I am the parent of a current Junior.
She has good stats: 3.7w/4.3uw GPA, 1420 new SAT, interested in law and history.
Hobbies: musical theater, dance, loves community service.
She is interested in (wish list) a small/medium sized school, prefers Southern a little; small class size,; good study abroad; more conservative/preppy vs wacky PC; walking distance to a nice/not necessarily bustling downtown; beautiful campus; known for rigor and quality.
Good financial/merit aid for middle class families necessary
Any ideas?
How do you define middle class? I ask because everyone seems to think they are middle class. 
So are you looking primarily for merit aid, not qualifying for need based aid?
i would look at Dickinson.
Wake Forest
Rhodes
Elon
William & Mary
Around $100,000 parent income.
My current Junior at Vandy receives $52,000 in aid, but was offered much less at Duke, UCLA, Cornell and others.Vanderbilt is extremely generous for people in our income bracket.
We live in the Bay area, CA so that income is fairly modest here.
Interestingly, many OOS privates and some public are more affordable than CA public schools for us.
I think Dickinson might be too small for her.
Her high school has 1800 students.
I think the 3000-10000 undergrad range seems right for her.
There’s the supermatch tool on this website that may help a bit.
You may want to consider Agnes Scott even though it’s a small LAC. She could cross register at Emory.
Any feedback about Tulane?
We went to a very well done info session last week-end, but I have heard that New Orleans is not at all safe.
She is also interested in Richmond, but we know nothing about it-other than the internet available info.
Richmond - beautiful campus. Very large endowment for a school of its size, which funds lots of extras for students. A solid LAC with a business program. Southern, but not too southern as it attracts a lot of kids from the northeast. More preppy than not. Community feel to the student body.
Tulane is in the wealthiest part of New Orleans and the students there are safer, statistically, than at quite a few other campuses such as Yale, USC, Johns Hopkins, Columbia, UChicago, and many others. Like at any college campus, common sense rules. Most of the violent crime in NOLA is concentrated in 2 areas not very close to the campus, and nearly 90% of it is criminal-on-criminal. I think the best testimonial to all this is that about 62% of the students are female, and we fathers would be very reluctant to send our daughters into harm’s way if we had those kinds of reservations about it. My D graduated from there in 2014 and never had a whiff of an issue regarding crime or safety, and none of her circle of friends did either. Obviously it does happen occasionally, unfortunately, but again that is true of any campus and Tulane compares well with any of them.
Is there a little town or shopping area within walking distance to Richmond?
Or is a car necessary?
Some good tools for scoping out surrounding areas and to see what is around a campus are google street view and walkscore.com
@fallenchemist Columbia is extremely safe. Please cite statistics if you assert that it’s safer than Columbia. NYC is among the ten safest cities in the world.
To answer your question about Richmond, it seemed to be in a residential part of town. Did not notice a commercial area super nearby
If you are looking at more conservative schools, Emory is the complete opposite. It is one of the most liberal colleges in the US.
Sewanee fits everything she wants except the shopping.
Yes, we considered Emory, but we had a close friend who visited and was completely turned off by the “diversity” lecture they gave on the tour. That might have been an isolated case and they may have over-reacted, but there are so many schools that might be a better fit so we are not considering it at this time.
We did visit Sewanee last summer and we were all impressed with the grounds and atmosphere. My D did some research and was intrigued. She is a little worried that is might be to small and isolated…
We are from San Jose, CA and for some reason she is attracted to Southern schools.She did a summer program at Vanderbilt and loved everything about it. Here sister is a junior there but, of course, it is a reach for anyone.
She also loved the Furman campus, but it was a summer visit so she didn’t have a proper tour or see students in action.
For some reason I feel that Richmond also could be a good fit but no one around here, or her GC for that matter, knows anything about these schools. Her friends, for example, think all Southern schools are “racist”.
Sigh…
my BIL went to Richmond. He loved it - lots of kids from the NE there (can be considered a positive or negative LOL). My son is a freshman at Sewanee. So far he loves it - everyone lives on campus all four years (including the professors). In his first week he had already had dinner at his counselors home. So far he has not been bored at all. Nashville is an hour or so away and he trekked there for the Kanye concert. If she has any interest she needs to visit when students are on campus - we visited in the summer and the son was lukewarm, but our visit last fall won him over. I will say this though - Sewanee gets cold and it does snow there.
That’s helpful.
What most influenced your son to choose Sewanee?
Do you know anything about merit/financial aid?
sense of community was the big draw - everyone living and studying together on the top of the mountain. He also liked the small classes (his English class has 14 students, and I think his largest is like 30), the reputation of academic rigor, and fact he could get a liberal arts education but they do have a business minor program. He was really wary of large class sizes and wanted to be able to meet and talk with his professors. As an example - he has a Calculus test today. I just sent a text to him and wished him good luck and asked him what he was doing. His response - just grabbed some lunch and now in my professors office studying with him for my test.
They do offer merit (he got some) and they do hold your tuition constant for your four years. He grew up in a big city (top 5 populaton) and so far the move to a small town has been great.