<p>Thanks, that helps.
15K + the federal loans + work study makes the total costs to about 23k a year.
She’d need a full tuition scholarship or near-full tuition in merit at some schools, or could get some merit to decrease costs to that. Challenging but can be found.
Look at CTCL (.org or the book). Depending on her SAT results, she could get good merit money at some of these. The schools are small. Geneseo (public honors college in NY) is another good possibility if she can get merit to decrease costs from 28k to 20k, which is possible.
Harvard-educated teachers do exist 
and if your income is 60k or below Harvard (and Yale and Princeton and Amherst, etc.) are free for you. No parental contribution whatsoever and no loans, although your daughter would be expected to work to cover personal expenses and transportation. Of course we don’t know whether her stats are in the ballpark for this type of school but for 90% families it doesn’t cost more and often costs less to attend one of these schools than to attend a state university. And they open doors, regardless of profession.
Look at women’s colleges. The 7sisters tend to have excellent financial aid, both need-based and merit (Mount Holyoke, Wellesley, Barnard, Bryn Mawr, Smith) + Scripps in CA (but probably too far). </p>
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If your GPA and SAT scores are within a certain range you automatically get a 5,000 scholarship which brings the total down to 15,000 per year!
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<p>ahh…that is an important distinction. what are the reqts for that?</p>
<p>there are other schools that, with merit, would bring costs down, too. It just depends on the stats of the student.</p>
<p>btw…are these two Maine schools mostly commuter or suitcase schools? If so, then an OOS student could feel lonely on nights and weekends. </p>
<p>^ just looked it up: CR+M 1,100 and top 25% in class.</p>
<p>Good question M2CK regarding commuter/suitcase schools: student population in the dorms and on campus activities would be important.</p>
<p>yikes…the upper quartile has a sat 1000+. No wonder they give a half tuition scholarship for a 1100+</p>
<p>this may be fine for someone with those stats or someone who needs this financial option, but the student body is not very academically strong at all.</p>
<p>fort kent is also 71% women. </p>
<p>yes, neither university is likely to be very challenging or offer much in academic growth opportunities because even its top students would be average and most students would be below average - a honors program that starts so low can offer a lot to challenge 3.2 kids so I guess it depends on what Op’s kid has for stats. It’s a step above a community college and it’s a cheap option for students with average stats who want merit.</p>
<p>Hopefully, OP’s daughter who wants to be a teacher has higher stats and can find better merit scholarships somewhere that offers interdisciplinary freshman seminars and a strong general education core. To be a good English teacher, she should be able to take Comparative literature or Literature in Translation, Philosophy, have a sense of history for the US, European, and World history, be able to contextualize through art history and music. Making connections between disciplines in the humanities and social sciences would be good (some would say, essential). Study abroad (in Great Britain?) would be a good thing to have, too, or the Newberry Seminar (or equivalent).
<a href=“Newberry Seminar: Research in the Humanities - Associated Colleges of the Midwest”>Visiting Faculty Positions Are Available in 2014-15 on ACM Programs in Africa, Asia, Europe, and the U.S. - Associated Colleges of the Midwest;
<p>I saw, for another student, that at Slippery Rock, a student with a 3.0 gets an automatic tuition discount and one with a 3.8 who scored above 1200 on the SAT gets a merit scholarship if they apply early enough in the year. If everything stacks, it makes tuition $10,000 (OOS) and R&B 7,500 to 9,000. If she doesn’t live in a single or a suite, and chooses an average meal option, it’d be close to your budget. There are several PASSHE schools and I think a few have implemented this “automatic OOS tuition reduction” for 3.0 and have merit scholarships. The school is a little better than UMaine PI. </p>
<p>Harvard would be WAY out of her reach!! She goes to a very, very small school. No AP classes are offered. Honors classes there are the same as a regular class with just more work to the honors student. They have no extracurricular activities, no sports teams, no clubs, etc… she is on leadership team and has done model UN for two years and will do it again her senior year. She will only graduate with about 35 kids in her class. An average school might be her comfort zone. As far as kids living on campus/commuting there are about 300 kids that live on campus of UMPI. We need to do some campus visits this summer/early fall to some schools here in the northeast. </p>
<p>Check out the ctcl (.org or book) then. :)</p>
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<p>I sure will thank you! </p>
<p>how did she do on the psat? has she taken the act or sat yet?</p>
