I’m an American AMA about US universities

[Dilemoth]

I know US universities/colleges have become more popular and would like to help if possible.

Context: Have children in high school in the southeast part of the US applying to college soon.

Yale is Ivy League and is ranked above Northwestern University. Northwestern is ranked more highly than Brown even though Brown is Ivy League. All three are highly-selective universities.

Northeastern University is not in the same league as the above.

I know you asked the OP but if I can jump in here. It doesn't cause confusion because Americans know the difference between nursery school, high school, and getting a PhD from Harvard, even though they all might be called school. But various adjectives are usually used to clarify different levels of education.

Also in the us, university is generally referred to as college.

@DorotheaDiamond

William and Mary is not generous with financial aid to out of state students. In-state admitted students can get finaid up to 100% of demonstrated need whereas out of state admitted students max their eligibility at 25% of demonstrated need. UVA is a better bet of you're out of state.

@mathanxiety thank you for that! We are visiting 3 very different unis over the summer just to see if dd really wants to go to USA and get an idea of what sort she wants then she will have to do a lot more research. But w&m was recommended as a good fit for her by a college counselor and we can probably afford it.

Ranking of Universities needs to be taken with a pinch of salt.

The Ivy League is a football league. Universities within that league are often older, but not necessarily better than others.

FWIW on the QS tables, Northwestern ranks 30th, Brown ranks 60th.

Northwestern has a very famous journalism school and hosts the Kellogg Business School so is well regarded for economics.

QS has five US Universities in the top 10 worldwide. Only one is Ivy (Harvard). Others are Stanford, MIT, Caltech, and U Chicago. Which sounds about right.

Yale ranks 14th, so the third highest Ivy.

For those interested in Northeastern and in rankings this article from 2014 is interesting.

www.bostonmagazine.com/news/2014/08/26/how-northeastern-gamed-the-college-rankings/

Fun fact - Northwestern is called that because when it was originally set up Chicago was in the northwest of the United States.

@HoneyMobster
There are is not money for overseas students at all usa universities. As DD got a place with little fee reduction I do know. It wholly deigned where and subjects offered.

As @PhotoDad says it’s patchy. Also $29,000 for Harvard looks expensive against the best here. Plenty of parents won’t have that.

There is also the issue of flights home and living costs. There is money for some but by no means all. The very rich are always ok. The poor are ok. In the middle, not really!

Yale ranks 18th, the fourth highest Ivy aften Harvard, Penn and Princeton. Columbia and Cornell are hot on the heels of Yale.

UK universities are greatly subsidised: an undergraduate degree costs MUCH more that the current maximum annual fee which is why allowing students to act like stroppy customers makes no sense to me. It's not like they're in short supply

TizerorFizz · Today 23:07
There is money for some but by no means all. The very rich are always ok. The poor are ok. In the middle, not really!

@TizerorFizz, it's simply not true that the poor are okay. Financial aid covering the full costs of poor students is limited to a very small number of highly-selective US universities. The number of poor UK students who go to college in the US is very small indeed.

That should read:
Financial aid covering the full costs of poor international students is limited to a very small number of highly-selective US universities.

@TizerorFizz $29,000 is about £20,000 on long term exchange trends, more at the moment. And it included everything down to travel and health insurance. But that was my hypothetical family’s contribution on a stable income of $175,000. I agree it is too much for many families, but most British families do not have this income.

@PhotoDad you make good points about professional accreditation here in the UK. I apologise in advance for what’s below if we are saying the same thing in different ways.

The Ivies, Stanford and some others do not offer merit scholarships. The only threshold for aid is admission. Harvard is amongst the most generous. I think some others now meet its basic offer: if family income is less than $100,000, no check is written and no loan is offered. The university provides full aid - tuition, residence halls, fees, etc. (There might be a small component of decent campus employment, I am not sure.).

Of course getting in is the challenge, but for many of the British who do it is fabulous.

I agree there is another tier of unis offering merit scholarships, in some cases quite substantial.

Do students really get stuck sharing bedrooms with a stranger like in the movies? Does that not cause a lot of problems?

While $60k may the advertised full rack tuition, the reality is most students get aid and pay way less. This website details the average cost based on income and this is the same for other private universities in the US.

www.usnews.com/best-colleges/boston-university-2130/paying

Also included for Harvard as well for more context.

www.usnews.com/best-colleges/harvard-university-2155/paying

Another aspect that no one’s touched on is the fact that the federal student loans available to students really haven’t kept pace with tuition rates so parents are expected to contribute alot of money. The federal loan cap for a freshman is $5,500, which doesn’t touch the sides of most annual tuition, room and board, etc.

Parents are expected to cough up instead and there’s even the Parent PLUS loans that they can take out to cover their child’s education. So you have parents in their 40’s and 50’s taking on tens of thousands in debt. It’s ludicrous. ☹️

It’s so tempting to go for the largest scholarship, but if you really want to go elsewhere that’s offered less money/has more expensive tuition, you have to plead your case for additional financial aid and apply for other scholarships. It’s an additional layer of stress.

