High achiever looking for a bargain school

College Search & Selection
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<p>$15k per year total budget removes ALL of the top 50 schools, because IT IS WAY TOO LATE TO GET MERIT AID. Without Merit aid, the cheapest schools I know about are the military service academies, Brigham Young University, and University of Minnesota. SUNY Stoney Brook too. Then a little more is Grove City college. Even USC with its 50% tuition rebate for NMSF’s is over $34,000 for 1/2 tuition plus full cost room and board.</p>

<p>So… You need to either come up with another $5k per year for BYU, and $10k per year for Minn or Stoney Brook.</p>

<p>Absent that, your best option is to TAKE A YEAR OFF, do something really interesting, save some money, and apply to the Ivies (if your family income is under $100k). Then, there are a lot of private colleges where you might get $37,000 merit aid (the typical amount you’ll need to get the $52,000 all-in costs down to $15,000). You should create a separate post in the section of this website that is focused on financial and merit aid to get good advice on that. <a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/financial-aid-scholarships/[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/financial-aid-scholarships/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>I think your requirements for warm weather and urban should really be secondary to finding a place that will give you $37,000 merit aid.</p>

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<p>I don’t know if you were referring to a specific school - you didn’t say - but I had full-tuition merit aid offers when I transferred, and two of those offers were to colleges to which I applied after the preferred deadline. It can happen.</p>

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<p>Dunn, The academies actually require you to apply a year in advance (junior year for HS students) because you have to go through a congressional nomination process. Those are not options this year either.</p>

<p>Edit: I note that OP has another thread just posted about this same issue with more information.</p>

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<p>MHC - Really? What schools are you talking about, pre- and post-transfer? The keyword in my previous post is upward-transfer; i.e. transferring from a lesser school to a “better” (academic/prestige-wise) school.</p>