Quote Originally Posted by essnce629 View Post
DS1 and I had a great time on our 11 day mom and son college trip! We toured 5 schools in 4 different cities in the Pacific Northwest. It was basically a food and college tour!

DS had been leaning towards Whitman College for months BUT it was way out of our original budget (like $17k a year more even after his $14k a year in merit initially). We attended their Admitted Student Saturday in person 2 weeks ago and then immediately came home and drafted our appeal. We qualify for zero need based aid so our only hope was way more merit. DS wrote a letter basically saying what drew him to Whitman (including specifics from attending the Admitted Student Saturday), told them that our budget all along was the price of a UC school but that a small liberal arts college is what is the best fit, and that Whitman was his first choice but the most expensive choice out of the 8 schools he had gotten into. We included a comparison spreadsheet of all the current colleges’ net costs and attached the aid letters of each school he’s been accepted to. We just heard back that they gave him an additional $16k a year in merit, bringing the total merit to $30k a year! That puts Whitman squarely in our budget and now he can commit. We knew from day one that we would always appeal his first choice school. You have nothing to lose and a ton to gain! Colleges are a business and in the end they need to make their yield and financial goals. If they didn’t budge in price then we could walk and they’d get $0 from us. So in the end it was a win win situation. We got the price we wanted and they are still getting money from us and another student to add to their yield numbers. I looked over their Common Data Sets from the past couple of years and saw that their freshman class from last year was significantly smaller due to Covid. I assumed they were at risk for not making their yield again (they are actually still accepting applications) and therefore we had the upper hand as the consumer. Also, most small liberal arts colleges skew very heavily female, with Whitman being 60% female, 40% male. I knew they needed more males. And in another crazy turn of events my in-laws have offered to pay for Whitman, but now that the price is in our original budget, if anything goes awry with the in-laws we know we can still afford it on our own. We are all ecstatic for how things turned out!

I just checked and Whitman is ranked #47 for LACs in the US, so I guess he did apply to a school in the top 50, plus 2 UC schools since we're in CA. Whitman has an acceptance rate of 56%, probably due to it's location. If it was in a bigger city I think it would be much more popular. It wasn't even on our list of schools to visit last year because it was such a far drive from Seattle. It's truly a hidden gem and we probably would have never known about it if it wasn't for the Colleges that Change Lives book that I read DS1's freshman year.

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This is such a great outcome! Congrats to your DS, particularly for advocating for himself and going after what he wants!