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College admissions
Course: College admissions > Unit 3
Lesson 2: College search: Type of college- Identifying target colleges
- Explore colleges on Big Future
- Comparing vocational vs 2 year vs 4 year colleges
- Comparing public vs private colleges
- Comparing universities vs liberal arts colleges
- Comparing nonprofit vs. for profit colleges
- Comparing highly selective vs selective vs nonselective colleges
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Comparing public vs private colleges
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- Is there an easy way of determining if a school is public or private?(6 votes)
- Also public schools are often run by the a state and have their state's name in their name(7 votes)
- Atyou say that private schools can be cheaper than public schools. Do public schools offer financial aid to students? 1:20(2 votes)
- All colleges, public or private, offer financial aid to students.(2 votes)
- Why do public colleges cost more money than private colleges?(2 votes)
- For the most part this is not the case but sometimes this is due to the selectivity of the schools and how they are funded by the school and how they chose their faculty. One would not expect the same teachers at IVY Tech as Harvard not to say that IVY Tech is no less of a school but they are of different types of education.(3 votes)
- When does class size make a difference in learning in college? In my experience it doesn't do too much to make a difference. A small class size to me is like 5 or 6 and the teacher can go faster and get through more. A class with around 20 students you have more of a chance to actually interact with more people in school and can still know the names of all the students in the class. A class with 50 to 100 students is for some reason different and oddly you don't meet as many people, maybe it's because these classes are in an auditorium (again in my experience).(2 votes)
Video transcript
- [Voiceover] We're here with Sean Logan, Director of College Counseling
at Phillips Academy. Sean, can you tell us
a little bit more about the difference between
public and private schools? - [Sean] Sure. Private schools
tend to be privately-owned, public schools are generally state-run. The number of students in
general, they vary quite a bit, but most public institutions
tend to be larger, whereas private schools can
be large schools as well, but also might be much
smaller institutions as well. And that's what correlates
a little bit to class size, so at private institutions,
one of the strengths of them tend to be that they keep
their class sizes smaller, not all, but a lot will
have, say, a class size of 18 students in a class,
whereas public institutions may have larger class sizes,
more lecture-style classes than discussion-style classes. With those institutions, though,
one of the real strengths of public schools is that they
tend to be more affordable. Their overall price tag is
less, but with private schools, a lot of them are pretty well-funded, and so if you are a low-income
student looking at this, and you see a price tag of
$60,000 for an education, one of the things you want to make sure you look at closely though,
is what kind of financial aid do they they have,
because there are lots of private schools that do a very good job of financial aid and may cost the same amount as a public school. I've actually been in several situations over my career where
the private school was much less expensive than a public school. So there are different factors to look at as you compare both schools. - [Voiceover] Great.
Thank you so much, Sean.