A new era is upon us, and while it’s not quite the end of the world, it sure feels like it when the sticker shock hits the pocketbooks of those sending their kids to college.
It’s not just the college-bound that are feeling the pinch, an increasing number of past borrowers are struggling to pay. The current default rate on federal student loans stands at 13.4% for the first three years that students are required to make payments, the highest level in 14 years.
Between costs approaching $60,000 a year, an increase in student loan defaults and over $1 trillion in student loan debt, it's clear that the current model of raising tuition every year (at a rate higher than inflation) is unsustainable.
Our 6th annual ranking features the first $60K/year college: Sarah Lawrence College
This is the 6th annual Most Expensive Colleges ranking compiled by CampusGrotto.com. The significance of this year’s ranking is that it is the first year a college has passed the $60K/year mark in total cost.
Sarah Lawrence College is once again named America’s most expensive college, marking the 5th year in a row it has topped the ranking.
One school on the list, Mount Holyoke College, had their price remain the same as last year thanks in part to a tuition freeze. This is the first time since 1968 that the college has not increased the cost of attendance and was enough to drop the school 33 spots to #94 on the most expensive list. It will be interesting to see if we see more of these tuition freezes in the coming years.
The price tags shown for these institutions do not mean that these schools are financially out of reach.
Just because these schools have high tuition does not mean you will actually be paying that amount. Many schools will provide a financial aid package that meets 100% of a student's financial need (Cost of Attendance - Estimated Family Contribution). While going to college is still expensive, many of the colleges here offer excellent financial aid packages. Some colleges, like Brown University, even eliminate tuition altogether for lower income students. (It is the middle class who are seeing financial difficulties in paying for college.)
To get a better understanding of what you will actually be paying, be sure to use the net price calculator that each school provides on their website. These typically take about 10-15 minutes to complete, but can provide a more realistic ballpark figure of what you can expect to pay. (For a complete list of colleges and links to their net price calculators visit NetPriceCalculator.com.)
We start by taking a look at tuition and fees that are required of all undergraduates.
Room and board is another cost that is often overlooked. Where the school is located plays a big factor in rooming costs. Here we add the typical cost of room and board charged at each college giving us the total billable cost of attendance. In addition, students should anticipate for textbooks, supplies, personal expenses and transportation costs (not included in these prices).
Notes:
Total Cost = Tuition + Room and Board + Required Fees
The fees included in the total cost only include fees that are required for all undergraduates. These fees typically include items like the Student Activity Fee, a Facilities Fee, and a Technology fee. You won't see any fees by major, orientation fees for incoming students, or medical insurance fees included in these costs. Many other fees can be optional and can vary per student and per major. A Student Health Insurance Fee, for example, is obviously not going to be required for a student already on their parents’ insurance plan. Some colleges have their yearly budget for students listed slightly higher than what you see here. This is because some colleges also add in estimated costs of books, personal expenses, and transportation costs.
Tuition numbers were taken directly from each college's website during the last week in September of 2012.
This list only takes into account colleges that offer bachelor's (BA) degrees, so you will not see schools like Landmark College (costs over $55K) who only offer students an Associate of Arts (AA) degree. These prices are for traditional 4-year undergraduate colleges, so no Junior Colleges or Music Conservatories are included.
Total Cost = Tuition + Room and Board + Required Fees
The fees included in the total cost only include fees that are required for all undergraduates. These fees typically include items like the Student Activity Fee, a Facilities Fee, and a Technology fee. You won't see any fees by major, orientation fees for incoming students, or medical insurance fees included in these costs. Many other fees can be optional and can vary per student and per major. A Student Health Insurance Fee, for example, is obviously not going to be required for a student already on their parents’ insurance plan. Some colleges have their yearly budget for students listed slightly higher than what you see here. This is because some colleges also add in estimated costs of books, personal expenses, and transportation costs.
Tuition numbers were taken directly from each college's website during the last week in September of 2012.
This list only takes into account colleges that offer bachelor's (BA) degrees, so you will not see schools like Landmark College (costs over $55K) who only offer students an Associate of Arts (AA) degree. These prices are for traditional 4-year undergraduate colleges, so no Junior Colleges or Music Conservatories are included.
