Hi everyone,
I am new to this forum. Please bear with me as I learn the etiquettes of the forum.
My D is a junior now and her SAT score is 2350+ and SAT Subject tests in Match ii and Chem are 750+. Practice ACT is 35. So far she took 8 AP courses with 4+ score and is in the top 10% at one of the top 30 high schools in the country. Volunteered for about 400 hours of which 300 hours is with autistic kids. She has few additional EC activities worth mentioning. Our family income is around 175K/year. I notice HYP financial aid calculators, we won’t be getting any (or negligible funding). We may not consider Ivy schools seriously without additional funding as it will put lot of burden on us. I am trying to understand if ANY of the Ivy schools offer merit based funding? Would those scores be considered any merit worthy of funding? She wants to do medicine and 7/8 years of schooling will LOT of load on family.
My question applies in general to all Ivy schools but didn’t find a forum that includes all. So posting in Harvard and don’t want to flood other school forums.
Any suggestions on the path I could take is greatly appreciated.
@HoustonTxDad, congratulations to your daughter! She’s got great scores. (By the way, with that SAT I’m not sure I’d even have her take the ACT.) Unfortunately, none of the schools in the Ivy League give any merit aid. There are other highly ranked schools that do, though, including Duke. They are very very competitive but they are there. Good luck to you and your daughter.
I am far from an expert on FA, but you would probably have better results posting in the sub forum “Financial Aid and Scholarships.”
I think, generally speaking, that the highly selective schools (Ivy, etc.) give need-based aid, presumably on the theory that everyone accepted would qualify for a merit scholarship.
The schools that give merit-based aid are looking to raise the caliber of their students. They can still be excellent schools and can be as useful pre-med.
That’s a rough heuristic, but I don’t think it’s very wrong.
As you probably know, many entering pre-med students change their path during college. I know of many families paying for UG for their children but expecting mostly student loans for med school.
ETA: cross posted with Suzy100 above… Sorry for the duplication
Thank you all. Now I know the prospects with Ivies, I will post in “Financial Aid and Scholarships” forum after searching it first. Thank you suzy100 for suggesting Duke.
Welcome to CC @HoustonTxDad ! Congratulations on your DD’s great academics, she will be able to find some good merit aid, it just won’t be in the Ivies, unfortunately. As mentioned above, Duke, Wash U in St.Louis,Johns Hopkins, Vanderbilt, Rice and Emory might interest her. If she would like to see big money, she should look at the state schools who give full tuition (Alabama, etc.) for top scores, and bank the family savings for med or grad school.
The Ivies have so many pre-med majors, the academic competition for top grades is brutal. Maybe wiser to be a big fish, grade wise, and be eligible to get in an Ivy med school later.
@HoustonTxDad , I would suggest that your D apply for aid at the Ivies and not cross out Ivies completely since the top ones sometimes offer aid even to the families who at first glance would seem ineligible for aid. From my experience, merits scholarship at Duke are very competitive (around 80 in each class), and more than half of the merit scholarships target a particular variety of students (International students, service-oriented North Carolina students, applicants of African origin, low-income student, etc.). so as a person of a particular ethnicity/gender/income-class, it’s very hard to calculate the odds of receiving merit aid. anyways, as considerations for these scholarships don’t require separate applications, it is worth taking the shot and applying.
I would also suggest that your D continue with the plan of applying for merit schoalrship at Vanderbilt, Wash U and similar schools.
Furthermore, your D already has a strong profile from what you’ve mentioned. However, for merit scholarships (esp. the ones that require separate applications), scholarship essays will be more important than statistical profiles since most scholarship applicants will also have similarly impressive stats. so as your D has already achieved an impressive statistical profile, I would advise her not to worry about refining it any further and instead focus all her attention to the scholarship essays.
While you can certainly apply for financial aid at the ivies, the reality is that a family making $175k is in a tough place. Unless the family has significant savings, they cannot afford to pay the full-fare cost of tuition at most private colleges, but make too much money to qualify for need-based financial aid, or make too much money that their child will receive a minimal amount of financial aid, unless there is a second child concurrently enrolled in college, the family is paying private tuition for other children in grades K-12, or the family is supporting an ailing grandparent(s).
While Yale (http://www.yale.edu/sfas/finaid/finaid-information/1314/1314RD_FYYE.pdf) gives financial aid to families making up to $200k, they do so with a qualifier: “for families with typical assets” meaning families that have less than $250k in assets, including cash, savings, stocks, bonds, and home equity — anything but retirement funds. That qualifier eliminates many families in the $175k bracket.
Is your family income listed after taxes and all deductions? I know for us, that made a huge difference. We have a freshman D at Yale. Yale was very generous in their aid package and even have a payment plan they offer if needed. I would suggest using their online aid calculator. We also submitted our financials with her early application which allowed us to see an estimate of aid with her acceptance in Dec. It made filing our taxes in April very easy since most of the work had been done in Oct! Goodluck!
Left column of the page lists popular forums, with the top link being the forum home, once you click that you can scroll down to see all forums and subforums. You might be interested in the Med school subforums in the HS issues or Premed, can’t remember, there are discussions about picking colleges for premeds.
I would not have her take the ACT there is absolutely no need to, what a huge waste of time.