Best Values I Found for Chemical Engineering (method could work for other majors)

College Search & Selection
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This post could also be titled “I’m a little obsessed; please don’t judge me.” I’m sharing because CC has been incredibly helpful, and maybe this can be helpful for others. Some of the best values I found were colleges you hear a lot about on CC, others were a huge surprise. More details on my methodology are at the end of the post.

Obviously, results will vary, but if you have a relatively high stat kid with a middle class income, this could be a good template for your search. We are able to give her $15K a year for four years (which matches closely with the FASFA EFC calculator). D has 4.0 UW, 2120 SAT, decent amount of AP/dual credit/honors classes, minimal ECs, and will probably miss the cut-off for NMF. (FYI: a lot of the merit aid she qualified for has a much lower threshold than her stats).

The biggest surprise for me was the adage “look beyond private schools sticker price, aid can make them reasonable” did not hold true for us. Also, west coast schools suck for OOS aid. I assumed schools with the WUE (Western Undergraduate Exchange) would be a good deal for us (we live in Hawaii) but not always. OOS tuition and room & board differences vary widely and affect the net price just as much as the amount of merit aid given. I made notes when she was close to the next level up for merit aid since she is taking the SAT again or looks good for additional competitive scholarships.

These are yearly net price for our D AFTER school aid and our 15K contribution:

Colleges where she will not need the entire 15K a year from us (i.e.: She can use the money for graduate school, study abroad, 5th year undergraduate, etc.)
University of New Mexico
Louisiana Tech University
The University of Alabama - Included $2.5K automatic scholarship for engineering majors

Colleges under 5K (D could make up the difference with work study, summer job, outside scholarships)
Louisiana State University - Additional $1500 research job scholarship not included. Possible full ride.
Cleveland State University - Honors Program scholarship, free tuition, plus at least $2K for STEM major. Competitive.
New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology
West Virginia University - Also qualifies for automatic engineering scholarship, but doesn’t say how much
University of South Florida

Colleges under 10K (D could make up the difference with work study, summer job, outside scholarships, Stafford loan)
University of Houston - Chance for full tuition, plus good chance for honors college and engineering scholarships
University of Kentucky – Chance for full tuition
University of Nebraska - Lincoln
University of Utah – Chance for more
Florida State University - Chance for additional scholarships, up to full tuition
University of New Hampshire
Miami University - With current stats, 15-30K scholarship so I splint difference in calculation
Montana State University - Bozeman
University of Idaho - WUE scholarship is better than OOS merit scholarship, so used that. To get WUE, you must enroll in honors college.
University of South Carolina - Lots of additional engineering scholarships

College under 15K (If she loves the school, maybe she could make it work with other loans)
Kansas State University
Illinois Institute of Technology – Welcome our first private school to the list!
University of Maine
University of Iowa
Arizona State University - Looks like lots of additional School of Engineering scholarships
Michigan Technological University
Washington State University – WUE, scholarship calculator said also eligible for more money, but didn’t say how much
University of Oklahoma
Virginia Commonwealth University - Provost Scholarship. Next scholarship up is another $11.5K a year.
University of Missouri-Columbia

Colleges under 20K (Maybe my calculations are off, if she loves the school, let’s run the numbers again and then see if she can manage it)
Florida Institute of Technology
Colorado State University - More possible scholarships for Engineering
Tulane University
University of Illinois at Urbana – Champaign - Additional scholarships possible
Northeastern University
Lafayette College – NPC didn’t ask for stats

Methodology:

I searched ABET for all accredited schools with an undergraduate degree for Chemical Engineering (you could use collegedata.com to search with any major) and downloaded it to a Google spreadsheet. It is amazing how much easier things are to analyze in a spreadsheet!

I took out colleges with:

  1. Less than a B- overall grade on colleges.niche.com (my D’s go-to for college research or you could also use collegedata.com with 75% or higher “Freshman Satisfaction”)
  2. Less than 25% acceptance rate (not that she can’t apply, but they are reaches)
  3. Public schools I know don’t offer OOS merit money (I’m looking at you California)
  4. All religious schools and some southern schools with lower Niche grades because we had so many low net cost choices in the south. I also took out a few schools that were so conservative, remote or women only, I knew she wouldn’t consider them.

For consistency, I used the Cost of Attendance on collegedata.com for each school.

Now from here it gets a little tricky. For public schools, I went on their website and searched for “out of state scholarships.” Schools that made my list had automatic merit aid or competitive but gave a good idea of what stats you needed, and it looks good for my D. If the school didn’t list any OOS merit aid or was cagey about the amount/qualifications or the requirements were beyond her stats, they were off my spreadsheet.

For private schools, I ran the Net Price Calculator (so much easier for those that use the College Board calculator because you can save your data). Some asked for academic stats and some did not, so those that did not may be more generous than the NPC shows. Fun fact: most put our EFC at around $25K as opposed to the $15K on the FAFSA, so schools that “guarantee” to meet full demonstrated need are debatable for our reality.