The fees included with these tuition numbers only include fees that are required for all undergraduates. These fees typically include items like the Student Activity Fee, a Facilities Fee, and a Technology fee. You won't see any fees by major, orientation fees for incoming students, or medical insurance fees included in these costs. Many other fees can be optional and can vary per student and per major. A Student Health Insurance Fee, for example, is obviously not going to be required for a student already on their parents’ insurance plan.
Tuition numbers were taken directly from each college's website during the last week in September of 2012.
One thing is clear: college is a lot different than high school. Not only when it comes to academics, but your personal life as well. No longer do you have immediate access to parents who cook your meals, do your laundry, pick up after you and help you with the other things that go by unnoticed (until you find yourself out on your own).
Here’s a little guidance for those who are off to college for the first time on some basic life skills you will need to know, complete with instructional videos if you want to dive deeper into mastering the skill.
How to do Laundry
Other than the times you head home for the weekend or over a semester break, you will need to do your own laundry. If you don’t have much experience in doing your own laundry, you’ll want to get a rundown of how to do so; you don’t want to end up ruining your fresh gear.
This video sums up laundry 101. It’s pretty basic stuff, but there are still some out there who don’t have a grasp on how to properly wash clothing.
How to Fold Clothes
Now that your laundry is clean, you’ll need to know how to properly fold and store your clothing items. Don’t be the one who shows up to class in a wrinkled shirt. Use proper clothes folding techniques to keep your wears in shape.
As mentioned above, you want to keep your clothes from being wrinkled. You want your clothes looking sharp, especially when it comes time to dress up. You will need to know how to iron.
Between interviews and formals you’ll need to know how to tie a tie at some point. It’s best to learn beforehand as we all know how rushed we can become on an important date where formal wear is required.
Parking at college is a pain. If you feel you must have a car on or near campus, you’ll want to master the art of parallel parking as you’ll probably be squeezing into some tight spots.
As children we were always told don’t talk to strangers. While that advice may have been fine at the time, it’s some of the worst advice we can carry on to our later years. The point is you need to be comfortable talking to someone you don’t know or you’ll never meet anyone in college. So open up, smile, and be ready and willing to converse with fellow students on campus.
As mentioned above, you no longer have access to healthy home-cooked meals. Students are often in a hurry and often grab whatever comes cheap and easy. Unfortunately this means a lot of fast food and pizza. To ensure you don’t become a victim of the freshman 15 you’ll have to keep an eye on your diet and make sure you are eating healthy.
An organized student is a prepared student who is able to get things done faster and in good order. Use some of our recommended tools like Evernote and Mint.com to stay on top of what’s going on in your classes and with your finances.
How to Study
The academic rigor of college can be an eye opening experience for many students. The sad fact is that many students at this level simply do not know how to study (33% according to one study). They don’t have a grasp of proper and effective techniques when it comes to studying and preparing for exams.
You need all the help you can get in college. While we've previously discussed using office hours as a way to better grades, here are a few useful tools you can use on your own that will help you become a better prepared and organized student.
Besides our laptop, the one tool we would have for our studies is a smartpen from Livescribe.
While some students choose to take notes on their laptop, the majority of students prefer to take their notes down by hand. Having notes on your laptop makes them easily searchable and revisable but taking notes by hand feels more natural and is easier to take down ideas, especially in classes like math and science. Using a smart pen from Livescribe gives you the best of both worlds.
The pen will digitally capture your handwritten notes and the audio of the lecture as you write.
The pen digitally stores your notes in a built-in storage drive as you write by hand. These notes can then be uploaded to your computer, making them easily searchable. The pen is also equipped with a built-in microphone, so you’re able to record the lecture if you’d like.
Great for Studying:
The pen will sync your notes with the recorded class lecture making it great for study sessions. When it comes time to review, just tap on your notes (written on their specially designed paper) with the smartpen and the device will play back the professor's explanation - word for word.
Evernote is a free note taking program that can be used across multiple platforms and on multiple devices.
