Good Schools With Full Rides/Merit Scholarships

This thread is intended to discuss good public/private universities in the U.S with a good engineering/computer science program that offer merit scholarships. These scholarships should mostly or fully cover costs of tuition. They should also be merit based.

The University of Alabama offers the UA Scholars program that covers full tuition.You need to have a 1450-1600 sat score, and a 3.5 GPA.

The University of South Carolina has its honor college.

The University of Tulsa has an excellent engineering and computer science program and offers generous merit scholarships, including their Presidential which covers tuition, room and board.

Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago is strong in engineering/computer science and offers full tuition and full ride competitive merit scholarships.

here’s a recent thread with similar information; not necessarily engineering specific.

http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/financial-aid-scholarships/1910341-merit-scholarships-for-33-act-and-top-10-percent-class-rank.html

thx

You’re a high school freshman, so keep in mind that things can change a lot in a short time. The colleges that offer good aid now may not offer as much by the time you graduate, and others may offer more to be competitive. Temple used to offer good scholarships until just a couple of years ago. Bama offers great aid, but I think the stats required for the highest grant increased recently. When you’re ready to apply, check each college website for their requirements and run their Net Price Calculator to get an estimate of their costs.

You asked about full ride merit aid. Do you think your parents make too much to qualify for need based aid? Why do need a full ride? Will they be contributing to your education at all?

You can only borrow ~$5500/year. If you work summers you can probably raise ~$3k/year. If your stats are high enough, you may qualify for merit, but if your parents are upper income they’ll likely still be expected to contribute. If you’re lower income, you may qualify for a Pell grant of up to ~$5k. In that case, you’d need to target schools that offer enough to cover tuition.

SUNY Buffalo has a Presidential Scholarship that, up until this year, was a total full ride-room, board, books, and tuition. This year it has been changed to $15,000 per year, which is still a great deal. It can be stacked with the STEM incentive to make it pretty much a full ride. My older son is a senior on the original scholarship and younger son recently found out he is receiving the current scholarship. Students must maintain a gpa of 3.5 or higher to keep the scholarship.

Here are the details:
UB’s top entering freshmen are awarded Presidential Scholarships. This scholarship is the most valuable scholarship offered within the SUNY system and is a $15,000 annual award renewable for four years of undergraduate study. To be competitive for this award, students must show outstanding academic merit and typically present a minimum unweighted high school average of 95 and a combined SAT critical reading and math score of at least 1470 (Taken prior to March 2016) or 1510 (New SAT taken March 2016 or later) or an ACT score of 33. Students must be United States citizens or permanent residents. Students who receive Presidential Scholarships are automatically admitted to the Honors College.

What state are you in?

I live in the Carolinas (don’t want to say which one).

But I want to attend an out of state public ivy. What about umd college park? UMD’s Bernakey merit scholarship is pretty good, and it is less competitive than other full scholarships. How is their computer science program? Does it rival the other public ivies( UMich, Ga Tech, UW Madison, UT Austin,etc.)

@Mahindra the B-K scholarship at UMD is insanely competitive. My D (comp sci major in the fall) got huge merit scholarships everywhere she applied (NEU, UA, WPI), and got nothing at UMD.

Zero.

Zip.

Goose egg.

Didn’t even get honors college, the application was ghastly difficult, and the website was tragi-comedically filled with broken links and wrongly updating info. My daughter wanted to know why UMD didn’t take some of its very excellent CS department and have them work on getting a decent user interface going for the application portal.

However, we can recommend the other three. They do change a lot over time, though. CS for incoming girls is becoming very popular and much more competitive. By the time you’re ready to apply, everything could be different.

I would echo MotherofDragons post as far as the 40 Acres at UT Austin. Extraordinarily competitive and very difficult to get. For Good but not tip top publics in Texas, Texas Tech just re-introduced a full ride + NMF deal and UT Dallas has some very good scholarships both competitive and for NMF or automatic. Both have very good science/CS/engineering schools.

@mahindra - The problem that you will run into is that very few “public Ivies” (which is not an objectively defined term!) offer full tuition scholarships for out of state students, and if they do, there are very few per year and they are very very competitive, such as UVA Jefferson and UNC Robertson. There are however, plenty of great public universities (such as Pitt, Alabama, Ole Miss and U Texas-Dallas) that do offer generous merit packages for high stat kids and these are often automatic (e.g., if you hit the SAT and GPA mark you get the scholarship). Also, as noted above, these scholarships can change from year to year and the amount of merit can particularly change significantly.

Hi - when you say hit the mark on SAT and GPA, is there a way to know what those levels are that qualify? Thinking about applying to PITT as we are in-state in PA and it may be most feasable financially… Thanks!

@citizen2100 Thx

^ Check on each school’s website as they typically detail this type of info there. Please note however that these scholarships do change year to year.

@citizen2100 --go to the University of Pittsburgh forum and look for the Class of 2021 merit discussion thread.

33 ACT AND upper 2-5% of class rank seemed to be the minimum threshold for merit this year.

Thanks all!