[fs1977]

Originally Posted by afadeev

We can fix that. This will help:
US University rankings (school with under-grad and masters/PhD programs): https://www.usnews.com/best-colleges...tDirection=asc
US College rankings (under-grad only, <5K students, almost 100% of classes will be taught by actual professors, not TAs): https://www.usnews.com/best-colleges

Top-20 from either list will give your kid a world-class education.
20-50 are mostly still great.
Outside of 50 - things may start getting weird.



Yep, we've got plenty of those!
Just beware that the culture of the two coasts is VERY different. Will have to take your kid to visit and see for yourselves to find out!



You will have to invest time, money, and effort into visiting schools and meeting the coaches for yourself. Unless you REALLY trust your intermediary!



Yeah, you will need to seriously study for SAT and raise that score, unless your son is an Olympic-level athlete (in which case scores may not matter).

For top-20 / Ivy Leage schools, you will want to aim for the top 5% of the SAT scores.
https://research.collegeboard.org/re...ing-scores/sat

Good luck,
a

You are far more ambitious academically than he is or we are for him for his USA experience. No special interest in Ivy league or top 20/50 schools. If he gets offers from them, fine. If not, also fine. It's all about the overall experience, different culture, different mentality, widening his world and developing as a person. All that while playing his favourite sport at a decent level.

And as you can imagine, visiting schools is not an option. To many miles away, just costs to much time. We trust the intermediary enough and besides that, contact with coaches can be done with all kinds of different video call apps.

[mdf]

Originally Posted by XutvJet

We are thankful for the process to be over though as it was exhausting and time consuming. We are proud of our girl to be patient and explore all her options. Luckily, none of the coaches pressured her and were willing to wait.

Hey, congratulations to your daughter and your family. The thread was an interesting read. Thanks for following up with the conclusion.

I'm late to this thread, and my New Year's resolution was to not offer opinions or give advice people didn't ask for. You can see how well that's going. Because despite that, reading through this thread there was something that kept coming to my mind and that I thought I'd pass along.

It's about self-care. Athletes and self-care.

As a high school student, my college girlfriend was a two-time All American. She was a State champion and had so many trophies and medals that she only displayed the towering prestigious ones, with the rest filling up boxes in the garage. And she was as heavily recruited as your daughter was, and also got full-ride offers from major D1 schools. She burned out before she got there. And she ended up at the D3 school where we met, where she swam on the team "for fun". But she had a dysfunctional relationship with her sport by that point. She would be kind of an emotional mess about swimming, before meets and sometimes even practices. But couldn't quit it. I didn't know it at the time, no one really talked about the psychology of being a youth athlete, and the importance of self-care. My girlfriend would really have benefited from it.

The other one was an episode of the radio program This American Life. They had an episode about a youth athlete.

Originally Posted by This American Life

I'm on a Zoom call with my brother Pat, talking about a list that was written by our other brother, Mike. ...

My brother Mike died in 2015. That's almost 10 years ago now. And trigger warning and all that, he died because of a suicidal act. It's unclear why he did what he did.

It was all so sudden and shocking that my family and I started grasping around for anything, trying to make it all make sense, which brings me to the list. Mike wrote the list the summer he was about to be a sophomore in high school-- 16 principles to live his life by, titled, "Goals for Success," double underlined on a rectangular piece of poster board.

They were corny bro-isms, if I'm being honest. "Make a commitment. Be unselfish. Create unity. Come together as never before." As you can see, Mike was a real overachiever, Type A type. "Improve every day as a player, person, and student. Be tough. Be self-disciplined-- do it right, don't accept less."

He was captain of the high school football team, straight-A student. "Give great effort. Be enthusiastic. Eliminate mistakes. Don't beat yourself." He hung the list on his closet door, facing his bed, so that when he woke up in the morning, the first thing he saw was-- "Expect to win. Be consistent. Develop leadership. Be responsible."

One of the things that comes up is the importance of self-care. When I heard it, I thought a lot about my old girlfriend in the context of self-care. If curious, the episode segment is here:

https://www.thisamericanlife.org/831/lists/act-one-21

[XutvJet]

Originally Posted by mdf

Hey, congratulations to your daughter and your family. The thread was an interesting read. Thanks for following up with the conclusion.

I'm late to this thread, and my New Year's resolution was to not offer opinions or give advice people didn't ask for. You can see how well that's going. Because despite that, reading through this thread there was something that kept coming to my mind and that I thought I'd pass along.

It's about self-care. Athletes and self-care.

As a high school student, my college girlfriend was a two-time All American. She was a State champion and had so many trophies and medals that she only displayed the towering prestigious ones, with the rest filling up boxes in the garage. And she was as heavily recruited as your daughter was, and also got full-ride offers from major D1 schools. She burned out before she got there. And she ended up at the D3 school where we met, where she swam on the team "for fun". But she had a dysfunctional relationship with her sport by that point. She would be kind of an emotional mess about swimming, before meets and sometimes even practices. But couldn't quit it. I didn't know it at the time, no one really talked about the psychology of being a youth athlete, and the importance of self-care. My girlfriend would really have benefited from it.

The other one was an episode of the radio program This American Life. They had an episode about a youth athlete.

