<p>Guidance counselors will tell the kids to follow their dreams, because they don’t want to stop the kids from dreaming, and that is OK. It is part of their job to encourage these kids to reach for the stars. However, few guidance counselors know much about paying for college, and in some schools they are specifically forbidden to discuss it because of privacy issues. Not to mention of course that guidance counselors and high school principals and PTA presidents like to play “more students from our HS get into fancy-name-college-here than from your HS” with their peer group. </p>
<p>Know your financial bottom line.</p>
<p>Know which in-state options are good social and academic matches for your kid (St Mary’s? UM-CP? UM-BC?). Her own guidance counselor should be able to give an estimate of her chances at these three places.</p>
<p>Know which in-state options are good social and academic safeties for your kid (Towson U? especially for that competitive dance thing. Happykid just graduated from TU in theatre tech, and I know that the theatre department is pretty good there too.)</p>
<p>Know whether or not she’d be happy at a rock-bottom dead-on safety (If you are in Montgomery College, check out MC-Rockville. Excellent dance & theatre also some merit money available . Happykid had full tuition and fees free there for two years.)</p>
<p>There are a number of threads on good merit-based aid in both the Financial Aid Forum and in the Parents Forum. Scroll down through them, and see what you find. She has the GPA and test scores to attend a number of places for very little money provided she doesn’t need to be at an Ivy or Ivy peer.</p>
<p>Bryn Mawr could bring some merit money with those test scores, or maybe Oberlin. Bryn Mawr has good dance program, 20 minute train ride to Philly and all its arts scene. With Haverford a mile away and the opportunity to take any and all classes (except freshman comp, as I recall) at Haverford, and to major at Haverford, BMC opens up a lot of opportunities. </p>
<p>For political science. You may look into Schools in DC areas, George Washington , Georgetown, Hopkins, Thomas Jefferson and Richmond just came off my head. </p>
<p>lots of great advice far in this thread … a couple comments … </p>
<p>There is a huge thread on merit scholarships … I’d suggest searching for that thread and finding possible school your daughter might like better than UM (a great option) and which might grant her substantial aid.</p>
<p>the bigger point is in response to this
It seems you are feeling time pressure. Tons of parents of sons can tell you your daughter’s search is in the same time frame of tons of students. Given your east coast location visits can easily be arranged to schools in the northeast and mid-atlantic states during vacations and weekends. Applying early decision (ED) would be tough given the state of your daughter’s search but given the financial constraints on her search (paying $20k on a $150k income) applying would likely not be a good strategy … it seems you will want to compare merit and financial aid offers … so early action (EA) and rolling applications will make the most sense.</p>
<p>You have plenty of time … enjoy the search with your daughter!</p>
<p>To help others later who may stumble upon this thread below is a list of recommended schools for possible merit for strong SAT, good GPA, so-so EC’s- in no particular order:
Barnard - likely no merit?
Emory
Tulane
Rice
U Miami
Scrips
Smith
Occidental
Boston College
UVA
Davidson
UMD
Fordham - Lincoln Center campus
BU
U Denver
U Miami
Rhodes
Trinity
St. Edwards
Southwestern
Hendrix
Bryn Mawr
Oberlin
Haverford
George Washington
Georgetown
Temple
St. Mary’s
Agnes Scott</p>
<p>Your 17ish daughter likely cannot comprehend debt or its burdens.</p>
<p>even $50k in debt is too much…especially if law school is an option. Since it looks like your d is into human rights, which often is lowish paying, minimize undergrad as much as possible. </p>
<p>Law school could easily lead to 150k in debt by itself.</p>
<p>Your d can only borrow the following amounts</p>
<p>frosh 5500
soph 6500
jr 7500
sr 7500</p>
<p>to borrow more, YOU would have to co-sign and you would be responsible if she cant pay.</p>
<p>For starters, congrats on your daughter’s great SAT score! But I want to second jkeil911’s observation and temper your expectations a bit. DS had a 3.8 UW with 11 AP classes, a 2210 SAT, 780, 770 SAT 2s, and good ECs, and he was rejected from 5 of his 6 reach schools for engineering. Also, U Maryland is a great in-state option which we briefly considered for OOS, which with some merit and honors would be hard to beat.</p>