It makes the parents feel shit as well, because of course you want to say go to that prestigious college even though they haven’t given you the most money. ☹️

I went to a US uni and I shared, pretty much everyone did in those days. However, most shared accommodation at my old uni has been knocked down and single rooms have been built. I've heard that it's much more common now for single occupancy. The sharing thing had its pros and cons, you only really shared with a stranger as a freshman (I knew my roomie before I got there though), after that you share with friends. So sharing means you meet people more easily. The cons are obvious, 18-22 year old have lots of sex, lol

@Barleysugar86 yes we get stuck sharing rooms with strangers and YES it sucks. A lot of unis charge the same amount of any room type, my uni had a huge variety, really small doubles (2 students) with a big communal bathroom, to very plush flats with 4 beds and 4 bathrooms and charged accordingly. Seeing as my parents were already shelling out $25K a year (15 years ago, at an elite private uni, I got an elusive merit based scholarship), they opted not to add $5k/year on for me to have my own room (which I fully support and understand!). But I got stuck with a psycho and all round miserable human being my first year. Second year I got a better roommate but it wasn't great (I was signed up to share with a friend but she ended up leaving over the summer unexpectedly so I got a random). Third year, I moved to off campus housing which was a little further away but WAY less expensive (Boston).

Worth noting that "needs blind admissions" just means they won't reject your application solely because you need financial aid/can't obviously afford the college and supporting "demonstrated need" is what the government and school think your family needs and this aid can include student loans at a high interest rate NOT like British student loans. My family was told I didn't need anything to go to a $45k/year school 15 years ago. We did. I went where I got a merit based scholarship. I had some student loans for grad school and rate was 8.6%. You can defer some of it I think, but the terms aren't great. My parents ended up paying it off for me I paid them back at the rate they were getting from the bank. I was fortunate that I was able to pay it off within 4-5 years but many continue paying for decades. I will STRONGLY encourage my DC not to take out student loans unless they are sure to finish in a lucrative profession (law, ,medicine etc) and even then, would caution about what a millstone it can be for a lot of people.

State schools are only cheaper for students who are resident in that state, ie California schools are only cheap for California residents and as expensive as private schools for out of state AND for the competitive state systems (and there are not that many, many state schools are not great) the states are usually wise to people try to claim residency after the first year so you can't always do this.

There are also plenty of crappy private unis that still charge 50-60$K a year. There are plenty of small (2000 students of less) and good liberal arts colleges but there are also plenty that are kind of niche-y and not really that academically rigorous or that likely to help you build the kind of connections and networks somewhere like Yale, Harvard, MIT etc would. Yale may rank 14th or whatever, but you want to look at what's going to get you connections to top jobs in law, business, medicine, government, just look at how many presidents went to Yale and ivies more broadly. So much of what you're getting at a top uni like that is access to alumni.

Also, unless you are seriously minted, or your child is seriously good at a particular sport and thus likely to get a scholarship, don't try and get them to go to a US school. Focus on the top UK unis and give them a fraction of what you'd be spending on US tuition to have a really great gap year. I went to the LSE for grad school partly because it was excellent in the field and partly because it cost me 13K as an international student to achieve what it would have cost me $100K+ in the US.

Unbelieveable!

Basically - Is it true that all Americans are thick even the ones in Harvard etc?

And all of us are really smart.

Little England much?

Yes, for the most part, you are assigned a roommate who will be a stranger to you.

However, many universities have a roommate selector section of their website where you can enter in roomie features you couldn't possibly put up with - you like to be in bed asleep at 9pm so you don't want a roommate who is up all night and sleeps to noon or beyond, you get stabby if someone snores, you are a neat freak so no 'relaxed about mess' people, please.

Universities don't guarantee they will find you the perfect roommate, but you might find you get along fairly well. If problems arise, you bring them to the RA (resident advisor) who tries to mediate. If the situation is really bad, you can ask to be moved. Realistically, the only time you might be able to move is at the start of a semester when others who hate their roommates are all trying to find somewhere else too. You might find you've left a bad situation for a worse one.

Only my DS had a truly awful experience with a roommate - there were stolen books, a complete lack of personal hygiene, and lots of other issues. The other four got along fine with theirs. They were able to contact their roommates before meeting them on drop-off day and coordinate who would bring or rent a mini fridge, microwave, electric kettle, rug for the floor/ what colour, etc. DS never bothered trying to be moved, but he probably could have been accommodated if he had tried. My DCs were used to shared bathrooms and bedrooms as there are five of them, and we had a small house. They always requested roommates from large families if possible.

They encountered and heard about a good many students who had grown up in extremely salubrious surroundings, often with live-in housekeepers, kids of 18 who had never done their own laundry, or taken public transport..

And then there are sorority and fraternity rituals and houses, truly a different world.

And the town it is located in, Evanston, was known to wags as Heavenston, thanks to its staunchly Methodist ethos. It was a dry town until 1972.