One of the things that comes up is the importance of self-care. When I heard it, I thought a lot about my old girlfriend in the context of self-care. If curious, the episode segment is here:

https://www.thisamericanlife.org/831/lists/act-one-21

Thank for all of this. I totally agree with all of it too. There are plenty of kids that get burned out before their high school career is over. To a large extent, I blame club sports and crazy parents living through their kids sports. Club sports now is a HUGE money grab. When I was growing up in the 1980s and 1990s, a kid playing on a club team meant you were a total rock star. Club teams were a rarity. These days, at least in volleyball, a club may have up to 6 to 8 teams in the same age group at the club. That's 60-90 girls! There is the "1s" team which is the rock stars with most aiming to play DI/II, the "2s" team which is a solid team with some aiming to play in college, and so one. IMO, anything below a 3s team is recreational and you shouldn't be paying thousands for that level of play. The coaching tends to suck as well. You're basically paying the way for the 1s and 2s teams. Many of those parents are mislead into thinking their kid will work their way up. It's nearly impossible.

We have stressed to our daughter that being a kid and doing kid stuff is #1. Then school is #2 and athletics #3. She needs to have a life outside of the sport and she does a great job at doing that. She does many thing away from the sport. However, I usually have to be the one that tells her that taking an occasional multi-day or a week long break from volleyball and training is very good for the mind and body and will make her even better. Mental and physical recovery is a real thing. She's almost 17 now and she is starting to come back around to listening to her old man again...ocassionaly

[afadeev]

Originally Posted by fs1977

No special interest in Ivy league or top 20/50 schools. If he gets offers from them, fine. If not, also fine. It's all about the overall experience, different culture, different mentality, widening his world and developing as a person. All that while playing his favourite sport at a decent level.

You may want to SERIOUSLY research more about US colleges and universities, and different regional cultures within the US. US is not nearly as uniform as tourist perceive or movies depict. Regional difference and education priorities across ~5,500 different schools in the US are stark!

A college experience in NYC vs. North Dokota vs. California might as well be on different planets.

Originally Posted by fs1977

And as you can imagine, visiting schools is not an option. To many miles away, just costs to much time. We trust the intermediary enough and besides that, contact with coaches can be done with all kinds of different video call apps.

Good luck trusting intermediaries!
It's only a ~$100K/year * 4 years purchase decision.
Even with discounts on the list price, the ROI on research and preparation is tremendous!

a

[XutvJet]

Originally Posted by afadeev

Good luck trusting intermediaries!
It's only a ~$100K/year * 4 years purchase decision.
Even with discounts on the list price, the ROI on research and preparation is tremendous!

What in the world universities are you looking at that are $100K+/yr for undergrad My son goes to Kansas State and that's $25-28K/yr in-state and $44-48K out-of-state and no body pays full price. Over half his tuition is covered by scholarships. The Midwest D1 school my daughter got a full ride to is slightly less than KSU. The University of Kansas is slightly less than KSU as well. These are all excellent schools too.

The higher the under-grad tuition does not always mean a better education. As I hiring manager, I've learned that. I've also learned that Ivy League and Ivy League-like school grads REALLY like to tell you often where they went to school

[afadeev]

Originally Posted by XutvJet

What in the world universities are you looking at that are $100K+/yr for undergrad My son goes to Kansas State and that's $25-28K/yr in-state and $44-48K out-of-state and no body pays full price. Over half his tuition is covered by scholarships.

Most private schools tuition + boarding + meal plans add up to $90+K these days. Most good public school out of state tuitions (UMich-AA, UC-B, UT-A) are $65+K. In state comes with its limitations. The delta between the two categories of school is not as big as it was a generation ago.

If your kids are still in elementary school, accelerating inflation will push both categories into $100+K range by the time you pay up. And with our elected officials deprioritizing education for the last generation, the costs of the two categories will be converging.
Budget accordingly.

Originally Posted by XutvJet

The Midwest D1 school my daughter got a full ride to is slightly less than KSU. The University of Kansas is slightly less than KSU as well. These are all excellent schools too.

D1 schools do offer sports scholarships. D3 schools do not. One category clearly prioritizes sports over academics vs. the other.

Pick the ranking you prefer, but here are the most recent results from Forbes for the schools you mentioned.
https://www.forbes.com/top-colleges/

University of Kansas ranking: 165
Kansas Sate University ranking: 213

Not terrible, but hardly excellent.

Originally Posted by XutvJet

The higher the under-grad tuition does not always mean a better education.

Totally agree.
The extra cost of private schools is not linearly correlated with quality of their education. The best schools (MIT, Harvard, Stanford, etc.) charge less than mediocre or downright shitty private schools. So the relevant predictor of quality of educational experience is school's ranking, not cost.

Getting into MIT or Harvard, on the other hand, is couple of orders of magnitude harder than getting into pay-for-diploma schools. With or without sports abilities. For the obvious reasons.

Originally Posted by XutvJet

As I hiring manager, I've learned that. I've also learned that Ivy League and Ivy League-like school grads REALLY like to tell you often where they went to school

I've NEVER had a bad hire out of top-20 schools, Ivy or outside. Retaining them is a challenge.
You maybe conflating "cost of education" with quality. They are not the same, though I suspect the two are loosely positively correlated.
Depending on the type of a hire you are pursuing, recruiting out of top-20 schools may be well advised. Or just the opposite!

YMMV,
a

[fs1977]

The first universities are reaching out, or at least their coaches are. All D3 schools, so no athletic scholarships. Non of them in that Forbes 500 list