Hello Fellow Members
I got accepted into the following for undergrad.
U Mich Ann Arbor
UGA
GSU
Awaiting
Princeton
Yale
GT
Auburn
I am local to GA, and qualified for Zelle miller.
Can members based on their experience guide me in making the best decision around chosing one of the above. Criteria of course is cost and future prospects.
Stream - Engineering (chem/aerospace/nuclear)
TIA
Which schools on your list can your parents afford without borrowing? That should be the first cut.
Look at costs…your GA schools are going to be a fraction of the costs especially with Zelle Miller.
Do you qualify for need based aid? How much can your family pay annually?
Wont qualify for need-based, and the amounts that can be contributed wont be enough 
Hence, checking to see what others think and their experiences around such scenarios
What is the net price of each college, and what will your parents contribute?
What did the Net Price Calculators give you for each school? All of them are fine schools and will give you a good education.
NPC for in-state is less than $20K/Yr, but NPC for OOS is $65K/year+ for all of them
If i choose OOS i also stand to lose the zelle miller scholarship that i am already eligible for. So, financially OOS isnt obviously the right choice.
So, everything comes down to future prospects and value for the money $$$ for OOS schools. In my case, Umich/Princeton/Yale/Auburn
Very tough decision, but i wanted to run this by others to get their perspectives from real-world rather than lookup online.
TIA
How would you pay for the $65K+ at OOS schools? What can/will your family pay per year?
You can borrow up to $5.5k and realistically earn a few $k more from part time and summer work.
So the $20k colleges need at least $10-12k from your parents to be affordable, and the $65k colleges need at least $55-57k from your parents to be affordable.
(These are all per year, so multiply by 4 to get four year costs.)
If you get into GT then it will be a no brainer. For what you want to study UGA doesnt make sense. Will Auburn offer you any money (in state tuition ?) I would remote U Mich for out of state off your list. Also Yale and Princeton are lottery tickets and if you get into GT, once again, would they be worth it beyond prestige, likely not if cost is an issue.
You have this idea that an engineering degree that doesn’t come from one of the Ivies or Michigan or some other very costly place is not worthwhile.
You are wrong about this.
“Wont qualify for need-based, and the amounts that can be contributed wont be enough”
Then your options right now are the GA institutions where you can use Zell Miller, and any future offers that bring the cost down to that range.
No. It is not worth it for you and your parents to take on the kind of debt necessary to make U of MI possible.
If you apply to schools you can’t afford, there’s no reason to believe you could afford them if you get accepted. You have solid in-state options with a scholarship.
If your parents can’t pay $60k/year then you can’t go OOS. Are you thinking of asking your parents to borrow a quarter of a million dollars so you don’t have to go to school instate? That’s not a good plan.
GT, no question, if you get in (which you should if you got accepted to UMich Engineering OOS and you are GA in state). GT is going to give as much or more opportunities for engineering as any school on your list. For S19 he was OOS for both GT and UMich and we couldn’t see the value of the $17K/yr more UMich was going to be over GT so I definitely couldn’t see $50K/yr. Even if the cost were equal I think GT would have been his preference.