DD2 has UC Boulder at the top of her list. I’m just wondering if it’s even worth applying, and if merit is significant for out of state applicants.
Her WGPA was 4.25 end of junior year. Likely to be around 4.4 to 4.5 end of senior year. She takes mainly AP and Honors. UWGPA probably 3.75 or so.
She’s took SATs today, don’t have her results. PSAT was 1280, no prep. If she gets 1300+ probably would submit it, otherwise not.
We will get no financial aid. So merit is everything.
I’m hoping there is a world where she could get 15-20k per year in merit. 54k sticker won’t be an option, mainly because it would be silly to pay that much. I’m just not sure if CU does much for merit out of state.
As an example, for DD1, U Buffalo offered 15k per year to her. And she only had a 3.8 weighted gpa. But UC might be a lot more stingy with more people wanting to go to Boulder than Buffalo (despite them being about the same in terms of academics and education).
I see on their site they have a chancellor scholarship for $6250 per year, which wouldn’t be close to enough, for kids in the top 25 percent. For kids in the top 1-3 percent, they offer 15k, which is still borderline of coming up short (still 40k per year out of pocket), but not sure her stats would qualify her.
Thanks in advance for any insight. Trying to temper expectations.
That’s very unlikely, the kids we know who went there got very poor merit aid (they were rich social kids from CA). If your interest is in the outdoor lifestyle then for OOS students Utah is about half the price of CU (you can get instate rates in Utah after the first year) for much the same experience, though perhaps slightly less partying.
I agree CU is not likely to give merit, and if they do, it would be for the very top applicants. Even then, it’s often not a whole lot. $6k is what I seem to remember some kids getting. I remember Penn State being similar. That’s about what one of mine got even with an excellent academic profile.
UDenver, a private school, gives good merit awards.
With a slightly higher unweighted GPA and slightly lower weighted GPA, roughly 6 or 7 years ago, we were offered enough merit aid at CU boulder out of state to bring the total cost of attendance to somewhere around about $40,000 per year. This was very close to the same that we were offered at a couple of other universities. I do not know what difference 6 or 7 years would make, but it would seem more likely for costs to go up over time.
I suppose there is no way to know for sure except by applying and seeing what the offer is. Of course it is important to set expectations and/or set a hard budget.
Both daughters were offered merit scholarships which came with a minimum GPA that they had to maintain to keep the scholarship for four years. We never discussed what would happen if they did not keep up their GPA enough to keep the scholarship. I think that I goofed in not thinking about this issue. Fortunately the problem never came up.