Early Action & Merit Based Aid

I’m planning on applying to Tulane and am thinking of going with single-choice early action, both in the hopes of demonstrating interest and because I really would like to hear back from one of my colleges sooner. I have a couple of questions, though.

First of all, from what I’ve gathered, merit aid is offered when you first receive a decision, including for EA. Is this correct?

Second, my GPA fell to 3.590 last year and my class rank to 11%, so it looks like I’m a fairly average applicant with a fine, but not great chance of admissions. My SAT composite, 2020, which I think I can bring up about 100 points, is similarly fairly average. I’m assuming I won’t receive much (any?) merit aid with those stats, and it looks like Tulane doesn’t usually give out 100% of a student’s need-based aid. However, I think I can bring both my GPA and class rank up next year, although my course load is still rigorous. Assuming the answer to the first question is yes, does Tulane reconsider merit aid offers if an EA student’s midyear grades are an improvement? If not, do you think it might make enough difference for aid to delay my application until RD?

@usualhopeful

Yes, absolutely. Historically the merit offer comes only with the printed letter that is sent snail mail, not posted online with your acceptance status. Of course there is always a chance Tulane will introduce a new feature, but through last year this is the way they do it. The letter usually arrives about 4 days to a week after they post your acceptance online.

Also, you probably know this, but the earlier you apply the earlier you can get your acceptance. Tulane does not wait until December 15 to tell everyone. I have seen acceptances as early as the first week in October, and from mid-October on is very common. So get your application in by the end of September if you can, and get your school to send everything fast as well.

For the second part, I would say that based on stats alone you are a very good candidate for acceptance. Merit aid is a tougher call. Is that GPA weighted or unweighted? How many AP courses have you taken so far, if any, and are any scheduled for senior year? 11% class rank is pretty darn good, but no doubt getting it into the top 10% would help a lot, as would getting the SAT score up to at least 2100. I am not saying you won’t get merit aid if those things don’t happen, it would just be less iffy.

Tulane does not guarantee 100% of need, but I am not sure I would say they usually don’t provide it. Quite a few students do get it, and many more come very close to it. I wouldn’t get discouraged. But to get to your point, yes Tulane will reconsider merit offers if you can present a strong case. So if you have a really great first semester, and can boost up that SAT close to or more than the 80 points I mentioned, it could be worth a lot of money to you. All you can do is try. Small changes in your resume won’t really be considered.

But I wouldn’t put off your application. As I said you are already a very solid applicant from what I can see, and Tulane loves the interest that applying SCEA shows. The merit awards are mostly stats based, but not all. You might get a bit of a boost from applying early and enthusiastically. And then there is always the potential for reconsideration if warranted. One thing I have observed about Tulane admissions over these last 8 years or so is they really like to be fair. So if they gave $X to a student with certain stats in October and you achieved similar stats after Fall semester, even if you had already been accepted and given a certain award of less than $X, they would reconsider you for $X as well. Of course no two students are the same in total, but that is how it has seemed to me.

That GPA is unweighted. Sophomore year I took AP Chemistry (4) and this year I was one of three people in my class who took four out of a possible four APs this year - Biology, German, Lang & Comp, and Calc AB, all 5s. Next year I’m taking AP Calc BC, APUSH, and AP Physics C Mechanics.

I think I’ll probably go ahead and apply SCEA, especially if I could know my acceptance status at a school I’m really interested in as early as October.

It seems the merit aid is highly discretionary, In my son’s school there were 6 accepted to Tulane, and 4 of the 6 had interchangeable transcripts. 2 of the 6 got merit aid, and they were not necessarily the ones with the highest averages and scores. Interestingly, of the 6, 2 had parents that were alums (I am one of them), and we got nothing. At alumni meetings there was a great deal of discussion that merit aid tends not to go to kids of alums, but I could not confirm. Bottom line is that unless you’re fabulously wealthy, you cannot really go there without a significant amount of merit aid – the debt load is unjustifiable.

Well, just to balance this a bit if we are talking anecdotes, I am an alum and my D at first was awarded the Presidential (highest level of merit aid associated with all students being eligible) and then a DHS (competition based merit aid, full tuition at that time, now fees included as well and automatic consideration for the Stamps (full ride) which was not available from Tulane at that time). I hear about alum children getting merit scholarships all the time.

