Benjamin's Great Georgia College Tour! Here he stands at the gate to the University of Georgia!
We had earlier in the year seen Augusta University, Georgia Southern, and Valdosta State, and were now completing our tour by seeing three colleges in three days!
Benjamin was very impressed with the University of Georgia, with its beauty and green spaces, the accessible library, and large student union. He was also impressed that there was easy access to both a comic book shop and a gaming store.
Here he is competing in a trivia contest at Georgia State University, the very large school (50,000 plus) in downtown Atlanta. And yes, he won! It was millennials vs. baby boomers, and he actually knew the answer to more of the baby boomer questions than he did the millennial questions.
Benjamin walking the outskirts of Georgia college in Milledgeville. Georgia College combined the best features of a larger college with those of a smaller college. Big enough to have many of the amenities Benjamin was looking for, and the coursework he wants to specialize in (a combination of psychology with computer science), but small enough to feel special and get better connected to the professors.
Like UGA, Georgia College has a decorated mascot statue in the downtown area.
No trip to Milledgeville is complete without a trip to one of Georgia's finest restaurants, The Brick. It's great menu of mostly Italian treats, understands the value and great taste of over-cheesing! Alison loves their four cheese grilled sandwich. I had a chicken parm grinder, and Benjamin a cannibal calzone, containing about a half-a-dozen different kinds of meat!
Now that the whirlwind tour is over, Benjamin has narrowed down to three schools he will submit applications to - Georgia Southern, UGA, and Georgia College.
If all three accept him, which one would he choose? I don't know. That's a decision for another day. Our focus now is on retaking the ACT, in the hopes of bumping up his first score of 25.
Even though we have saved and planned, the costs of a college education is now overwhelming. One semester costs more than what I and my parents paid for four years at the University of Michigan. It easily costs ten times more now. And we're not making ten times more than what my parents made.
Without the Hope scholarship, there is no hope of going to college. I don't want to strap Benjamin or our family with huge student loans. We want to minimize that as much as possible.
That so many families accept the reality of large student loans, often at usurious interest rates (which will be increasingly true under DeVos and Trump), saddens me deeply. There is another way, if we only had the political courage to take that route.
Feel the Bern!
Looks like Benjamin has several good choices, and I wish him well. Unfortunately, college has become unaffordable for all but the wealthy. I could attend one of the objectively best colleges in the world only because Bill Milliken(and George Romney, John Swanson, and Soapy Williams before him) and state legislators valued and funded a world-class (and public) university. In 1974, my lower-division tuition was $400 per semester. They also funded a state tuition scholarship program that I worked to achieve that paid 16 credit hours for eight semesters that allowed a working class kid to realize a dream. Most “public” universities are now at best partially publicly-funded, and pay only 10 to 30 % of operating expenses. The rest is now funded by research grants(diminishing under Trump), endowment funds, student loans, student employment and parental savings. This is not a tenable business model, and does not serve society well.
ReplyDeleteWhat is amazing to me is how many parents and students are willing to "Rube Goldberg" the system, searching for any scholarship or Jerry-rigged means to work around the system. Going to the financial sessions, it becomes clear that to successfully negotiate it is almost a full-time job. And you go through all that, you might still ending with student loans, that for me, is like carrying a mortgage on an unwanted second home. And yet many just put up with it, and do not support the change needed to streamline the system, and make it affordable.
ReplyDeleteGood for Ben! I know he will go far. It's astounding that one semester for Ben costs as much as your four college years. I wish you all the best as you figure out how to fund his education. Good luck Ben!
ReplyDeleteThank you. We're all working on it. It's a full family project!
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