<p>and ebeee/etc, i misread mom2collegekid’s post about USC and after i read it again i realized she didn’t mean the UC’s! you were right though i did misunderstand her at first lol</p>
<p>anon2010 - Many CC posters do not have safeties (financial and admissions) and I just wanted to point that out (see andimom’s illuminating and poignant posts a few years back, rejected from Oberlin which was a safety). Good luck to you during this very stressful time.</p>
<p>*Many CC posters do not have safeties (financial and admissions) *</p>
<p>This is very true. Every spring there are kids who sorrowfully post here when they receive their FA packages and find out…</p>
<p>1) Their schools don’t meet need (or they meet “need” with huge loans)
2) Their families have been given an EFC that is unaffordable.
3) They were only looking at tuition costs and weren’t looking at COA (or they only looked at “semester costs” and thought it was for the entire year).
4) Their OOS publics don’t ever meet need of OOS students (almost none do).
5) Their parents aren’t going to pay as much as the kid **assumed **they would/could.
6) Their families can no longer pay what they thought they could (or one spouse committed to an amount that the other spouse wasn’t aware of and won’t agree to.)
7) They had no idea that financial aid often includes loans. They thought that they’d only have to pay their EFC and would get the rest for free.</p>
<p>During the application season, everyone can get caught up in applying to big name schools (even the parents). Kids don’t want to even consider financial safeties (I’d NEVER go there). Some parents wrongly inflate how much they can truly afford or how much “need” their child will get. When spring comes and those hard numbers come, we see a lot of unhappy kids (and parents) on CC.</p>
<p>To the OP: My D, whose stats were not as good as yours, received a $20,000/yr. merit award (Dean’s scholarship) from American. I think you would do at least that well and might even get the larger Presidential scholarship. (Your stats would also get you into American’s Honors program.) She got no merit aid from Northeastern, just a need-based financial aid package of about $12,000. Good luck to you.</p>
<p>^^^</p>
<p>When was your D awarded the scholarship? Some schools are reducing their scholarships because of the economy. Was American’s scholarship webpage as vague then as it is now?</p>
<p>^^^vagueness does not mean scholarship money does not exist. It simply means that one needs to do a little more research to discover it at particular colleges. My D considered an application to American because we had read on numerous CC threads and other places that their merit aid was fairly generous. One of D’s friends with lower stats than the OP also received $20,000/year starting this fall.</p>
<p>Oh, I agree that vagueness does not mean that the scholarship doesn’t exist. No one is saying that. It’s just that if a school is going to give a certain number of scholarships for certain stats, it’s nicer if they provide such info. </p>
<p>When a school doesn’t state a number or likely stats, it just seems like a dangled carrot to entice thousands of applicants for a small number of awards. That may not be the case with American. I just stated that I don’t like vagueness (and I don’t). :)</p>
<p>I also don’t like it when a school only offers 2 or 3 scholarships and then invites a couple hundred kids to come inteview and compete for those scholarships (at the kids’ own expense). Those seem like a cheap ploy to get lots of high stats kids onto a campus, so that they can sell their school to this captured audience.</p>
<p>With respect to the age of my information–my D is freshman. I think American doesn’t get more specific about its merit awards because they aren’t based on specific pre-established GPA’s/scores. But they do appear to award quite significant scholarships to those who are in the topmost tier (perhaps top 15-20%?) of each year’s applicant pool. A student can probably get a decent sense of the likelihood of getting a merit award by comparing his or her stats to those of students accepted in the prior year. Bottom line, American will pay to attract the best students.</p>