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.

Getting Hassled About College Choices

I received an email yesterday from a mom in Southern California, whose daughter Nicole is getting grief about the Southern universities that she has applied to.  Karen’s email raises a lot of interesting issues including preconceived notions about schools, the tendency of some parent(s) to push kids to attend their alma mater or state schools and a lack of understanding of how you can find schools that are more affordable. Aiming too high academically, for instance, can result in a teenager getting  aid packages stuffed with $55,000 worth of loans.

I’d love for you to read Karen’s note and share your thoughts in the comment box below.  Karen covers a lot in this note and I’m eager to read what you think! I will comment on the letter in my post tomorrow.

Email from a Concerned Mom

Thank you for your advice on this website and the books.  I have tried to incorporate the knowledge that I’ve learned in helping my daughter, who is a senior. We went to South and North Carolina to visit some smaller schools first (Furman, Elon, Davidson) and took a detour to Clemson.  The other schools were too small for her and she did like Clemson – so we started to look at schools a bit larger including Texas Christian University and Southern Methodist University.   With their lower costs and merit scholarships, our cost would be close to what we would pay for a University of California campus.  We are still waiting to hear back from others including Baylor University (which has a scholarship calculator on its website) and she is expecting merit aid from that school too.  I am sure she will receive flak for Baylor as well.

Nicole’s Merit Awards

Here is what she has gotten so far:

Texas Christian University (60k scholarship -15k a yr)

Southern Methodist University (48k scholarship – 12k a yr)

Clemson University (40k scholarship – 10k a yr)

University of San Diego ($0)

She has received the most negative comments about Clemson and TCU.  She really liked both schools when we visited them and both schools have Honors Colleges and Residences.  Clemson is a bit larger than what she was looking for, but the honor colleges and residences make the school seem smaller.

Why the Criticism?

I think most of the criticism is triggered by the rankings and locations – South versus Northeast.  Somehow anything in the Northeast must be better!  Also, many here in California are just not used to going to a different state for school and since many at my daughter’s school are first generation – the parents go by rankings and name. We used to live in Kansas City and most of her friends there already have selected Kansas State or University of Kansas. Our old neighbor’s daughter went to St. Olaf College. and many there also wondered why. I guess it is just that most kids usually stay close to home for college even in Kansas.

When we first started to look, the kids just made fun of her for looking at Furman and Elon – definitely schools not known out here!  I was impressed by the schools and wished she would have liked them!

We have used the tools for looking for schools with smaller class sizes, learning-based communities and those offering merit aid.  She has also learned about applying to the right schools and being realistic about matching up her grades, extracurriculars and test scores with universities.

My daughter has seen too many kids apply to schools even though they barely made the bottom of the 25-75% range. They are disappointed when they have gotten rejection letters or received no merit money.   We have also witnessed how family income comes into play.  She has seen many wealthy kids from our area get into Ivies (or other Ivy top tier) with stats a bit lower than some of her friends who were rejected even though they are National Merit scholars with perfect GPA’s and near perfect SAT’s, but who need aid.

Why Not USC?

While my daughter is pretty much sold on the idea of attending one of the schools on her list, the status and name issue keeps creeping in not only by her peers, but teachers and family members.  First, I am dealing with my husband’s family, who are LA natives.  My husband and his family attended University of Southern California for both their undergraduate and graduate work. Consequently, Nicole is not only battling the argument that one can only get a job attending a “name school,” but also that USC offers greater opportunities. And then there is the distance issue.  My mother- in-law believes kids should only attend college within a one-hour drive away from home so they can return every weekend and you can easily go take care of your kids if they are sick.  Hence my search for out-of-state colleges, gasp, that are not considered good, has been very alien to them.

My research shows that USC is different than it was in the 1950’s and the 1980’s when the relatives attended.  My husband’s family got a lot of money to send their kids there.  So I was able to show that the SAT range has gone up more than 300 points since then, and while my husband’s scores were in the upper 25% range then, our daughter with better SAT & ACT scores and higher GPA’s than her dad, is not in the upper 25% range now.