I would also quibble with the term “fabulously wealthy”, but since there are no hard and fast numbers associated with that description, to each their own. Tulane is expensive (similar to dozens of other schools) and I have never supported going deeply into debt to go to any school. Tulane is also routinely on the list of schools that offer the highest amounts of merit aid, usually in the top 5. Now to be fair, the Ivies don’t offer merit aid but have generous need-based programs. Still, middle to upper-middle class families are much harder pressed to afford those schools than a student of that caliber usually is to afford Tulane.

We are heading to Tulane next Wednesday in preparation for move-in day for our D. She is boarding at Wall Residential College and we are looking forward to it. She did not visit Tulane until orientation and loved it. All along we thought it was the best fit for her in every way (aside from the high cost of private universities).

She applied for EA and received the Distinguished Scholar award which is $27,000 per year. She also received a Tulane Scholar award, but I believe that one is more need based, not merit based.

She ranked top 10 in her class (7th if memory serves) and scored a 32 ACT composite – and from researching the acceptance threads for 2019 and merit based awards, the 32, in my opinion, is what landed her the DS award. There could, and probably were other factors that led to the award, but EA, ACT and ranking were the largest factors.

@usualhopeful - definitely consider taking the ACT rather than focusing on improving the SAT. I’m not saying don’t take the SAT again, but I believe a strong ACT score might help you more. My D only took the ACT because she was still involved in the application process for the Naval Academy and I think it ended up helping with her Tulane application with regard to merit awards (your SAT scores are very similar).

She also choose “Why Tulane?” for her essay and was very active in ECs and community service, important factors, I believe, as far as Tulane Admissions is concerned.

Anyway, I just wanted to give a comparison. EA is great idea and if you can schedule an ACT prior to completing your application, I would strongly consider it. Best of luck.

Hello - i am wondering if applying Single Choice EA will hurt chances for being considered for Merit based aid? What is the recent historical GPA/ACT scores for merit based aid - even from the lowest levels of funding if anyone knows?

Also does Tulane post how they recalculate HS GPA’s
thank you for any insight.

@Golfmommy

I know what you are thinking, and of course it has its own logic. “If they know I am really leaning towards Tulane that strongly, why wouldn’t they offer less $$ incentive?”. But it really, truly isn’t like that. In fact, if anything applying SCEA might tilt them a bit more favorably towards a slightly higher award if you were on the borderline between two awards. Tulane knows that SCEA is not binding and that quite a few applicants in that category still choose elsewhere. And once they decide they want you, they will try and convince you to come.

After watching this for years and talking to hundreds, maybe a thousand or more students, I can say that Tulane just awards merit aid fairly, largely based on stats. I cannot begin to give you what those stats are for each level of award. I can only say that the highest non-separate competition award, the Presidential, generally goes to those students that have an SAT of around 2150+ and a GPA (UW) of 3.8+ and a record of challenging classes like AP’s. That award is, I think, $32,000 this year. It works its way down from there, with fairly narrow tiers or strata. So maybe the lowest award ($15,000 ?? Not sure) is probably looking at a SAT of around 2050 and GPA of 3.6+ with at least some honors and AP. But what I am telling you is very rough. I don’t know how they handle cases like high GPA but somewhat lower SAT or vice versa, except they seem to favor the generous side as long as one of the two stats isn’t too out of whack.

I can tell more definitely you that the merit scholarships that one applies separately for, the DHS and Paul Tulane, require about a 2250+ SAT (33+ ACT) and top 5% of class with a very rigorous class schedule. Of course there is more to these than stats, but stats are a lot of it and hopefully that gives you at least some idea what is expected.

I do not know how they recalculate HS GPA. Hope that helped some, but bottom line is go ahead and have your child apply SCEA if Tulane is that high on their list. It can only help them.

FYI
Here’s a partial compilation of merit awards & student stats from last year:
http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/discussion/comment/17863936/#Comment_17863936

Later posters added GPA figures. Perhaps someone is interested in plotting the data Naviance style and posting a link to the scatter plot?

Thank you both @fallenchemist and @GMTplus7 for this information - certainly a worthwhile discussion to be had.

