The Price You Pay for College: An Entirely New Road Map for the Biggest Financial Decision Your Family Will Ever Make by Ron Lieber

Author:Ron Lieber [Lieber, Ron]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: finance
ISBN: 9780062867322
Google: k4m9DwAAQBAJ
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2021-01-26T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter 20

How the College of Wooster Puts It All Together

When I set out to report this book, I knew I couldn’t visit every college, grill every president, give every vice president of enrollment management the third degree, and satisfy the considerations of every family in the market for undergraduate education. I chose to focus on what seemed to be one of the key questions: Even if you can figure out a way to pay full price for a private college or university, should you? And given the amount of discounting that private schools are doing with merit aid, are there schools that offer great value for not much more than what a flagship state school costs in many states?

The willingness to pay full price is on the decline, and the merit aid movement is already entrenched in many institutions. Not surprisingly, the two go hand in hand, since lower prices are necessary when a growing number of people won’t pay the sticker price. The schools that offer some merit aid are in a delicate marketplace position where they must fight for every dollar and hope that at least some families will pay in full. I was curious when I began my multiyear reporting binge whether any one of these schools would stand out at the end. I toured them like the parent that I am, imagining my own daughters living and learning on their campuses someday.

I had a couple of other criteria as well. As a stand-in for value-conscious readers, I wanted to know which schools were talking openly about price, cost, and discounting. It quickly became clear that nearly every president was citing, unprompted, the Gallup research on what defines successful undergraduate education: connecting students with professors who care deeply about them, making them feel excited about learning, and encouraging them to pursue their dreams. The school that surprised me the most in this regard was the College of Wooster, one that some people have never even heard of.

Wooster, Ohio, about an hour’s drive south of Cleveland, is just big enough to be a city, not a town, and to have an excellent third-wave coffee shop. And if the College of Wooster is known for anything, it is for its Independent Study, or “IS,” rendered in capital letters to distinguish it from the undistinguished mass of optional undergraduate senior theses that students churn out at other schools. At Wooster, every senior completes one; some undertake two at once. The school describes IS as a class of one, where you meet weekly with a faculty member with the goal of producing something entirely original: fiction, data from a lab, art that fills an entire wall of a large gallery. Much of the work that undergraduates do in Wooster classrooms during their first three years is to prepare them for this final yearlong intellectual journey. There are fewer upper-level classes than there might be at other colleges because of the demands that the IS places on both seniors and faculty members.

IS

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.