@fretfulmother, that’s how D makes some of her decisions!
In the state where we lived when D1 applied, this sort of conflict wasn’t that rare among the very top students.
In that part of the country, their state flagship is held in [unreasonably] high regard by the natives. If the goal is to stay local, the flagship might actually be better in the end. As I said above, D1 dismissed her offer from that flagship. But a number of other top students I know of, who actually liked it there, took it. Some wanted to stay local (or parents did), In fact the valedictorian of her private school selected the flagship over Brown, IIRC. Others were contemplating med school expenses down the road.
I imagine the sentiment is the same at some other states where free rides or substantial discounts are offered at their flagships. People in most parts of the country value their flagships more than we northeasterners do.
The schools that participate keep changing, and also their degree of funding changes. D1 got a free ride from a state flagship that isn’t giving quite that much anymore. Can’t wade through all, but if I’m reading this right, as of 2013
Alabama, Arizona, Idaho, Kentucky, Mississippi, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, [Oklahoma?], Texas A&M, others offered free tuition even to out of staters, while Connecticut, and Vermont offered them to in-staters. Some privates such as Fordham and Rochester were giving great deals too.
http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/discussion/comment/16465904 post#832
Any resident of one of the states whose flagships participate in this could be facing such a choice, if they got into an Ivy. So long as they made NMS semi-finalist in their state. And those states mostly have lower semi-finalist cutoffs than many of the Northeastern states do.
Lots of families find they do not qualify for financial aid from a private college but nevertheless can’t afford to pay full freight at one.Some of them are seeking out those tuition discount opportunities where they are offered. I’ve seen discussion on CC of programs such as U Alabama (eg #159 on this thread) and Fordham.
Thanks @Mom2aphysicsgeek for providing the honors college link.
Don’t know if this is current, or correct, but:
http://lhspsatteam.■■■■■■■■■■/uploads/5/2/1/0/5210607/scholarships.pdf
Thanks, @DiffMom!
@tk21769, huh? Just because many high-stats applicants reject full-rides doesn’t mean that they don’t have a choice. It means that they have the choice and are rejecting the full-rides.
So I would say that plenty of Ivy/equivalent admits do face the choice of full-pay at the former vs. a free or close-to-free elsewhere. Just because they don’t consider an option doesn’t mean that they don’t have a choice.
If you’re talking about a realistic scenario, it’s Ivy/equivalent at full-pay vs. a full-tuition scholarship elsewhere. I’ve already listed some of the flagships where it’s pretty likely that an Ivy/equivalent admit can pick up a full-tuition scholarship. Do you need me to list them again?
Probably all or almost all of them have the stats to get an automatic full ride at Louisiana Tech, Prairie View A&M, Alabama State, Arkansas - Monticello, and Louisiana - Monroe, and most would be competitive for various competitive full ride scholarships like at Alabama, Delaware, Georgia, Georgia Tech, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana State, Maryland, Michigan State, Mississippi, Mississippi State, Rutgers (in-state), Buffalo, North Carolina, North Carolina State, Ohio State, Pittsburgh, Clemson, South Carolina, Texas, Texas A&M, Utah, Virginia.
Now, it is entirely possible that some Ivy League applicants disdain state universities so much that they do not even apply, but that is different from not being able to get a full ride at a state university.
How many times on this board do posters define “safety” as a school that you know you can get in, you know you can afford … and would love to attend? I would think many affluent kids who apply to Ivies also do apply to their own state flagships. However, I doubt that very many also apply to directional state universities in distant states (the kinds of schools that show up on the “full ride” lists I’ve linked). It does not require blanket disdain for state universities to want to choose your safeties from schools in your own or neighboring states, or from state schools with good reputations in your intended major.