<p>Some of your local privates, particularly Catholic schools offer some good merit awards to students. That can bring costs for those below even that of CCs. So check your local state schools, privates and communty college. The Maritime colleges offer breaks that an bring the cost down very low, and pretty much guarantee a high paying job upon grad as well. Some of the SUNYs have nice awards for top OOS applicants. </p>
<p>College don’t penalize kids that don’t have AP offered at their school.</p>
<p>Kids from small, rural high schools where no one’s ever applied to NESCAC/Ivies are actually prized by these colleges, provided they’ve sought out every possible opportunity to learn and do things. I knew of a girl from a small, rural high school where most kids got into the military or went to work, and only 15% even took the SAT since they’re not required for CC… let us say the academic demands weren’t keeping her up at night. She had a 4.0, was valedictorian, took the SAT twice only, learned dance and iceskating which she then taught locally, studied abroad for junior year (HS), maxed out on the most advanced classes at her school (no AP) then dual enrolled at the local community college including in the summer, but didn’t do research, didn’t participate in Siemens or the State science fair, wasn’t all State in a sport… yet she got into a top-ranked LAC with a full scholarship. (And after that went on to a very, very bright future. )
Your daughter will be judged in comparison to what was possible: was she content with what was available or did she try to do more? If only 10 students took Precalc, was she one of them? Did she try to take her favorite subjects “ahead of time”? Did she create a club that didn’t exist - say, if there was no newspaper in her school and she’s interested in journalism, did she try to find a faculty adviser and create a school paper?
<em>If</em> your daughter has a high GPA and a high SAT score, plus has done everything she could to learn and grow and develop her passions, she has a shot. Now when the RD rate is 3%, admittedly not a big one, but a shot. And if if you make less than 180K a year, it should be cheaper than attending a public college in NH.
If your daughter doesn’t fit that profile, don’t worry, there are LOTS of colleges out there with scholarships for a bright kid, but if she does she wouldn’t be disqualified because there are no APs at her school and 4H is the most popular activity rather than Science Fair - quite the contrary.</p>
<p>Be aware that if your daughter wants to be a high school English teacher, the credential requirements are established by the state where she will be attending college (first). I do not know if the requirements are different among the New England states, but in our area they can be quite different in regards to the required standardized tests. For instance, if a CA resident attends college in NY but wants to teach in CA, they will have to be certified to teach in NY first and then can take the CA required tests to have their certification applied to CA too.</p>
<p>^ However if the program is good and the teaching credentials required by the State are demanding enough, there’s typically no difficulty in moving. It’s a bit harder if you complete a program that requires a BA and want to work in a State that required 1 year in professional Master’s (however, NYS has lots of “professional master’s” and they’re not expensive).</p>
<p>Fortunately, if my daughter gets her teaching certificate in the state of Maine it is transferable to the state of NH. If she chooses to teach in the state of Maine they forgive one year of student loan for every year that you teach in their state. We aren’t that far from southern Maine so she if she wanted to move back home after college she could teach in Maine under their forgiveness program and commute from home. </p>
<p>You can run the Net Price Calculators for the “Maine Big 3” to see how much they’d cost you…
<a href=“Net Price Calculator | Student Financial Services | Bates College”>http://www.bates.edu/financial-services/costs-financial-aid/financial-aid-estimator/</a>
<a href=“Bowdoin College - Net Price Calculator”>Bowdoin College - Net Price Calculator;
<a href=“http://www.colby.edu/admission/finaid/npc/”>http://www.colby.edu/admission/finaid/npc/</a></p>
<p>I should edit my post to say that if she teaches within certain communities (those that have struggling students) and certain subjects (english as a 2nd language would qualify). </p>
<p>If the NPC’s present decent numbers for you at any of the three colleges above (I think all three meet 100% need and I know Bowdoin’s financial aid packages only include grants and work study, they promise to meet need without loans) you should contact the Education dept or specialty, and see how their graduates fare in disadvantaged/rural/urban communities placement. Although these schools probably also have good placement rates in TFA.</p>
<p>Thanks for all of your help and suggestions MYOS1634 (and the others who responded as well)</p>
<p>Besides the final costs and college major offered, really look closely about the student body and patterns, like traveling home every weekend if boarding, if many do not finish in 4 years (so you have no student class identity), etc. </p>
<p>I have a friend’s student who is transferring to a bigger state university because 1) not sure if learning the correct things or enough being taught in field (accounting), 2) many students leave Thursday evening and return Monday every week, so not much ‘campus life’. Leaving a generous scholarship behind.</p>