<p>You most definitely don’t need a 4.0 to get into the Ivies lol. It would be unrealistic for every student to be perfect in college. With your income, if she got into, say Harvard, if you had another child in college, you would only pay around $20,000 per year. With her grades, even though she is unhooked, she could try get into Columbia. The Ivies tend to make it a priority that their students graduate debt free. That’s the one thing I’ll give the Ivies. They are amazing with financial aid. Pretty much everything else about there bothers me though lol. Great daughter though. You should be very proud :)</p>
<p>Another vote to look at St. Mary’s College of Maryland, your state honors college. It has an almost summer camp feel to it, and should be affordable as well. I think it would have been a great fit for my D1 (but we weren’t in-state, she ended up at Dickinson instead).</p>
<p>I’m not so sure St. Mary’s is a place you want to send a student who has any interest in research. It’s a fine LAC, but the profs in some depts are not cranking out the publications. I don’t know of your D’s interest, if any, in research, but I do know the professors at St. Mary’s seem to be much more invested in teaching than getting grants and driving u/g research opps. That ratio of teaching to research is more balanced in the elite LACs.</p>
<p>Gettingaclue, some of those schools have no merit money, Georgetown, Barnard and Haverford for certain. Some others have very limited merit awards like BC, I noticed off hand. When you need sizeable awards, OP, you need to look at the chances of getting such awards as well as admissions chances. </p>
<p>I have always loved St Mary’s, but the OP’s D is interested in a city, and St Mary’s is about as far removed from that as could be. </p>
<p>URichmond is also a school to consider. My son’s close friend got a huge award from there with stats similar to OP’s. Loved it there,did well there and thereafter. Yes, Temple has some great awards and is as city as they come. </p>
<p>If she is a NMSF and is accepted at USC [ Southern Calif] she would automatically receive a 1/2 tuition scholarship . USC also offers over 150 full tuition scholarships, but she needs to complete her application there by Dec 1 in order to be considered. Landing one of them is as competative as getting into a tip top college, but its worth trying.
USC also also very generous with FA, so be sure to document all of the extra medical expenses you are having to deal with in your FAFSA and Profile applications.
The LA area is alive with music venues and opportunists. And at USC’s Gloria Kaufman school of dance , she would also have lots of chance to dance for fun. </p>
<p>Her PSAT was 217 - another reason we weren’t expecting the 2300. Had we known about National Merit Scholarship/PSAT connection perhaps she would have prepped, but I just thought it was a practice SAT. For SAT prep she used the blue book and the black book and did a few tests. Nothing major.</p>
<p>Thanks again for comments I am taking notes and looking at schools. I promise to post the end of this all to help others later, hopefully.</p>
<p>Congratulations to your D! And welcome to the donut hole. It’s a shock when you discover that @150k income with limited assets nets you a 40-50k EFC. Especially when you probably take home less than 100k. </p>
<p>Given your ability to pay @20k a year, your D either needs to win the HYP lottery or she needs really good merit. </p>
<p>With exception of the guaranteed full ride or full tuition schools (check out the financial aid thread), it’s a bit hard to gauge merit awards (especially whether she will get 10 K or 35K). Some schos factor merit into their NPCs. Look for schools that have generous scholarships for which she’d be a strong candidate. Also look for schools that don’t count home equity in the FA equation. </p>
<p>Not sure whether these meet the above criteria, but I would check out Rhodes, Richmond, Occidental, University of Miami, TCU (warmer climates). I would look at Vandy too although your D would need to get lucky with a scholarship. </p>
<p>Pitt, Alabama, Alabama-Birmingham, University of Texas at Dallas, University of Houston - all good research institutions with merit money for a 2300 score.</p>
<p>Rice merit money is tricky and probably won’t come for that GPA (they don’t usually admit with that GPA if the admission is merit based).</p>
<p>My situation is similar to your daughter’s, and I also live in MD! I didn’t have as high of an SAT score as her (2120), but I was in the same financial boat and my GPA/EC’s got me into a few good schools this year that all appealed to me (CMU, honors @ UVA, honors @ UNC Chapel Hill, and others), but didn’t work out due to finances. Also, like your daughter, I plan on going to law school* or graduate school (I think you mentioned this on the first page), and to do this I wanted to minimize undergraduate debt. For law school admissions, undergrad GPA and LSAT score are 95% of the admission committee’s decision–letters of rec, personal statements, undergraduate prestige, etc. make up the other 5% (Note: this is the general consensus. The difference between Podunk State and Cornell/Brown matter less than 1 point on the LSAT.) If she plans on going to law school (or graduate school), I strongly suggest that you look toward merit scholarships or UMD. </p>
