Class of 2024 National Merit Discussion

[TonyGrace]

@tsbna44 is not wrong but you might learn something from their journey. If I remember correctly they also had a special needs child and how colleges factored that in varied wildly.

Looking for advice in Merit aid for a top 1% student

I’m sure this will come as a shock to a lot of people here but college is ridiculously expensive (yes, I’m sarcastic by nature). My daughter is graduating in 2020, and we are looking for schools to apply to, with the concern not being which colleges she will get accepted to, but instead which colleges we can afford. Most college calculators tell us our EFC is anywhere form $30K to 40K per year, which is about 1/3 of our after tax income and more than double our annual mortgage payment. There’s no way we can afford that, and there’s no way we’re taking out loans and mortgaging our (or our daughter’s) future to cover that cost. We need that number to be around $15K. Fortunately, it looks like our daughter will qualify for merit aid, so we are targeting schools with generous merit aid that also have great engineering programs (right now she’s looking to major in Chemical Engineering). I’m hoping to get advice from folks who have gotten merit aid and/or can offer suggestions on schoo…

If your S doesn’t know what he wants to do and a LAC is appealing maybe take a look at some of the Midwest schools. We found that several of them offered significant merit.

Also, is it fair to assume he has a strong SAT score? I think there are several schools that offer guaranteed merit based on those.