Kid Adventures

This has been a crazy week, and I may have 100 blog ideas a week, but didn't have time to write them. This weekend, I've had a bit of time to relax, so I'm back to share a story with you.
My 20-year-old is home from college in Florida. He started out working a restaurant job and now has switched to a landscaping job to make money this summer. He comes home tired and dirty, but he doesn't feel the need to lift weights as often.
The other evening, Spence had an opportunity to make some extra money doing something much less physical. He got to be a model in a photo shoot. That would not usually be something that he wanted to do, but the photo shoot was in the new locker room of the Ohio State football team. Spencer is a big fan of OSU football, so he was anxious to walk where some of his favorite football players practice.
Apparently, the university built a new practice facility. Yes, the amount of money spent on college sports is ridiculous.
Spencer took only two pictures on his phone and shared them with me.
He posed in front of the locker of OSU player Noah Spence. Obviously, he posed there because his name is Spencer.

The locker room leads to an indoor practice field, so Spencer took a shot of that too.

The boys got to pose in the hot tub too. They were in the pictures posing as football players for the architects who designed the new facility. So their pictures won't be in magazines, but used to promote the architectural firm.
Spencer made $40 and that wasn't bad for an evening of posing for pictures rather than manhandling mulch and weed whacking.

College Money Makers

I'm not sure why it took until my third child for me to realize the money making schemes that colleges have going on. I'm not talking about the outrageous tuition either. That's another story.
Colleges make money on people who will never attend there. Some of whom will not even get accepted.
Maybe I'm just realizing it because my other kids focused on small colleges. When they applied to college, they usually had fees waived to apply.
Big public schools though don't waive fees. To apply at Ohio State University costs $60. Last year, about 12,000 students applied to attend, which would bring in around $720,000 just in application fees. Of those 12,000, 7,186 new freshman began attending OSU. I don't know how many of them were not accepted and how many of them chose to go to college somewhere else.
One college that Tucker has been thinking about this year is the University of Miami in Florida. Its communications school has a good reputation, so we planned to let him apply there. Then I looked at the information about the average freshman attending U of Miami. The average, average GPA (grade point of average) of incoming freshman was 4.2. Now 4.0 is a perfect GPA. That means the student received straight As throughout high school.  Yet for U of M, the average was 4.2 which means half the students had higher GPAs than that. (Okay, my math skills aren't great but it must be a number of students with higher GPAs).

U of M was giving Tucker a pretty hard press to apply and when I saw the average GPA, I pointed out that he did not have a GPA nearly high enough to get into the school. The application fee was $70. So the schools work very hard sending out letters, emails, making phone calls to get students to apply even when they can never be accepted into the school.
Then I looked at the U of M statistics and they will receive 28,900 applications. At 70 bucks per student, that's over $2 million in application fees. Only 2000 students will be accepted.

So that's when I began to realize that college applications are a scam too.
One friend told me that her son decided to apply at colleges that don't have an application fee then to go visit the places where he was accepted.
Tucker wants to attend a large college though, so I suppose there isn't a way to avoid paying fees. I am trying to limit the fees to schools I think might be a good fit.