<p>This is my first post here, and I'm new to this college researching! My DS will be a senior next year in high school so I want to start narrowing some things down. I see a lot of good comments about Grinnell. On their page about scholarships, it looks like their best one is $15,000. If he were to qualify for that and also received the $2000 for NMF (he is in the running so far, waiting to hear more in September), it still is far, far below the tuition and pretty out of reach.</p>
<p>Is this as good as the scholarships there get or am I missing something? I don't want to rule it out yet in case their is more to the scholarship picture, but I can't seem to find it.</p>
<p>I see that their highest scholarship is highly competetive, as well, so there is no guarantee he'd even get one of those but his ACT was great and has a good GPA. </p>
<p>Thanks.</p>
<p>I'm not up to date, but as of 2 years ago, the 15k Trustee Honor scholarship was their highest merit award. They had other endowed scholarships but they were need based along with merit and maxed out at 10k. 15k is about a half tuition scholarship which is fairly good sized. There are relatively few schools that offer full tuition or full ride scholarships, and many with smaller awards.</p>
<p>Take a look at USN&WR Ultimate guide or subscribe to the online service that they have. There is a section that lists schools that have merit awards in order of amounts. You can then look up the individual schools in the book where you get further breakdown. Also check out the lists on CC that have merit awards by college. </p>
<p>As a rule, getting full rides is very difficult. Students who get them are usually HPY material. Or they look for schools that are very much unknown (see Texasmom posts). Usually merit awards are $5k or under, which is a drop in the bucket when it is for the highest costing privates.</p>
<p>I second the Cpt. If you are interested in alternatives look at this stickies at the top of the Fin Aid forum for good merit aid schools and full rides. Lots of good info in there.</p>
<p>I'll check these things out. Mostly looking at Iowa schools. Drake's best scholarship looks enticing to try for but would be very competitive since not many are handed out. The ones I see based on ACT score (he got a 35) and class rank and/or GPA are ones he would qualify for but it's the fact that I'm sure tons of students are trying for a very few awards. UNI and ISU might also come through with a nice offer if he ends up with NMF. Another thought was Luther which, like Grinnell, doesn't seem to pay more than about half in its best scholarship. I suppose most private schools are that way. </p>
<p>Do people generally end up applying to a few schools at a time and then seeing what kind of scholarship they can wrangle out of the deal? Or do you usually wait to apply to the one you are fairly sure of? </p>
<p>Off to read more messages and learn all I can about this!</p>
<p>Thanks for the replies. </p>
<p>Oh, what is HPY material? I can't figure out that acronym!</p>
<p>OP, HPY (also called HYPSM and others) is Harvard Princeton Yale (Stanford MIT). You'll see from the many posts that most people recommend applying to a spectrum of schools - reaches (hard to get into), matches (for your grades and scores) and safeties (ones that have a high admittance rate and for which your stats are well above average). I think 2 of each is good. DD1 applied to about that many. Others advocate more schools. The big thing is making sure the student is willing to attend (it's not a safety if your S/D is not willing to attend).</p>
<p>It is sobering when your kid gets an $18K merit award, and you read that the COA for 2008-09 is expected to be about $52K at a school. (this actually happened to us this year)</p>
<p>"Do people generally end up applying to a few schools at a time and then seeing what kind of scholarship they can wrangle out of the deal? Or do you usually wait to apply to the one you are fairly sure of?"</p>
<p>You usually have to select a few schools where you think you'll be competitive for merit awards and apply to them. They sometimes have earlier due dates for scholarship applications and often you are only notified about whether or not your get the award in the early spring. With merit awards, there is usually no "wrangling" like there can be with need based FA awards. You can never be very sure of a merit award unless it's the kind that guarantees money for certain gpa or SAT score.</p>
<p>I'm learning more all the time. Can't believe how much info is here to read about. I can see where this site comes in handy to help sort things out.</p>
<p>One thing I've wondered about is when people apply to multiple schools, does the school guidance counselor always have to be involved and fill out a form for each? I'd feel like a pain asking to do that multiple times. I suppose they are totally used to that, though.</p>
<p>With schools that are on the Common Ap, the guidance counselor reuses the form. </p>
<p>Some thing I wished we had known to do was line up the teacher recs at the end of junior year. In the fall they have so many to do. Probably the junior year teacher can give a fuller picture of the student than the one in senior year that has only had the student for two months.</p>
<p>Have you done any rough estimates for the need based aid you will qualify for?</p>
<p>I'll have to check out info about the common app and see what that is all about. I bet teachers get their share of writing this rec letters! I'm going to learn as much as I can about all this during the summer before the busy senior year hits.</p>
<p>orangepop - you'll learn a ton from College Confidential, but you might also want to see what books your library has that will give you an overview of the admissions process. Michelle Hernandez has written some good ones, but there are lots of others that explain the process really well. You should also look at "Paying for College Without Going Broke" if there's any chance you will apply for need-based financial aid. </p>
<p>It sounds like you've got a high-achieving kid who could be in the running for some excellent aid at second-tier schools, and admission to higher tier schools. Curmudgeon is a poster on CC who has taught other parents a lot about finding merit aid; his daughter attends Rhodes, having turned down Yale, and is reportedly very happy there on a generous merit scholarship. It's worth searching for his posts.</p>
<p>FauxNom, thanks for the resources to check into. A book would be nice to read through. I'll definitely check for Curmdgeon's posts, too. Thanks.</p>