Take notes on your computer using Evernote and your work will automatically sync to the web to an online storage space where all your notes can be saved and accessed with any web-enabled device. (Therefore, if your laptop ever crashes or gets stolen, you'll still have your notes stored safely online.)
If you prefer to take notes by hand, handwritten notes can be scanned into Evernote and the program will use image recognition technology to store and easily allow you to search for terms throughout your handwritten notes.
In Evernote, your notes can be organized into separate notebooks for each class and you can scan in handouts and any other papers for convenient storage and access within the Evernote program. Once they are scanned in they will be completely searchable and you’ll have all course-related materials stored in one location, accessible from any device.
Evernote is the perfect organization tool for students. Students can use it to take notes in class, organize homework and handouts, manage to-do lists, and is great for compiling research for a project with its clip feature that allows you to save any useful webpage.
StudyBlue is a free tool to help you study and prepare for exams (and better yet, actually learn and remember the material). With StudyBlue you can create digital flashcards with images and audio and use them on their free mobile app, making it great for studying on the go.
When reviewing flashcards, the application will remember what you get right and wrong so you can focus on the material you haven’t learned yet. With this technology you can also create personalized practice quizzes to further prepare yourself for the upcoming exam. StudyBlue also allows you to import your notes from Evernote to easily create flashcards from notes you have stored in Evernote.
In college, managing your money is important as so many students go through without realizing how much debt they are actually incurring.
The key to surviving on a college budget is to stay on top of your expenses. Mint.com is a free tool that does all the work for you.
After you sign up for a free account and link up your financial accounts, Mint automatically tracks all your financial transactions by type, allowing you to set budgets for each type of expenditure, keeping you completely on top of your personal finances.
Mint is used by over 7 million financially savvy people to help with budgeting and keeping track of expenses, so if you're not using Mint, head on over and get yourself a free account now.
You may have heard the horror stories of students losing their final term paper the night before it’s due. Well, it happens. Always have a backup!
A smart student will always keep a safe backup of all college work. Seagate Backup Plus provides quick and easy backups and enough storage for all your college work and media files, all on a device that looks good too. Choose from two easy backup options: automatic or scheduled.
The Seagate Backup Plus is also the first external hard drive to allow you to easily save your photos and other digital files from your social network accounts, like Facebook and Flickr. You can set the device to automatically save the photos from the online accounts.
Save your digital life with an external hard drive.
What tools are you using for better success in college? Email
This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it
We’ve always said when it comes to choosing a laptop for college, what you want is something powerful, lightweight and portable with a long-lasting battery.
Using those guidelines, here we’ll put the HP Envy 4 up to the test and look at a few other things to see if it’s a good choice for a college laptop. Also, we’ll be giving one away to one lucky reader.
Design
Style goes a long way on a college campus. We want a device that is lightweight and portable, but looks good too.
This sharp looking model sports a brushed aluminum finish in midnight black with a soft-touch red base. The brushed aluminum gives it a sleek modern look and its thin profile (0.78 inches) will easily fit into your backpack, leaving you plenty of room for your books.
Weighing less than 4 lbs., the device is easily portable, and the soft to the touch red velvety underside made carrying by hand easy and enjoyable.
The HP Envy 4 is thin enough to easily fit into your satchel.
As sharp as this laptop looks, there are a few things we don't like. While the brushed aluminum looks great, it’s also a fingerprint magnet. No one likes to see fingerprints all over their shiny new device. We almost had to make a habit of washing our hands before each use with the laptop.
Fingerprints!
Also, the touchpad takes some time to get used too. Between the awkward glossy texture of the touchpad and no definitive line between right click and left click buttons, navigating using the laptop was a little slower than normal. If you are considering this model, consider picking up a wireless mouse as well.
Battery Life
We recommend your college laptop should provide at least 6 hours of battery life. HP claims up to 7 hours and 30 minutes on this model. We were able to get a full 5 hours playing YouTube videos at full screen, so getting a full 6 hours doing things like taking notes and surfing the web is certainly possible.