 Pressure from Her Teachers for Big Name Schools

Her teachers and peers have commented to her about her acceptances into some of these schools as “I thought you are smart.” She is in the top 3% of her school in Irvine – her 2012 class has 14 National Merit Scholars, and in last year’s class there were large numbers of students that went to the Ivies, UCLA and UC Berkeley.  Her one teacher pushed her to apply to Duke University.  She does like the school and she applied.  She is practical and has thought about later that they only accept 2 AP courses and she will have taken 9 (she has gotten 5’s on past tests), and she wouldn’t get merit money (not in the top 25%), so this would be very expensive.  So she is now thinking that since she is majoring in the sciences and plans to go to grad school in the health field, she needs to balance undergraduate cost with educational experience and it wouldn’t be wise to get into debt over Duke.  However, here is what she is being told – you have a better chance at grad school acceptances or med school going to Duke, UCLA, or USC.

Greater Competition This Year

I guess we are also noticing that she is in a very competitive graduation class – the application stats of the students at the places she has been applying are greater than in years prior.  In the past with her resume, she may have earned a full ride at some of these places, but is getting 10-15k off per year ($40k-$60k scholarships) instead at many of the schools she targeted.  Also, the economy maybe pushing high-achieving kids to look and apply at schools offering merit money more so than in the past.  She also applied and got into University of San Diego; however in the past many kids she knows got over 20k off with lower stats and extracurriculas, and she got in and didn’t get merit offers (as of now).  She was going to use that as a local backup if she could get the costs to a UC level!  But it seems there is more money out-of-state since many of her peers will not apply out of state so more competition here!

Any Advice?

If you have input in your columns about how to handle legacy parents and grandparents, going away to school and how to handle the “name” game with schools and teachers, I would greatly appreciate it. And again, thank you – at least she said she knows she is going to school and she likes where she has gotten in so far!

Karen

What Do You Think?

Okay folks, I’d love for you to weigh in on any aspect of Karen’s note. Please respond in the box below.

Today I want to share a nifty interactive tool on The Chronicle of Higher Education’s  website that you can use to see where students, who attend any college or university, are coming from.

When I used it to look up the the University of Michigan, I discovered that the biggest contingent of nonresidents were from New York (361), Illinois (319), California (297) and New Jersey (234). Sixty four percent (3,900 freshmen) came from Michigan. The University of Michigan has a long tradition of attracting students from outside the state — and enjoying the premium prices these nonresidents pay.

When using this tool on The Chronicle’s website, you can put your cursor on any state on the map and see how many freshmen came from there. The smaller the dot, the fewer the freshmen.

University of Michigan

University of California, Berkeley

I also checked the stats of another prestigious flagship, University of California, Berkeley, which has only recently begun to aggressively pursue rich nonresidents.

The biggest groups of nonresident freshmen came from Texas (62), Washington state (58), New York (42), New Jersey (33), Maryland (32) and Illinois (28). North Dakota, Nebraska and Mississippi each produced one freshmen for Berkeley. Eighty four percent of UC Berkeley’s freshmen class (3,003 students) were Californians.

 What Can You Do With These Stats?

Are these just fun facts? Not necessarily.

These stats could be helpful if you’re looking at private colleges and universities that value geographic diversity. If you’re a teenager, who is interested in a college that rarely sees applicants from your state, you could enjoy an advantage over other teenagers. It’s worth checking out.

The Most Popular States for College Students

You can also use the tool to see what states are most popular with nonresidents.

Using the tool, I found the states that attract the most outsiders. I’m not surprised that the top states for nonresidents are located on the East Coast. Take a look:

States That Attract the Most Outside College Students

What’s cool about this interactive college tool is that you can click on the bars next to a state’s name and find out how many students are coming from individual states. For instance, the biggest feeder states for Pennsylvania schools are New Jersey, New York and Maryland.

Least Popular States for Outsiders

Not surprisingly, the states that draw the fewest outsiders are remote or sparsely populated. The state that I was surprised about — it just missed being on this list at No. 11  — was New Jersey.

Lynn O’Shaughnessy is the author of The College Solution and she also writes a college blog for CBSMoneyWatch.com and US News & World Report. Join her on Facebook.

