college red flags
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Anonymous
| What are your red flags when looking for colleges |
Anonymous
| When annual tuition is higher than the average starting salary of their graduates |
Anonymous
This is going to be very different for different students and families, OP. Realize that you will get wildly varying and contradictory answers here. This being rank-obsessed DCUM, probably the red flag for some people will be "any college that's not ranked in the top 20 by USNWR" or whatever, or "any college that isn't an Ivy" blah blah.... For us, red flags would have been any college with a heavy Greek presence and a lot of social life centered on Greek houses and partying. But others here actively seek schools with Greek presence. |
Anonymous
Extremely arbitrary formula. It's nonsensical to apply a magical mathematical formula because salaries are dependent on too many variables. "Their graduates" means little when those graduates are in a wide range of fields with a wide range of potential starting salaries. And the formula totally misses the idea that some, perhaps many, students, will not have a "starting salary" until after grad school, if grad school is next on their list after undergrad. But you do you. What this PP actually means is "I won't send a kid to a private college and am insisting my kid only go to the in-state public, and I consider college to be a financial return on investment situation." Fine for them, but not as clear-cut and simple as parents like this want it to be. |
Anonymous
|
When everyone gets merit money.
They set their tuition high, then give everyone a discount for the feel good factor. |
Anonymous
Nearly ever private school there is. In the 2021 NACUBO Tuition Discounting Study, 359 private, nonprofit colleges and universities reported an estimated 54.5 percent average institutional tuition discount rate for first-time, full-time, first-year students in 2020-21 and 49 percent for all undergraduates—both record highs. By providing grants, fellowships, and scholarships, these institutions forgo about half the revenue they otherwise would collect if they charged all students the tuition and fee sticker price. https://www.nacubo.org/Press-Releases/2022/Tuition-Discount-Rates-at-Private-Colleges-and-Universities-Hit-All-Time-Highs |
Anonymous
|
Freshman retention rate below 90%.
Graduation rate below 80%. Low endowment. Top 25% of the students performing below how my kids perform Strong Greek culture |
Anonymous
| Where majority commutes. Where graduation rate is low. Where average SAT is low. Where diversity is low. |
Anonymous
| More than half the students belong to fraternities and sororities. Low freshman retention rate. |
Anonymous
| Low graduation rate. Greek dominated campus. Lots of pandering to certain groups at tours, I've seen lots of pandering to athletes and men, for example, in schools which want to bring in more men. |
Anonymous
|
No one attends campus events (suggests low school spirit/sense of community). We asked about this on tours.
My kid was a bio major and we asked how many kids struggled in the entry level bio class (many are a weedout class, which results in students dropping STEM major). If a significantly lower proportion of upperclassmen get merit aid than freshmen (this statistic is available, in college guides like Princeton Review). If you see this, it means they only used the merit aid to recruit the kid and have no intention of continuing it for four years. Often they do this through inflexible rules for maintaining the aid (like a trigger that is based upon semester GPA rather than overall GPA). |
Anonymous
| High suicide rate or a school that won't disclose the number of suicides (and drug deaths, overdoses, etc.) |
Anonymous
| There’s a really nasty practice some private colleges have of granting a full ride for the first year to attract the top students they really want (and increase “yield”) and then significantly cutting back the amount of aid for the next year, regardless of how well the student is performing. They expect that the student and/or parents will then apply for a huge amount of loans. Awful. It happened to me years ago at one of the top 5 wealthiest private colleges and again to my nephew recently at a different private college It’s devastating. In my case, the chair of the department I was as majoring in found a private scholarship for me but it was too little too late and I had to go into debt. In my nephew’s case, he transferred to a state university. It’s a horrible and hidden practice. |
Anonymous
|
Strong Greek culture.
Inappropriate attention to my DD during tour, and on IG. |
Anonymous
+1 And you don't realize it until you're there and it's too late. I went to GW and knew numerous people who had this happen to them. It messed up their entire college trajectory in some cases, since credits were hard to transfer and they needed to take an extra year at a new school. Some people decided to wait a year to see if their aid changed, and if it didn't, it was a year lost. Really, really sad. |