Well, that’s it folks! Thanks for sticking with me to the end, and good luck! Aloha.

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Many schools that claim to meet 100% of demonstrated need do have admission rates below 25%.
(http://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/paying-for-college/articles/2014/09/15/colleges-and-universities-that-claim-to-meet-full-financial-need)

I ran College Abacus on several “full need” schools and (for comparison) on Lafayette.
These are the net price estimates it gave for my assumptions*:

$35,960 Northwestern
$32,705 Lafayette
$28,650 Tufts
$27,030 Harvey Mudd
$26,300 Duke
$22,400 Stanford

  • Assumptions $100K family income 1 child own a home $100K in total assets

The above prices reflect the full cost of attendance minus institutional scholarships/grants and Pell Grants …
but not minus any family contributions or “self help”. If I understand the OP’s method correctly, we’d deduct another $15K from these prices to compare the results with the ones shown in the original post.

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I assumed schools with the WUE (Western Undergraduate Exchange) would be a good deal for us (


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This is a big surprise to many.

Also, some/most WUE schools will not allow you to combine WUE rates with merit money. At those schools, you have to choose one or the other.

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@tk21769, thanks for the article. It seems like the Catch 22 for “meets full demonstrated need” is that 1) most of the colleges are reaches for most kids, 2) the school’s determination of EFC doesn’t match what parents are willing or able to pay, and 3) many of the schools are “needs aware” when determining admission. I didn’t know about College Abacus. I can’t wait to try it. For Lafayette, my specific numbers are: COA - $62,705, school grant aid - $28,400, so THEY see $34,305 as a good amount for us to pay, use loans or find alternate scholarships.

@mom2collegekids, you’re tough love on CC makes you a great “mom” to all the college kids on this site. :slight_smile:

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~45 colleges that claim to meet full demonstrated need also have (or claim to have) need-blind admission policies. Another ~21 colleges claim to meet full demonstrated need, but also have need-aware admission policies. Many other schools claim to meet nearly 100% of demonstrated need on average.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Need-blind_admission

To manage costs, which is the better strategy for a high-stats, high-need student: to focus on those “full need” colleges, or on colleges that offer generous merit scholarships? It depends. You’re right, the 60+ “full need” colleges do tend to be more selective than the (mostly) state universities listed in your original post. However, I would think that for your daughter’s stats (4.0/2120), roughly 1/3 to 1/2 of the “full need” schools would offer realistic admission chances …and perhaps net costs competitive with your “under $15K” or “under $10K” groups. The “under $10K” (or even lower) range is where you need to be if you’re referring to the amount your D must shoulder as “self help”. Yes, I bet there are very few expensive private schools that offer the combination of (a) your “under $10K” self help balance (after you contribute not more than $15K), (b) need blind admissions, (c) admit rates > 25% … and (d) strong engineering programs. If not for that last criterion, I’d say you might be overlooking some attractive, realistic, “full need” alternatives to the ones high on your list.

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If you actually go through the admissions process, I would be very surprised if it failed to hold true at quite a few private colleges. They simply do not expose the information well on their NPCs.

With each of mine who have been through the process, actual net price was off as much as $26K from the NPC, due to merit aid.

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College Abacus appears to be a web scraper of college net price calculators, so it can make it more convenient to run net price calculators on many colleges while shopping.

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@BobWallace, I know I should view this as good news, but it’s frustrating you cannot compare apples to apples. Do you think a good way to compare private colleges is to look at the “Financial Friendliness” on collegedata.com? For an example: Stevens has 86% need met, 66% merit aid, & $14,113 student debt vs. Tulane has 96% need met, 51% merit aid, and & $29,122 student debt. From this, can you discern which would provide a better net price for a middle class family?

I was disappointed with College Abacus. Lots of colleges either not listed, blocking the program from using their calculator, or participate but were not working at the time. Plus, I’m really enjoying comparing college websites when I go to find the calculator. Some tech schools have the ugly, clunky websites while “lesser” state school’s sites are beautiful and easy to navigate.

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You can’t. You can only assess whether a given school is likely to be affordable for your family. Net price calculators can help with need-based aid and sometimes (stats-based) merit scholarships. However, merit scholarships other than purely stats-based ones tend to be much less transparent than admissions and purely need-based financial aid. Also, some schools have the practice of preferential packaging, where nominally need-based aid is increased for students that the schools really want (i.e. an embedded hidden merit scholarship).

Bottom line is to start with a safety with assured admission and assured affordability (on list price, assured-for-stats merit, or sufficient need-based aid). When a competitive merit scholarship, or a preferential packaging of need-based aid, is needed for affordability, you can try to estimate the chance of getting such when determining reach or match, but that can be much more difficult than estimating chance of admission (probably best to classify such schools as reaches if you are unsure).

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Drats, it looks like I’ll be throwing out my all-knowing spreadsheet! Everything you wrote @ucbalumnus makes a lot of sense. I guess just like holistic admission, holistic aid makes it very hard to know who will offer what.