 Read More on The College Solution:

 Where Most Students End Up Attending College

Attending College in a Different Time Zone

Attending a College With Lousy Weather

I heard from a mom this week, who is worried about some of the schools her daughter has begun applying to. I wanted to share what the mother wrote:

As I watch my daughter start her college applications, I’m cringing inside because she’s wanting to apply to out of state public schools such as UCLA, Georgia Tech and Purdue. Although Purdue states that it does have scholarships to out of state students, I’m worried that this will end up being a waste of time and the cost of the application fees.

I would add “public schools in other states” to the list of schools that generally don’t give merit aid.

The Allure of Distant State Universities

I don’t blame Patty for being concerned. In some cases, the cost of attending an out-of-state school an end up costing the same or more than a private college or university. Here’s why: state universities are looking for more sources of revenue and what better way to capture extra cash than from impressionable 18-year-olds who think it would be cool to go to the University of Michigan or some other high visibility state school?

While many state universities give merit money, I’d argue that the flagships universities are going to be more tightfisted because they rarely have to worry about attracting enough students. I’ve heard from students, for instance, who have received $5,000 merit awards from the University of Michigan, which isn’t going to go far. Michigan for the typical nonresident is going to cost about $50,000 a year.

Some prestigious state universities, such as UCLA, University of California, Berkeley and the University of Washington in Seattle don’t give out any merit awards. Any of the University of California campuses would cost your daughter about $53,000 a year! The tuition at the University of Washington is $10,826 versus $28,310 for nonresidents. That’s a huge premium to pay for the privilege of going to a state school that has been facing severe financial troubles, which you can read about in this Chronicle of Higher Education story.

Doing Your Due Diligence

Before students aim for state schools as nonresidents, here are a couple of things you should do:

1. Use Net Price Calculators With Caution.

I’ve written a lot about net price calculators lately and you should definitely use a calculator before applying to any school including out-of-state public universities to see what the price will be. As a nonresident, however, you need to be careful that you are getting an accurate price.  Mark Kantrowitz, publisher of Fastweb and FinAid, said he tried a few calculators on state university sites a few months ago and observed it was “hit or miss” on whether these calculators asked for the residency of an applicant.

2. Research scholarship availability.

Head over to a school’s admission web pages and research what kind of out-of-state scholarships are available. Typically these scholarships will be awarded based on a child’s test scores and GPA. These schools don’t have the manpower to evaluate applicants holistically so awards are often strictly by the numbers.

More from The College Solution

Out-of-State Universities: Finding Bargains

4 Ways to Cut the Cost of an Out-of-State University

What is Your Expected Family Contribution

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

I’ve been running into more and more parents, who are curious about sending their children to community colleges.

I can understand the attraction. Community colleges are often much cheaper than four-year schools and they can offer a more personalized education than big state universities.

Out here in California, for instance, a freshman can take introductory courses with 30 to 40 students at a community college versus hundreds of students  at introductory courses at many state universities here.

Teenagers who start at a community college or end up leaving a four-year school for another four-year institution, have lots of company.

According to a transfer student report from the National Association for College Admission Counseling, a third of students end up transferring to other colleges or universities. Some of these students are transferring from community colleges, but many are also seeking to move from one four-year school to another.

Because of the huge number of college students who are on the move every year, I am sharing some tips for these often overlooked students:

8 Things Transfer Students Need to Know

1. The transfer admission hurdle is slightly more difficult.

The acceptance rate for transfer students (64%), according to NACAC, is slightly lower than the acceptance rate of first-year students (69% ).

When evaluating transfer applicants, the biggest admission factor by far is a student’s grades at their current college. More than 90% of colleges that participated in the NACAC survey said the overall postsecondary grade point average was “considerably important.”

2. Transfer students can qualify for merit aid.

Seventy-seven percent of colleges reported that they provide merit scholarships to transfer students. Eighty-one percent of small colleges, which have less than 3,000 students, report that they award merit scholarships to transfer students. In comparison, 66% of medium-sized schools and 67% of large schools offer merit awards.

3. Not all schools have room for transfer students.

Small colleges, which have very few undergrads leaving, can have few available spots for transfer students. For instance, Amherst College admitted just 24 transfer students out of 421 applicants for the fall term. Georgetown University, a much larger institution, admitted 364 transfer students out of 1,616 who applied.

State universities are often more equipped to accept large numbers of transfer applicants. UCLA, for instance, recently accepted 5,505 transfer students out of a pool of 18,986 transfer applicants.

