Your in-state public U’s set a very high bar in terms of quality and value. There are many, many students at UMich who are full-paying the OOS cost of attendance, which is only about 10K/year less than an Ivy. UMich is basically semi-private; and MSU compares favorably with the flagship universities in many other states. So your point is well taken that paying a premium to attend an OOS public makes no sense. Given your complicated financial profile, there may not be a ton of private U’s that will compare favorably on value to your public U’s, either. But it’s definitely worth exploring the possibilities!
For something different to consider, there are a couple of highly-competitive business/econ-related honors cohort programs at U of Nebraska Lincoln that could be worth a look. Lincoln gets high marks as a college town. The Business Honors Academy offers a high-powered cohort and a great student experience with excellent opportunities Nebraska Business Honors Academy | Academics | Business | Nebraska … and if you aren’t as averse to computer science as you are to physics, the Raikes School combines Business, CS, and Design in a very cool interdisciplinary honors curriculum (some major in engineering and take all of the dreaded STEM classes, while others choose majors from the business school or major in econ through arts & sciences… but they all participate in the interdisciplinary program together). https://raikes.unl.edu/ UNL would be very affordable given the low sticker price and the merit you could expect (not dependent on need calculations), and it seems to tick your boxes for the most part (not too small or too rural or too rich, overly-fratty, activist, religious, or gratuitously stressful).
As a 5C’s parent, I can definitely see you liking Claremont McKenna and the consortium in general (although “performative” activism is not absent, and its detractors can get strident and offensive in their own way, so that can get icky sometimes). Unclear how your net cost would end up looking, however, and the NPC may not be reliable given the complexity of your profile. The problem here is that if you truly loved CMC, the acceptance rate is much, much higher if you apply ED… but that’s hard to do if you can’t reliable gauge affordability. Of course, if your aid ultimately doesn’t measure up to what the NPC indicated, you’re not obligated to enroll, but nobody needs that emotional rollercoaster. If you consider applying ED to any full-need-met school, it may be worth inquiring about a financial aid pre-read instead of just relying on the NPC. This applies also to Rice, which I agree might hit the sweet spot in terms of the social vibe and political climate that you’re looking for. Rice is about as generous as it gets, aid-wise, so if they’d be willing to give you a pre-read, that might give you a good best-case-scenario baseline for elite private U’s.
What about smaller universities that may technically be considered liberal arts colleges, but have strong pre-professional programs? I’m thinking of Denison University as an example. They have some really good offerings in poli sci, policy analysis, econ, data analytics… and a top notch DC program Lugar Program | Denison University . Granville is a nice college town, and it’s just outside the city of Columbus. They’re pretty generous with both merit and need-based aid. Probably a little smaller than you prefer, with about 2300 undergrads, but not tiny.
University of Richmond could be worth a look too. And ASU Barrett as already mentioned. UGA Honors might appeal if you can land one of the big merit awards. The U of Utah Honors College is pretty cool too, and there are both strong merit possibilities and the unusual option of a path to residency after the first year, to make it particularly affordable.
It seems like the safeties you already have are pretty great, so as you say, you might as well be picky in terms of what would tempt you away from your in-state and/or big-merit options. You show good self-awareness and a great sense of humor; if you can use those to paint a picture of yourself and your goals, in your applications, I think admissions will go well for you. It’s good that you understand the possible financial pitfalls up-front and are getting out in front of that. You’re asking all the right questions and balancing aspirational thinking with pragmatism, which is to say, you’re well ahead of the game already, which is going to pay off with good, realistic options.
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