<p>bclintonk–You pulled out the NEED category now, the original conversation was about merit aid alone. YOu were talking about families with EFC over $24,000, now you want to toss in need based aid. Keep it along the same track. The U of MN does NOT give much MERIT aid (non-need based aid) to in state students(institutional aid). There are some private scholarships available but that isn’t the same. Several friends have kids at the U of MN, most of them with 4.0’s and perfect or near perfect ACT scores and the biggest award any of them got from the U of MN for merit only was $3000. Several of them received full tuition scholarships from private sources however. Those same stats at ANY private school in MN will put the cost of that school well below $20,000/year. One friend in particular, DD graduated #1, 4.0, 2380 SAT, 35ACT, got almost a full award from Carleton. She is paying $1500/year to attend Carleton with a EFC in the $30,000 range and a trust fund from her Grandparents, so none of it is need based.</p>
<p>Gustavus ranks first in almost every study done for meeting the most need of most of their students, see the Princeton Review for more details. So what if it isn’t talked about here much, it’s still a great school and one worth considering for people with higher EFC’s as they are very generous with merit and other forms of institutional aid. Most kids I know that attend Gustavus do so for next to nothing-relatively speaking in the college world. EVERY MIAC school is going to be less expensive than the U of MN for a 3.5/26 student and above, regardless of need. Same goes for the private schools in Wisconsin, Iowa, South Dakota, OH, IL, IN. We have yet to find a school that is more expensive than the U of MN, except Notre Dame and even that, we don’t know until the aid packages come out. We aren’t expecting it to be less expensive as we have a high EFC, but you never know. We have also looked at private schools in WV, VA, NC, MT, KS, NE, CO, CA, and NONE of them cost more than the U of MN yet have stats equal to or better than the U of MN for our purposes (med school placement rates, incoming GPA’s, etc.).</p>
<p>OP–I think perhaps your DD should get on some Facebook pages or go visit some schools to see what they are really like. Once she is on campus, her attitude may change quickly. Your DD sounds a lot like my niece and is determined that she will only go to certain schools–nevermind she hasn’t taken the ACT/SAT and has no idea where she stands. She came on a campus visit with us and quite honestly was a total snot the entire time she was there because it was “beneath” her in her mind. Her mom pretty much told her to start saving her pennies for all of these visits she wants to go on out East because they were not going to pay for them unless she opened her mind to other opportunities. Her #1 choice right now has a 6% acceptance rate for females from out of state–how likely is it that she will get in there-pretty much not at all. She hasn’t looked into that information yet though. :D.</p>
Bclintonk didn’t say that no one would find U MN less expensive, just that most students with EFC’s above the U MN COA likely would. Obviously, those few (percentage wise) with the top scores and stats like your friend’s DD, will fall into the group with high merit $$ potential. She is clearly not a good example to use here.
<p>I may have missed it, but I don’t see where OP mentioned their EFC band or the kid’s stats. It sounds like every possible permutation of merit and need is still on the table at this point based on information known to the general public. Some of the schools mentioned in the thread also offer service, leadership and fine arts awards which can be stacked on top of academic merit.</p>
<p>Can I just say my two dreams schools are UVA and UCLA? </p>
<p>For OP, what all this crosstalk shows is it’s not a simple matter of black and white, good colleges and bad, or easy assumptions about affordability. It takes a commitment to dig below the glossy marketing words or admissions-speak or what the neighbors or fellow students think. </p>
<p>It does not seem to work for us this way. DD’s GPA is 3.6 unweighted, combined SAT 2170. We ran the calculator for a number of privates on her list, and have yet to find one where the estimated out-of-pocket costs will come below 40K. I think it’s a combination of factors: </p>
<p>1)her stats are good (but not good enough to get full tuition or even half tuition)
2)our income is too high (but not high enough to pay those costs). </p>
<p>Talk about the middle class crunch! I’d like to add, there seems to be a ‘middle-stats’ crunch too, when the kids with stats like DD do not have more choices than the kids who barely made 3.0 GPA.</p>
<p>Bottom line: our experience is that merit money is hard to come by, especially at a top 100 USNWR ranked school. For a kid with a 3.5 and ACT 26, not likely to get enough merit money to make a $50K school affordable. Further drop in prestige, or smaller LACs, could get enough.</p>
<p>It all depends on the selectivity of the school and the amount of merit aid needed. I strongly disagree that MOST kids will be able to take the COA at a $50K private below $24K on merit aid alone. When people state that their child got a scholarship, you have no way of knowing whether this was for merit or need. The package could also include loans. </p>
<p>While there is nothing wrong with trying for merit money, know that there many of the higher ranked schools give no or very little merit aid. Some may have one or two scholarships for the top students, but some of these still require demonstration of need. My son was disappointed in the level of merit offered even by schools where his stats put him above the 75th percentile. Very little was actually offered even at a school where the Info session made it seem as if he would be in line for an automatic scholarship with his stats. </p>
<p>The bottom line is that merit aid is limited at most schools. Having a financial safety to love is critical.</p>
One of the little “lies” that schools propagate is telling parents/students “don’t worry about what the sticker price is, we help make it affordable for you”. In reality, for a lot of us it’s more like buying a car. You don’t go to the Jaguar dealer if all you can afford is a used GMC. A few super-high stats kids will “win” a Jaguar, a handful of high-stats uber poor kids will “win” Jaguars, but most of us will have to buy what we can afford. Once you accept that reality, you stop shopping for Jaguars on a Ford budget and start looking at what is realistic for you and your family.</p>
<p>But unlike colleges, there are are no Jaguar dealers who will give you a significant discount because you’re poor, or because you’re smart. That’s a good thing about colleges–it’s just too bad that there aren’t even more discounts available.</p>
<p>One of the little “lies” that schools propagate is telling parents/students “don’t worry about what the sticker price is, we help make it affordable for you”.</p>
<p>I hear this repeated on CC a lot, but as a parent of first gen kids, I hadn’t run into it.
