My Advice to Parents Considering Out-of-State Colleges for Kansas Students
Written by Kristin Brighton, founder of HirePaths
Our daughter knew early in her high school career that she wanted to major in international relations with a focus on East Asia — which seems pretty unusual for a girl growing up in eastern Kansas. She wants to grow up to be a diplomat and fight the good fight on behalf of U.S. foreign relations. She also is interested in learning Chinese, a critical language the United States has identified it needs more citizens to learn.
Who could discourage her from pursuing a dream like that?
With that direction in mind, it made sense that she wanted to find a university that would get her near either Washington, D.C., or the United Nations in New York. In theory, this proximity would make internships, job shadowing and networking easier.
With this goal defined — and a high ACT score and GPA achieved — her innately competitive parents committed to helping her achieve this dream, even though practically, we knew it would take nearly a full-ride scholarship to send her to most of the schools on her list. As the biased people who have raised her, we know she is awesome, so we wholeheartedly believed some school out there would offer her a life-changing scholarship to make the numbers add up.
The Research Phase
Our daughter did her homework, made spreadsheets to compare schools, and consulted websites and top 10 lists. Her enthusiasm for all she was learning sucked us in further. We truly began to want this for her — and for us.
We knew we didn’t have the time or money to visit every school on the list, so we squeezed in one quick trip the summer after her junior year to the D.C. area to visit the two schools she was the most excited about, and we built our annual family vacation around a visit to a third. We agreed that after receiving acceptance letters and scholarships, we’d visit any other schools that made the final cut.
From these visits, we quickly learned that big-name schools don’t bend over backward to impress. (KU and K-State’s visits put most of them to shame!) Most of these schools sit you in a large room with 500 other people to hear from a student ambassador and an administrator how great they are, then show you a snazzy PowerPoint with a hype video. Next, they break you up into small groups for a campus tour, during which they prance you by the library, law school and the stadium to show you their gorgeous campus. Typically, you are in and out in about two hours — with just enough time to buy a T-shirt.
We left most of these visits — which cost us thousands of dollars to make — less inspired about each school and without talking to a single faculty member.
The Application Phase
By the start of her senior year, we’d narrowed down the list to 10 schools to apply to — eight out-of-state schools, plus the University of Kansas and Kansas State University (where her dad works, we both attended, and she would get a discount on tuition).
From October through January 1, she applied to those schools, including perfecting 17 essays — on top of keeping up with a rigorous senior-year class schedule, which the top schools stressed was an important part of her application. She wrote additional essays to apply for honors programs and scholarships to schools where she wasn’t even sure she’d be accepted! In total, applying to these 10 schools cost us $600 in cash; hundreds of hours strategizing, researching and writing essays; and a ton of extra stress. It also forced her to reduce her participation in senior-year school activities and eliminate free time with her friends.
The Waiting Phase
Three acceptance letters came back quickly, which included some merit scholarship offers — but we heard nothing from the schools at the top of her list. After winter break, there was a little flurry of activity, when she was asked to do some Zoom interviews and one school even asked her to audition for a speech scholarship. Hearing anything from these schools seemed like positive news and whetted our appetites to see what was coming next.
Then, we waited some more. We learned in early March that the universities hadn’t received our financial information because of more delays with the new FAFSA , and that we wouldn’t hear anything else until they got our numbers. A few schools chose to evaluate our financial situation using the alternative CSS form (a financial document administered by the College Board) so they wouldn’t have to wait on the feds. One school requested copies of our tax returns, and another even wanted me to submit my small business tax return! I wanted to refuse these extra requests, but in the end, I gave in, because I wanted to ensure our efforts would produce some results.
The Offers
By late March, more acceptance letters with estimated financial aid offers rolled in — as well as a couple of rejections. Still, we felt we were marching toward victory! Our daughter was accepted to three more schools (yay!) — except each had a price tag from $70,000 to $90,000 a year for tuition, room and board. Each school flattered us by offering large scholarships and grants, often packaged as six-figure, four-year totals. (It’s exciting to read your kid is being offered a $200,000 scholarship package!)
But still, with a gap of $30 to $40K per year that we’d have to pay out of pocket or with loans, none of the offers added up for us. We kept waiting, holding tightly to the dream of that elusive full ride, until the very last offer came in.
The Decision
When all was said and done, our wise daughter knew she didn’t want to graduate more than $100K in debt, with grad school still on the horizon. While this massive amount of work seemed to have produced nothing, we were proud she realized it was time to switch to Plan B.
We scheduled a second campus visit at KU (K-State doesn’t offer a major in Chinese or international relations). After spending a day in Lawrence — visiting with faculty to ask the hard questions we didn’t know to ask when we visited her junior year — we realized the state school 90 minutes away offered everything she needed. KU offers an extensive languages department that would allow her to double-major in Chinese and global and international studies. In fact, KU is one of the schools the U.S. Department of Education uses for its Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) Fellowships, which offer intermediate and advanced students large scholarships for tuition and housing to learn high-demand languages. At our visit, faculty members assured us that as a Jayhawk she could get into top study abroad and internship opportunities AND be accepted to highly regarded graduate programs.
When the final financial aid information rolled in early May, we learned KU offered her the smallest merit scholarship of the six schools she was accepted to, including K-State. To be frank, it bruised our egos a bit to realize KU gave all incoming freshmen with a 3.95 GPA or higher the same scholarship package, meaning all those AP classes and her many accomplishments and accolades didn’t result in any additional dollars. While KU may not have acknowledged our baby was as exceptional as we did, the in-state price tag was refreshing, the prospect of a FLAS scholarship for future years sounded promising, and we wouldn’t have to spend thousands on travel costs. KU offered everything she wanted — including opportunities to study abroad and internships in D.C. and New York.
The pieces had finally fallen into place.
We know at KU she’ll make amazing friends, learn a ton, travel the world and learn a foreign language that she’ll have as a lifelong skill. She will also have the background and skills to either enter the workforce or go to graduate school. Our financial planner confirmed that it’s likely with the scholarships she’s already received, what we’ve put away in our 529 account and a part-time job, she should be able to graduate without any student loan debt.
The day she decided to attend KU we didn’t celebrate at the mailbox with confetti and streamers. While the decision was a bit anticlimactic, her decision was also comfortable, safe and smart.
My Advice to Other Kansas Families
My point in sharing our family’s experience is to potentially save other middle-class families the drama, stress and expense of chasing a dream beyond their reach. Full-ride scholarships are fairly rare in today’s world, and a lot of talented kids in this nation are competing for every opportunity.
I cannot stress enough that this process came with a significant “hidden” opportunity cost: it dominated my daughter’s senior year, forcing her to skip activities and time with friends that she’ll never get back.
My advice to other families considering sending their child to college out of state is if you don’t have more than $100,000 in the bank earmarked for your child’s college expenses, prioritize your time and mental health and look for affordable opportunities closer to home.
As the founder of HirePaths, I work every day to introduce Kansas kids to opportunities in their home state for careers and training. However, I openly admit that I, too, got caught up in the romance of chasing the prospect of a full ride that would take my daughter far away, when in reality, the best fit for our family was only 90 minutes down the road.
Before you spend your child’s senior year chasing similar dreams, don’t forget to look at opportunities that exist right here in Kansas. Even though our family has a long tradition of bleeding purple, we’re excited to share that our youngest is now a Jayhawk. Rock Chalk!
If you’d like to share the story of how your family decided what path your child would follow after high school, please reach out to me at [email protected]. We’d love to help you craft a blog to share your experiences with other parents.
