State Colleges. Are they right for your your child?

I'm home recovering from a three-day, 9 school tour with 2 dozen teens. We visited 7 state colleges and 2 private ones. The differences were dramatic and worth exploring.

State schools usually offer all the trappings you think of during Saturday college football games - stadiums, thousands of students wearing t-shirts emblazoned with the school mascot, Greek life, cheerleaders, and on and on. What you also get at these state schools are large classes - impossibly large classes. At one of our stops on this tour (from Grand College Tours), the cheerful college guide explained that her freshman bio class had 1,100 students, but no worries!! The professor was required to have open hours each week (4 hours!) for students to stop in and ask questions. And you didn't even have to go to class. You could watch the class from your room in your pj's via livestream.

WHAT?!

As a parent I'm thinking I'm paying tuition to have my child sit in their room taking a class? The class is so large she can't even find a chair to sit in?

This cheerful college guide looked as if she couldn't care less that her class had over 1,000 students in it. And this applied to many of her General Education classes. But this was the only college experience she knew, and she loved the over 500 clubs on campus, and the Division I sports and the intramural teams to boot.

Now, not every state university has 1,000 student classes, and not every school permits livestreaming either. But many do, and it's important that you know this when your child applies to their schools of choice.

Enormously large classes place a burden on the student to be exquisitely adept at attending extra sessions (with teaching assistants) and going to professor's hours. Additionally, it is not uncommon that these large classes are not taught by professors at all, but by graduate students. This is not necessarily a bad thing - it's just something you should be aware of.

So on to the private colleges we visited. The campus sizes were still relatively large (6,000 students for the private colleges versus 24,000 to 60,000 for the state ones).  Football was not an available sport at these private colleges. But we saw plenty of students sporting mascot t-shirts, sorority sisters, small but gorgeous campuses, and were assured that plenty of varsity sports were in fact played, as well as intramural. And as expected, the class sizes tended to be in the 200 range for General Education classes, and 20-30 range in classes in your major.

Big difference. But so is the price tag, or so it appears. These specific private colleges cost twice what the state colleges cost, but offer a lot of scholarship opportunities, many more than the state colleges do.  And that's not unusual - private colleges almost never charge the "advertised" price.  State colleges don't have as much scholarship money available to offer most students.

There's a lot to consider when selecting a college. Knowing the facts ahead of time can help alleviate a potential bad fit for your student.