“Competitive for” doesn’t necessarily mean they are very likely to get them. I mentioned (in post #175) some numbers for Delaware (30 full rides), Ohio State (25 full rides), and Oregon (5 full rides). These are very small numbers relative to the enrollments. Last time I checked, the OOS merit scholarships at Alabama were full tuition, not full ride. For my home state, the link at the bottom of post #179 shows only one public institution (a small HBU) that appears to guarantee full rides for high stats. Some other big Ivy feeder states (CA, ILL, NY, PA) don’t have a single institution that guarantees full rides for high stats on that list. Now maybe that 21 page, 2 year thread still isn’t complete … or maybe some schools that don’t guarantee full rides nevertheless do award many more than token numbers of them. Which schools are those?
I suspect that for the 5K-10K students who enter Ivies as full-paying freshmen every year, the number who actually decline full ride offers is closer to 10% than 100%. I suspect (don’t really know for sure) that many of them just aren’t getting those full-ride offers from the in-state public and other schools they apply to as safety and match alternatives. Among admitted students (including those who declined the Ivy offers), maybe the number is somewhere in between. I’m basing my estimate on numbers like the ones I cited above for Delaware, etc., on the merit aid stats I see on Kiplinger’s and in the CDS files, etc. Maybe I’m still missing something.
As I have pointed out before, that list is not comprehensive. OSU has a gazillion different scholarships, many stackable, so an OH kid who is Ivy material very likely can go to OSU tuition-free if not completely free (not to mention that they can likely get a free or close-to-free education from other OH publics).
And now you’re rejecting state schools that are far away and add the clause that it has to be a school that a kid would love to attend. Again, that is a choice. Turning down a choice doesn’t mean that you don’t have the choice of a state school tuition-free.
The bottom line is that most kids who can get in to an Ivy/equivalent can go to a state flagship or equivalent tuition-free and can get a full ride to some other schools.
@tk21769 Our reality is not that we would be full pay, but it is still a huge amt, far beyond our means to pay. Our ds is attending full-ride bc he attends a school which allows stacking of scholarships. They do not offer a scholarship that is full-ride, but they do allow department scholarships, elite scholarships from competitive programs, etc to stack on top of their automatic admission tuition scholarships. You are correct that the number of students in my son’s situation at his school is not very high, but I personally doubt that mean it is insignificant, either.
When you consider the low number of students accepted into elite schools, I think that talking in terms of small numbers is relevant. I suspect that whatever the low number is of students accepting the high merit offers at individual universities is added up across all of universities which offer high merit $$ that number is probably significant number of students. (Looking at where NMF students attend shows a very wide range of schools.)
University of Virginia aid is primarily need based. There are only about 30 or so Jefferson Scholars a year (with full tuition and room and board) out of a first year class of over 3000 students. Jefferson Scholars are chosen by a private foundation, not by the school. Echols and Rodman Scholars receive no money at all.
Of course, it is not unusual to see student posters on these forums who are so picky that the only schools that they would love to attend are non-safeties (too selective to be safeties for them, or too expensive). Such students cannot have any safeties and increase the risk of being shut out. (And it doesn’t have to be an Ivy League school that they are fixated on; NYU is a well known “dream school” that can turn into a nightmare of debt for some students foolish enough to attend when they cannot really afford it.)
You will see a few posts usually this time of year when those students learn they have been shut out of all their dream schools, or suddenly realize that they can’t afford their dream schools, and are scrambling to find affordable safeties. But unless they are NMF they would have missed all the scholarship windows by now.
No I’m not. Clearly, many Ivy students come to college from far away. I’m sure many of them would seriously consider some public schools in distant states.
Which list? I’ve cited two. First I cited this one:
http://www.thecollegiateblog.org/2012/12/09/national-universities-that-offer-full-ride-scholarship/
Purpletitan, you said it appeared to be out-of date and not comprehensive. So then I cited this one (in post #179):
http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/financial-aid-scholarships/1348012-automatic-full-tuition-full-ride-scholarships-p20.html
That CC thread runs 21 pages and was last updated in June 2014. In it I find only two state schools that (a) appear to guarantee full rides for stats, AND (b) are ranked at all in the US News “National Universities” list. Those 2 schools are Louisiana Tech (ranked #201) and Howard University (#145).
Is there a better (more up to date, more comprehensive) list?