4. Standardized tests scores aren’t as important.

The SAT and ACT, according to the NACAC survey, are less important for transfer students than high school seniors.

In fact, the more time you’ve spent in college, the less other institutions care about your SAT or ACT scores, according to Deborah Shames, an independent college counselor in northern New Jersey and a transfer admissions advisor for Kaplan Education Foundation.

“If a student is transferring after one semester in college or a year, schools usually want the SAT and high school GPA, but the further away from high school, the less schools rely on them,” Shames says.

5. Check out what a college wants from transfer students.

Before applying to a school, find out what the institution is looking for in transfer applicants. You can get a good idea by looking at a school’s Common Data Set. The Common Data Set is a document that four-year schools across the country complete that contains lots of information on such topics as admission criteria, freshman academic profile, campus safety and transfer admissions. You can often find a college’s Common Data Set by Googling that term and the name of the institution.

The College Board also provides this same transfer information. When looking at the profile of any four-year school on College Board, click on “Admission” hyperlink and you’ll find the transfer statistics.

6. Make sure your credits transfer.

You don’t want to lose credits when you move to another school. During the admission process, talk to a college’s transfer credit evaluator to get a sense of what credits would transfer.

7. Look for transfer-friendly schools.

One way to access that intangible is to ask if the college has a transfer coordinator. Also does the school have a transfer orientation or other transfer programs? Does the school have housing for transfer students? Ideally, you’d like to talk to transfer students about their experience at a school.

8. Focus on the positive when explaining your desire to transfer.

College applications will typically ask a student why they want to transfer. Shames warns that students should avoid saving anything negative about their current school. Instead focus on positive reasons for the change and offer specifics on why you want to transfer to a specific college.

Should professors work as hard as many of the rest of us?

If you compare the sort of work week and vacation time that many professors enjoy with other highly educated professionals, you could conclude that there are a lot of slackers hanging out in the Ivory Towers.

I hope that professor productivity becomes a big issue with the published costs of college continuing to rise. Pushing university professors back into the classroom could certainly help reduce expenses and also benefit students who are too often taught by graduate students. There is a story in today’s issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education that focuses on this issue:

How to Justify Our Paychecks

I remember reading a history of the University of California system once and I was shocked when I discovered that decades ago professors at the University of California, Berkeley used to conduct their research on the weekends and during the work week they taught students. Today plenty of professors at Berkeley and many other research universities conduct their research during the week and rarely, if ever, teach undergrads.

Coincidentally, I wrote a post yesterday for my other college blog over at CBS MoneyWatch on this very issue of professor productivity. I am sharing an excerpt here that mentions a study conducted by The Center for College Productivity and Affordability, a higher-ed think tank, that examined workload data from the University of Texas at Austin that suggests that many professors aren’t teaching much nor conducting much research.  Here is the link to my post and an excerpt:

Is Toilet Paper More Valuable Than Professor Research?

After analyzing the preliminary numbers, The Center for College Productivity and Affordability argued that if professors were made to work as hard as many other Americans, college costs could shrink dramatically. In fact, according to the center’s calculations, tuition at the University of Texas could be slashed by 50% if the 80% of professors with the lightest teaching loads had to  teach a mere 150 to 160 students a year.  That doesn’t sound too tough.

What’s More Useful: Research or Charmin?

Apologists for professors counter that academics need copious amounts of free time to conduct research.  At universities, there is a widespread belief that research is far more valuable than teaching Biology 101 to a lecture hall stuffed with hundreds of freshmen.

This is actually the mindset of academia. Professors are evaluated by what kind of research grants they get and how many research papers they can crank out. Research leads to tenure. In contrast, teaching undergrads, much less being an excellent teacher, doesn’t get professors anywhere. In this sort of environment, professors spend more time avoiding undergrads than teaching them.

Disposable Research?

Much of this hallowed research, however, is less essential than the toilet paper in your own bathroom. All of us use toilet paper everyday, but very few people ever read, much less benefit from the busy-work research that many professors are generating.

The Ivory Tower is drowning in research papers that nobody needs. You can learn more about this sad phenomenon by reading this article written by leading academics in The Chronicle of Higher Education: We Must Stop the Avalanche of Low-Quality Research. And here’s another one that focuses on academia’s shortsighted worship of research: Diminishing Returns in Humanities Research.