<p>Now that that’s out of the way, let me plug the school I’m attending this fall (note some bias in this recommendation): the University of Maryland. Your daughter seems like a great candidate for the Banneker Key Scholarship (full or half tuition decided by an interview) and the honors college. With such a large student body, it’s great to have a niche coming in, and the honors college serves its purpose in making a large resource university seem like a smaller liberal arts school. To quote the honors dean: “you can make a big school small, but you can’t make a small school big.” There are some pretty great research opportunities at College Park, and your daughter would definitely have a chance to pursue any research she wants–or none at all. The honors college is extremely flexible, and she’ll have the resources here to do pretty much anything. We graduate a huge amount of Fulbrights/Rhodes and other scholarship winners, and a bunch of Terps go on to the T14 law schools (a huge amount go to Harvard, UChi, Columbia, and the rest of the T14–one UMD honors alum graduated 1st @ HLS and is now clerking for Chief Justice Roberts). As a stop on the DC metro, a huge amount of students intern on Capitol Hill (in the fall or summer; we have some alums who frequently take in UMD students; if a UMD student wants an internship in DC, they’ll almost always get it if their GPA’s high enough). </p>
<p>The message is this: whatever path your daughter wants to follow, she can do it at UMD for ~20k per year (total cost of attendance assuming no merit aid). With the Banneker Key scholarship (for which she is a good candidate), you’ll pay a lot less at UMD, and still end up with the same result for grad school/law school/career opportunities (with the exclusion of finance–undergraduate prestige [read: Ivy or M7 undergrad] matters on Wall Street, but finance at the Big 4 is still very, very possible and happens every year). </p>
<p>The situation your daughter finds herself in is similar to many honors college students at UMD, meaning she has a shot at some great schools (Vandy, CMU, Tufts, Duke, etc.) but would prefer not to pay 60k for an undergrad degree. At UMD’s honors students orientation (this is anecdotal, so take it with a grain of salt), my dinner table was full of bright students who were accepted to Brown, Georgetown, and Carnegie Mellon among other schools, who all chose UMD to minimize debt. We all thought that it was foolish to spend 60k+ on a prestigious bumper sticker, since we could have the same end results coming from UMD. After talking to UMD alumni, I’m even more certain that this is true. </p>
<p>I posted on a popular law school admissions forum (the CollegeConfidential for law school admissions) asking a basic question re: AP classes and if they factor into an LSAC GPA, including the fact that I will be attending UMD as a quick aside to provide context, and multiple members sent me private messages to say that they were UMD alums and offered advice for getting adjusted to the school, for choosing proper classes, for wanting to go to law school as a Terp, etc. etc. After looking through those alums post history, I found that they are all attending top 4 (read: Harvard, Columbia, UChi) law schools this fall. From my personal experiences, I am proud of UMD’s strong alumni network. </p>
<p>I forgot to mention above, so I’ll just add this in at the bottom: UMD accepts many AP classes with scores of 4/5. A lot of private schools/Ivies don’t take credit for those classes, and had I chosen a different school I wouldn’tve had room in my schedule for more interesting classes or to study abroad. With 15 AP classes, I’m going in with 40-60 credits (depending on how I did on the exams this past May), and it’s a good feeling knowing I have the option to double major/study abroad/take more interesting classes/dual degree/etc. </p>
<p>*I’ve had my heart set on law school for some time, and I’ve dedicated my undergrad studies toward that path.</p>
<p>ETA: </p>
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</p>
<p>UMD has some pretty great options for all of what you mentioned, including a dual BA/MPP for her public policy interest (it takes 5 years, but with 9 AP’s she almost certainly can do it in 4). I talked to the head of the Diamondback (the school’s paper) about blogging earlier in the month, and they’re recruiting bloggers. </p>
<p>I don’t have too much info wrt the theatre program, but a bunch of my thespian friends that go there/are going there say they love it/can’t wait for it. </p>