Yes, it’s quite possible I’m underestimating the number of “full ride” scholarships available for Ivy-level stats.
If so, I’d like to see the evidence that for many full-pay students, the net price differences at decision-time are as stark as “full ride for a state school v. full pay for an Ivy.”
@tk21769, do you have trouble understanding the meaning of the term “stackable”, or are you being willfully obtuse?
No list will list all scholarships for all schools, but here’s a list of what’s available to NMS kids:
http://nmfscholarships.yolasite.com/
Plenty of full-rides on there.
Here’s the companion site based on stats:
http://automaticfulltuition.yolasite.com/
I don’'t understand the fixation on “full ride” specifically. The point is, lots of people can’t afford to pay $50,000 per year, even if colleges have some calculations that result in them not qualifying for financial aid.Those people may be motivated to find ways to save boatloads of money. The more the better. Whether they are saving $50,000, or $35,000, that’s really not the point, IMO. They are saving a lot, and they care about that level of savings.
I look at the thread title non-literally.For purposes of the thread I interpreted “Free Ride” to be equivalent to “save a boatload of money”. Whether or not the students have to pay for books & lodging, they are still saving a ton, vs. the alternative. More than if they just went full-pay to the state u. And “Ivy League” really means “very selective private university”. Whether the school actually, literally plays Columbia in basketball is pretty much irrelevant to the overall, “big picture” point of the thread, seems to me. This is most relevant for familiies that won’t qualify for need-based aid, and anyway Ivies are not the only selective private schools who provide that.
As I said in #181 above, the exact schools and offers keep changing. D1 did get a “real” free ride, and now that school is giving more modest awards. Who knows, next year they might decide to give more again.I also gave a link to a 2013 list of schools in that thread. I don’t know where it stands now, but it changes. It will probably keep changing, in the years that follow.
Lots of residents of most of the states listed in #181 would need very little prodding to send their kids to their local schools listed there. Particularly if they could not afford a private . The locals actually hold those schools in high regard. At least that was the experience in our state.
As for the # students that may be affected , look up the enrollments of college-sponsored NM scholarships.
for sake of estimation, assume a pretty large proportion of the semi-finalists who attended a “lower” school that offered college-sponsored scholarships were influenced by the scholarship. Some are “bought” by a lot less than a full ride.
http://www.nationalmerit.org/annual_report.pdf
That appears to repeat many of the same schools already shown in the CC thread I linked above.
But it does add a few full ride schools, including Liberty University (which you probably couldn’t pay many Ivy Leaguers enough to attend) as well as some better suggestions such as UT-Dallas, the University of New Mexico, and Minnesota-Morris. If these are guaranteed for stats, or are open to OOS students and granted in more than token numbers, they’d be examples of good full-ride options for full-pay Ivy candidates.
Fair enough (although that’s how the OP happened to frame the discussion.) There’s no doubt that virtually all Ivy League full-pay students could have found cheaper options. A state flagship even a full sticker in-state rates might make more sense for many of them.
The reality is, for those families that CAN afford to be full-pay at an Ivy/Ivy-equivalent (or where the NPC gives them a workable number), many will allow their students to apply ED to maximize their chances of admission. They know there’s merit money out there, possibly even at some very desirable state flagships, but it isn’t a big enough draw to risk losing their best shot at their “dream school.”
Others will apply RD and wait and see what all the offers are before making a final selection, weighing the relative value of the different schools.
My son had many classmates who would have been eligible for the full-tuition scholarship he received if they’d applied for it. But these are families that not only would never apply to an out-of-state flagship that wasn’t also “elite,” they’d never bother to even look.
A merit-based full-ride at a school that is even remotely in the same “league” as an elite school is a very rare thing and most families would take such an offer (which likely comes with quite a few other perks including “prestige”) very seriously. If not, they never would have had their student apply for it in the first place.
@tk21769 You won’t be able to easily assess how many students are on full scholarship due to stacking scholarships due to dept scholarships. As @PurpleTitan posted earlier, stacking of scholarships is not uncommon.