I agree with FC, as I always do! My son applied SCEA and received merit money. @Golfmommy, I understand your thinking that they won’t feel the same need to woo someone who applies SCEA-I had the same thought in the back of my mind at the time. But Tulane also wants students who really want to be there, so it would be counterproductive if they “penalized” those who apply SCEA by offering less merit money than to others. @Newtownunit, I would feel exactly as you do if I were in your situation. I’d have a hard time coming to another conclusion. However, just as there are more qualified students who apply than they can accept, there is also not enough merit money to go around. There is more to each applicant than just their stats, and no one outside of admissions will ever know how they made these particular decisions.

The good news is that my son is extremely happy where he is, and that’s all that really matters. Just to clarify my “fabulously wealthy” comment, what I meant is that the projected cost per student at Tulane (and many, many other private institutions) is between $240K-$260K. My personal concern is that even if the parent can pay half, I question whether students or parents should go into over $100K in student loans for just the undergraduate education, and just for one child. We learned that some of the best deals in education right now are honors colleges and programs at public institutions. So, my son got into the UF and FSU programs, both of which are quite remarkable. FSU gave him an OOS tuition waiver, meaning that our total out of pocket per year is about $14K. Everyone has to evaluate these choices individually, but honestly, unless you’ve saved up a good $200K per student as they enter into a private institution, you either have to have a very high income to pay as you go, or incur astounding debt. Money does and should enter into these discussions. Student loan debt loads have simply become unsustainable.

@Newtonunit I totally agree with you on the loans. The trouble is that I’m from New Hampshire, where in-state tuition is horrible.

Absolutely correct, it is beyond absurd (IMO) for parents to take on that kind of debt for a college education for their kid, much less the students themselves. But just to be clear, Tulane remains one of the most generous schools for merit aid, so that lowers the borrowing need, and of course the need-based aid packages often have grants as well as loans, which also lowers the need to borrow. As Newtownunit has pointed out, not every accepted applicant gets a package that meets their needs, which is a shame. I always hate to see that.

But the stats show that the bottom line is that the average Tulane grad that has debt has about $28,000 in debt facing them. Now to me that is an acceptable amount in today’s world. I would personally say as high as $35,000 is tolerable for most, but that is a very personal decision. Others would argue a little more is OK, many would say that is too much. There is no right answer, but I feel pretty strongly that $100,000+ is definitely a wrong answer. To be even clearer, I am talking undergrad only. Of course if one is going to med school this number is quite different. Used to be law school could justify a higher number as well, but unless it is one of the top 15 or so law schools and you are graduating in the top portion of your class, maybe borrowing much for law school isn’t such a good idea either. But for undergraduate, no school is that magical compared to the far more affordable in-state universities to justify those kind of huge loan burdens. I would like to be able to say that Tulane, with its unique programs and its NOLA location, is worth anything to attend, but of course even it is not and even Tulane admissions and admins themselves would say the same.

This is so helpful! Thank you!

To update on the merit aid component: I e-mailed my admissions rep and she said that Tulane will NOT re-evaluate merit aid after the initial decision.
In somewhat related news, I just submitted my app SCEA with my current stats and am praying for a positive decision and good merit aid.

@Newtownunit - agreed. I do not believe most schools are worth an extra 65-75k (over 4 years) versus your state flagship. And that’s assuming the cost of attendance is around half of sticker (get $120,000 in aid).

That all sounds great, @usualhopeful . It certainly is possible that they have changed their policy on reconsideration of merit awards. After all, this year’s class was very full so maybe they just don’t think it is a good policy any longer. I would still bet that if you had a huge change in your stats so that your profile was more comparable to those with higher awards they would make an exception, but the only way I can see a change of that magnitude is a big jump in the SAT/ACT score. Otherwise I can see where they are now making very few reconsiderations compared to the past.

Best of luck!

Dies the CSS profile have to be submitted by 11/15 with an EA app? The app was submitted 3 weeks ago, but now I am questioning whether the CSS needs to be submitted now as well. My daughter did have to submit it to two other schools already. Thanks!

@carchivist Tulane is need blind, so I’m pretty sure it’s not. I certainly hope so at least, since I didn’t turn it in.