Would research, whether it’s mediocre or brilliant, be threatened if profs had to spend time in classrooms? Hardly. According to the Center for College Productivity and Affordability’s report, 99.8% of the research grant money at the University of Texas was brought in by a mere 20% of the faculty.

Are you wondering, as I am, what professors, who aren’t doing much research or teaching, are doing with their time after they’ve finished the daily New York Times’ puzzle?

Read More:

You can read the rest of my CBS MoneyWatch post on professors here:

Is Toilet Paper More Valuable Than Professor Research?

In my last blog post I complained that too many high school students pick schools based primarily on size. And most of these students only want to look at schools that are large.

Here is where I vented: Do You Know the Difference Between A College and University?

What’s more important, I argued, is a school’s mission. Today, I want to explore a bit about what the mission is for large research institutions.

Research Universities

The prime mission of private and state flagship research universities is to generate research and produce graduate students. Schools like Yale, UCLA, MIT, University of Wisconsin and the University of Texas attract professors who enjoy stellar credential in their fields of study.

Undergraduates foot much of the tab for these expensive graduate programs and for star professors who rarely ever teach. While producing graduate students is labor intensive, it’s much cheaper to teach undergrads because they can be taught in large lecture halls.

And guess who ends up interacting with these undergrads the most? Graduate students. Particularly in the sciences, grad students often get their degrees for free and in return they teach undergraduates.

Does this arrangement mean that students who attend large universities, particularly state institutions, will be corralled into large lecture-style classes for four (or more) years? In some cases, that’s exactly what’s going to happen, but not in others.

You can learn a great deal about universities by reading a book that I’ve been recommending a lot, The Thinking Student’s Guide to College, which I wrote about in a previous blog post.

Getting Personal Attention at a Research University

How do you get personal attention if you attend a research university?

Pursuing a major that isn’t impacted may also lead to smaller classes. Honor colleges within state universities can be another way to avoid some monster lecture-hall courses for the brightest students.  Here is where you can learn more about honor colleges.

You should also contact faculty at a university — email is probably your best bet — and ask what is the average class size for introductory classes and what is the average class size once you get into your major. You should also ask students who attend the university and/or recently graduated this question. They would have no motivation to buffalo you.

Earlier this year, I met a recent UCLA graduate, who had earned an English degree.  One of the first things that I asked him was how many students were in his English classes. While the young man said his professors were smart, he shared that he had been frustrated because the class sizes were too large. Even his upper-division English classes had at least 100 students in them. Consequently, he never got to know his professors.

The UCLA English major did smile, however, when he recalled the one class that he truly loved. He took a senior English seminar class with just 15 students. He said he worked so hard in that class and thoroughly enjoyed it because of the intimate setting.

Undergraduates at Harvard

You shouldn’t assume that just because you attend a private research university that your professors will be more accessible and you will be able to skip lecture-style learning. I begin my book, The College Solution, with a story that appeared in The New York Times that focused on a movement at Harvard to improve the undergraduate education. Here’s an excerpt:

A curious story appeared in The New York Times one day about the university that’s the academic equivalent of the Yankees.

The article captured the concerns of faculty, who worry that the teaching taking place at Harvard University isn’t meeting the school’s own vaunted standards.  In fact, a professor lamented that some undergraduates, after spending four years at Harvard, don’t know a single faculty member well enough to ask for a letter of recommendation. (Here is the link to the story: Harvard Task Force Calls for New Focus on Teaching and Not Just Research.)

Hmmm.

One student, who was interviewed, suggested that undergraduates ought to know that professors are too focused on research to put much effort into what happens in the classroom.

“You’d be stupid if you came to Harvard for the teaching,” a Harvard senior and a Rhodes scholar told the Times’ reporter. “You go to a liberal arts college for teaching. You come to Harvard to be around some of the greatest minds on earth.”

And he had more to say: “I think many people (at Harvard) spend a great deal of their time in large lecture classes, have little direct contact with professors, and are frustrated by poorly trained teaching fellows.”

So what’s the bottom line? If you want an excellent academic fit, you’ll need to do a lot more than look at the size and reputation of a university. Please dig deeper!

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