Perhaps those mailers target a different socio-economic group.</p>
<p>For kids that perform well academically, or have the potential, this “gift” is more motivation to do well. The hard work actually does pay off in cold hard cash.</p>
<p>There are schools that give merit aid to a majority of students such as Beloit. There are threads with schools with good merit aid and they do exist. It takes a very flexible kid to go that route. Sadly, my two would have preferred State U. to a school selected in that manner. Their loss. Beloit is a very good school.</p>
<p>We were lucky. Kids qualified for need blind/meets full need schools, and the schools did. It was still tough, but we managed.</p>
<p>For a girl, the women’s colleges, particularly Smith and Mt. Holyoke that have merit money as well as generous need based FA, are a great deal and less competitive than co-ed schools of their caliber.</p>
<p>Grinnell is another school for a kid with stats like the OP’s daughter that gives out merit aid. I think it would have been a wonderful choice for at least one of my kids, but neither was willing to go that far from home.</p>
<p>sylvan8798–the point is that bclintonk is wrong about that-most kids with a 3.5 and 26 ACT and above will find the U of MN MORE expensive than pretty much every private school around…</p>
<p>parentof Junior-that has not been our experience with any of our kids. Our kids currently have 2 state schools and about 8 private schools on their lists and they are all netting out with just the automatic merit aid listed on the school websites in the $14,000-$17,000 range, with the U of MN (if they considered that school) at full freight and 2 of the private schools coming in as the least expensive options for DS (at and one state and one private coming in on the low end for DD. DS is a 3.8 with a 32 ACT so that helps but DD is a 3.6 with a 28 ACT and she qualifies for about the same awards-usually $1000/year less-but she is a recruited athlete so we don’t know what those numbers are yet (not included in the above).</p>
<p>Most of the private schools come in with a COA around $45,000-give or take a couple thousand with the least expensive one around $37,000 and the most, Notre Dame at $OMG,000 :D.</p>
<p>It also helps that we are not prestige bound by our college choices too.</p>
<p>“We’ll help you find the resources to pay for college.” BU, formerly. Find the resources, indeed- at the end of a loan application.</p>
<p>Steve- I’ve been impressed by your attitude and research, so far. But, don’t count chickens til they’re pecking at your freaking toes. Or, maybe I mean that’s the advice for others, who haven’t specifically looked as closely as you have. The perennial, “Don"t Assume.”</p>
<p>We were just on tour of 5 schools and heard that exact thing at least 2 of the presentations. “Don’t let the price tag scare you.”
We concentrated on instate public schools ( and a couple that participated in the reciprocal exchange) from the beginning because I never expected someone else besides ourselves to be paying for our kids educational expenses.</p>
<p>Apparently at the schools with scary tuitions, that isn’t the case!</p>
<p>lookingforward–we are on kid 3 and 4 in the process-been there, done that, it happens. Most of the schools the next 2 are looking at have automatic merit based on GPA and test scores, it will happen at those schools too. We are aware and have discounted most schools that say 'we will consider…" when it comes to merit aid. DD wants to go to medical school–her goal is to get out of undergrad with zero debt-we’ve done a lot of research for her.</p>
I resent your implication that we expect someone else to pay for our kid’s educations. Our EFC is in the mid $60’s. S has a merit scholarship, and we hope that D will at least have some merit offers as well. </p>
<p>BTW, if your kids are at public schools the taxpayers are helping to pay for their education costs. We consider ourselves to be “someone else” wrt your children.</p>
<p>State schools aren’t subsidized by very much. Students in our state are paying approx 75% of costs, ( much increased from even ten years ago.)
I don’t know how else to say I didn’t expect anyone else to pay our kids school expenses, if people think that is somehow an insult.
I had attended community college for a very short time after my father died,and I didn’t know about stafford loans, let alone Pell grants. I was receiving social security when attending school full time, but that didn’t pay for my living expenses and tuition, so I dropped out to work full time.
By the time our oldest was thinking about colleges, i had heard about education loans, and figured with that,and some savings bonds,we could cover the cost of the instate school.
It was only after that school didn’t seem to be quite what she was looking for,and she took a gap year,that my neighbor mentioned that the private college he had attended gave grants that paid most of the college expenses. I had never heard that before.
She decided to apply,but not ED just in case it was still too expensive.</p>
<p>I like merit aid as much as the next guy, but if you get a merit award, isn’t somebody else paying for your education, or at least part of it? I guess what you think of that depends on who it is.</p>