the University of California, San Diego on Jan. 28 and Feb. 4. At the workshops — you can sign up for one or both – I aim to share with you ways to help you make smart decisions about picking colleges and making them more affordable. You can learn more here and sign up for the workshops here. Lynn O’Shaughnessy

Time is money and that is especially true when it comes to college.

College students usually don’t graduate in four years and that comes as a shock to most parents. Yesterday I devoted my college blog to explaining how families can find the four-year grad rates of any schools — and just as importantly — compare any institution’s grad rate with its peers. If you missed it, here it is:

The Shocking Truth About Graduation Rates

Today I want to share graduation statistics among general categories of schools. It should be no surprise that students at private institutions  graduate sooner than students at state universities, but there is variation within those two broad categories, according to figures that I pulled from a study from the ACT Research & Policy Issues.

State universities that maintain doctoral programs graduate more students in the traditional four years than schools where the top degree is a master’s degree.  State schools that produce only bachelor’s degrees fare better with their grad stats than state schools that produce master’s degrees. You can witness the same phenomenon with private colleges and universities.

4-year Grad Rates at Private Institutions

• Bachelor-PhD programs               52.9%
• Bachelor’s Degree Only                 48.4%
• Bachelor’s/Master’s Degrees       44.9%

4-Year Grad Rates at Public Institutions

• Bachelors-PhD Programs        29.4%
• Bachelor’s Degree Only           27.6%
• Bachelors/Master’s Degree    23.1%

State Flagships & Private Universities

Why would research-intense schools enjoy the highest grad rates?

Among public institutions, schools that fall into this category include the state flagships and they tend to accept students who arrive at college with better high school grades and test scores. I think a much bigger reason, however, is that flagships tend to enjoy better state funding than the public regional universities that offer master’s degree programs.

As for the higher success of private research universities, frankly there aren’t that many schools that fit into this list and a healthy percentage of those that do tend to be elite such as the Ivy League schools, as well as institutions like Stanford, University of Chicago, MIT and Georgetown. These elite schools are extremely wealthy and only accept exceptional teenagers (mostly of them wealthy), which explains why these students can graduate on time. You could lock these kids in a dark closet and they’d still find a way to graduate on time.

Liberal Arts Colleges

Why would schools that only provide Bachelor’s degrees enjoy better grad rates than schools that also offer master’s degrees? One reason is that a fair number of schools in this category are liberal arts colleges.  Like private research universities, the percentage of liberal arts colleges in the higher-ed universe is tiny. Many of these liberal arts colleges are selective and enjoy more financial resources than schools that offer master’s degree.

The other type of colleges are considered “baccalaureate,” which as a group are less prestigious. These colleges offer more vocational majors such as communications, criminal justice, nursing, and parks & recreation.

I explained the difference between these two types of colleges in this post:

What Size is a Small College?

As you do research on grad rates for potential schools, I’d suggest checking out my favorite place to find four-year grad rates:

College Results Online

Lynn O’Shaughnessy is the author of The College Solution, an Amazon bestseller, and a workbook, Shrinking the Cost of College. Follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

Note: I wanted to let you know that I will be holding my next two college workshops at the University of California, San Diego on Jan. 28 and Feb. 4. At the workshops — you can sign up for one or both – I aim to share with you ways to help you make smart decisions about picking colleges and making them more affordable. You can learn more here and sign up for the workshops here. Lynn O.

The Shocking Trust About Graduation Rates

I met a teenage girl during the fall who was excited about applying to Hampshire College.

She had visited the campus in Amherst, MA, had met professors and talked with students. She was smitten. She and her mother felt good that they had done their due diligence on the college, but then I asked them a question that drew a blank stare: Do you know what Hampshire’s four-year graduation rate is?

Overlooking Graduation Rates

They didn’t know what it was and that’s strangely common. Every year students apply to schools without ever knowing if they have a good shot of graduating in four years. Most college students, by the way, don’t graduate in what used to be the traditional eight semesters.

When I give talks out here in California and share a Power Point slide with four-year grad rates of some of the state universities, it always triggers a collective gasp from the audience. Really!

Examples:

• San Francisco State: 11.7%
• San Jose State 7.7%
• San Diego State 28.5%, which in the Cal State system is a stellar performance!

Now you might assume that students who attend a liberal arts college that costs $54,000 are going to graduate on time, but that’s a dangerous assumption. I happened to know that Hampshire’s graduation rate is strangely low for an expensive, selective school. The school’s four-year grad rate is 54.8%.

I got that figure from College Result Online, which is my favorite source for graduation rates. At College Results Online, which is brought to you by the Education Trust, you can obtain a college’s four, five and six-year rates. Here are Hampshire’s grad statistics:

Comparing Peer Institutions

One of the features that I particularly like about College Results Online is that the site will generate the names of peer institutions for you so you’ll get  a sense about whether a school’s grad rate is good or not for the company it keeps. Feeling good about Hampshire’s grad rate compared to San Jose State won’t cut it because they are entirely different institutions.

The cool part about the site’s software is that you don’t have to know what a school’s comparable institutions are. Simply hit the Similar Colleges button. When I did that in Hampshire’s case, the software generated this list of peer institutions with their four-year grad rates.

You can see that Hampshire lands at the very bottom. While Hampshire’s 54.8% four-year grad rates is alarming, it looks even worse when compared to some of its peers.

How Grad Rates Are Calculated

You should know that grad rates are a bit misleading for all schools simply because of the way that the federal government collects them. These figures only reflect the graduation rates of students who began as full-time freshmen and graduated four years later. Strangely, the federal government never tracks what happens to part-time students.

Equally odd, full-time students who end up transferring to a different college are counted as non-graduates of their original college. So obviously schools where many students leave will have lower grad rates than others. That’s clearly an issue at Hampshire, which leads to another disquieting statistic. Hampshire’s  freshmen retention is low for a highly selective private school. The freshman retention rate is only 79%. What’s with that?

When you are paying top dollar for a private college, the fact that 21% of students leave after freshman year is something to worry about.

State School Example

Now let’s look at a state university. I picked the University of Texas at Austin simply because Texas is the third biggest draw for my blog after California and New York state. In general, state flagship universities have higher grad rates than the vast majority of other public universities.

A student’s chance of graduating on time at the University of Texas, which draws a far more diverse student body, is about as good as getting “tails” on a single coin toss.  (Twenty three percent  of students at UT are low income versus 12% at Hampshire.) Most Texas students require five years to graduate.  When I see a grad rate like this, I’d want to know who is graduating in four years to assess my own child’s chances of being in that group. Far more students return for a second year at Texas.

Now let’s look at some of the Texas flagship’s peers:

There are some flagship peers that clearly possess better grad rates than UT, but in looking at many grad rates for flagships  over the years, I’d say that’s a pretty typical one.

Bottom Line:

When evaluating schools, always look at graduation rates. Even among schools of similar reputations, the grad rates can be dramatically different. Also find out what it would take at any particular school to graduate on time! Do so could ultimately save you tens of thousands of dollars.

I’m going to write more about graduation rates tomorrow.

Lynn O’Shaughnessy is the author of The College Solution, an Amazon bestseller, (the second edition should be out this spring!) and she also has written a handy financial workbook, Shrinking the Cost of College, that’s only available on her website.