The screen is bright thanks to a 14" HD BrightView LED-backlit display, and bigger than you would expect on such a portable notebook. The viewing angle of the display is impressive, but sometimes almost appears too glossy, as it easily shows reflections.
What if I want to use the laptop while studying outside?
Even though the screen is glossy, we were still able to use the laptop while working outside. There is a somewhat mirror-like effect, but the screen is bright enough to where we were easily able to see what we were working on.
Sound
Portable laptops aren't known for producing quality sound, but being equipped with a 2.1 Beats Audio system does help. While we weren’t blown away by the quality of the sound, Beats audio still provides a slightly better sound experience.
Keyboard
Having a comfortable keyboard can be particularly important to college students who will be taking notes and writing papers on the device. The island-style keyboard felt good to type on and did not have much flex, especially when compared to a Sony S Series notebook with a similar island-style keyboard. The backlit keyboard (can be toggled on and off) would be useful in dim or dark study environments.
Quiet and Cool
When working in a quiet study environment you want as little excess noise as possible. The unit stays quiet and cool, even after watching videos in full screen. There is very little fan noise: we had to put our ear to it in a quiet study room.
The laptop is equipped with HP CoolSense technology, which automatically adjusts the notebook’s temperature based on usage and the conditions around you. Even if you do start hearing noise from the fan, you can put the laptop into quiet mode with HP CoolSense. With the device staying cool, it can comfortably rest on your lap for long periods of time without getting too hot.
Other Notes and Observations on Use:
The HP Envy 4 seems to hold its charge well, making it useful for all day use in your classes. Not needing to bring a power cord with you means less weight in your bag.
Fast start up and wake times. You can put the laptop on standby by simply closing the lid. It can be used immediately upon opening it back up: the system resumes in less than a second.
The power button feels weird to the touch. When pressing it we expected to hear a satisfying click, but instead it felt like we were pressing on a button that was jammed.
The 500GB hard drive will be large enough for all your college work and media files.
The HP TrueVision HD Webcam will be useful for Skype sessions to family and friends back home.
Pros
Looks Sharp
Quiet and cool; no annoying fan noise
Backlit keyboard
Enough battery life to get you through your classes
Fast start up and wake times
Thin and light: weighs only 3.8 lbs.
Cons
Aluminum finish is a fingerprint magnet
Touchpad is unpleasant and takes time getting used to
HP does a nice job of providing cost effective laptops with solid power and performance. With a splendid mix of portability, speed, and beauty the Envy 4 has a nice balance of everything we want in a college laptop. The Envy 4 proves to be a very cost effective and affordable Ultrabook that definitely puts it in consideration as a top choice college laptop for those who don’t want to spend $1000 or more.
Disclosure:
This post is a sponsored review in which we were provided with a HP Envy 4 laptop to test and review in exchange for an honest review of its use as a college laptop.
College is all about mastering the art of multitasking; therefore it is important to have a powerful laptop that can handle the same work load.
This is a tool that will be very beneficial to your success in college and is what you'll be doing most of your work on. It is important to be prepared for college with a laptop that is up to date. You don't want an outdated computer to slow you down when it comes to college work.
In looking for a college laptop, what you want is something powerful, lightweight and portable with a long-lasting battery since you will be carrying it with you all over campus.
A newer laptop is such a necessity for college, we're giving one away to one lucky student.
We’ll take an inside look at the HP Laptop we're giving away later this week. Stay tuned! (Update: check out our hands-on review of the HP Envy 4 here.)
The Contest
This contest is all about Back to School and Being Prepared.
We want to make sure you are ready to start the school year. So as a bonus for those who are signing up for our free Prepare for College in 30 Days eCourse, we’ll be giving you an additional entry into the giveaway.
What you can do:
This contest involves helping us get the word out about this useful new course. Our reach only goes so far...we need your help in making sure more students are prepared for college.
“I like the articles that are written here. There are plenty of other blogs that cover being frugal as a student, but you cover stuff that other places don't.” - Sarah E., USC
"I like the fact that you’re actually offering interesting, useful information to students." - Pedro M., Harvard
