I will either have 13 or 17 credits coming in depending on whether I get a 4 or 5 on AP Spanish.
Not literally in NYC - my mom works near Fordham and my dad works downtown, but that’s about it. My CC is pretty amazing - they have an agreement with Cornell CALS and their honors program has a high transfer rate to Ivy+ schools. Just this year they got kids into Hop, Columbia, UNC-CH, Barnard, and UMiami, and recently got kids to Cornell then Harvard Law, and one kid who came in with a 1350/2400 SAT and a 1.2 GPA is now graduating from Georgetown’s McDonough Business School and started an organization featured on Facebook’s home page.
https://www.sunyrockland.edu/study-at-rcc/academics-and-degrees/honors-program
https://www.lohud.com/story/news/2017/05/18/rcc-grad-returns-alma-mater-deliver-commencement-address/325093001/
What prestigious privates? WashU is very popular with students at my school, but the Midwest is more well-known for solid Big Ten school imo
My twin is a good student as well - 1390 SAT and a near 4.0 GPA. His course load is far easier than mine but he won’t drop out… I think?
Yes - they use debit cards, and they gave me one as well.
Landlords do credit checks, how are you going to rent an apartment in the future without credit history?
@mommdc - Credit histories get built up by paying utility bills and other accounts on time. Even putting the tuition bill on an installment plan woukd probably count. Yes it is a bit easier to build credit history with credit cards and loan re-payment, but those aren’t strictly necessary.
Before you take a class, unless you plan on staying at Rockland to complete your associates, you need to find out from each school how they will view this. On face it does not sound like dual enrollment. You may end up being a transfer student, losing your freshman status and any opportunity for freshman merit scholarships.
So ask each school. Let them know exactly what the honors program at Rockland is; an early admit program (where you will be a matriculated student).
WashU is west of the Mississippi, as are some Big 10 schools.
You’ve set some arbitrary limits, like no southern schools because you are Jewish, nothing west of the Mississippi which eliminates Grinnell and WashU and Stanford and Arizona State. You won’t have a credit card and thus booking airline tickets will be difficult. You don’t want to take any loans or work in the summer so can’t contribute anything, thus any ‘student contribution’ is out, which honestly eliminates almost any school in the country except the service academies (but Air Force is out because it is west of the Mississippi). Your family has an income of $250k, so even the meets full need schools are not going to award you 100% of costs (and even the most generous have a student/family contribution).
I agree you shouldn’t take student loans just to build your credit score, but only if you need the money to go to college. You can decide to pay as you go, but that’s going to really limit you.
Your only true financial safeties, with the perimeters you’ve set (no borrowing, only $12k from your parents, geographic restrictions, probably little need based aid) are going to be the NY public schools in the city so you can live at home and commute. There might be some reach schools that will award you a lot of merit money but you are going to have to change your requirements.
They won’t be your ‘true safeties.’
Their reasoning is that they don’t want to fly far away to see me. To be fair, my parents also work and commute 11 hours a day each, but my mom also doesn’t think I’m completely ready to live on my own because of normal teenage activities like not cleaning my room… They are pretty misguided despite thinking they know a lot… my mom gives me anecdotal evidence about her friends’ “average” kids getting $40-50k in merit a year from top privates as reasons why I would also.
Well… they said they’ll take out $140k in PLUS loans so it honestly doesn’t matter. If I get a 34-35, are there big state schools that could give me a full ride?
Some kids do get a lot of merit aid, but they can’t be picky about the colleges. That’s why people suggested New Mexico and Arizona. You already found that there is merit money at Ol’ Miss and Alabama.
You are looking for safety with full aid. Very difficult to come by. You’re lucky you live in NY as there are some very affordable public schools. You have to be willing to expand your geographic area, be willing to take out the standard loans (or let your parents take out the Plus loans, which financially aren’t as good a deal as you taking the student loans). You said your friends/classmates are going to Tulane and Hopkins and WashU. Those schools aren’t safeties, and aren’t going to be $12k per year for your stats and family income.
The west of the Mississippi limit is especially arbitrary considering LSU is on your list. Part of campus literally borders the river.
Travel is an issue, sure. Look at actual typical flights from a NY airport to the school. Flying to Houston or Dallas, for example, is going to be cheaper and easier than lots of smaller cities east of the Mississippi. Just to name 2 random cities.
Many parents never visit their kids in college. Mine didn’t. Some don’t even make it to graduation, so fear of flying or the cost and hassle of flying don’t need to be barriers.
@1or2Musicians is absolutely on point about travel. You need to check the details. NYC to Dickinson College in Carlisle, PA is do-able by car, but not easy by rail or air because those routes end in Harrisburg. On the other hand, there are direct flights from NYC airports to St Louis, and you could get a shuttle/uber/bus from that airport to Wash U. Google Maps can give you a decent notion of driving time, and show some options for public transit if bus and rail connections are available. Kayak.com can help you figure out air connections.
Don’t neglect to include your own best estimates for your transportation costs in your planning budgets.
University at Buffalo offers good merit aid: https://admissions.buffalo.edu/costs/scholarships.php
Geneseo offered my D $12,500 in merit aid a few years ago, and several of her friends got similar merit awards from there as well. It was a few years ago, before the Excelsior financial need scholarships, so I’m not sure it will be available this admissions cycle. But something to check out.
Check with your HS’s guidance department and ask which SUNYs offered merit to students in last year’s graduating class and how much.
One of my kids went to college on the opposite coast of this country. She came home at Christmastime, and summer only…two plane tickets a year. Period. And she knew that when she enrolled. We never visited her in college. We went to drop her off…and we went for graduation. She was just fine.
My other kid went to college a two hour and ten minute drive door to door. He could easily have taken the bus home. Or train. We were able to visit him for music concerts. He never came home in the summer. His school job was VERY lucrative during the Christmas season so he didn’t get home before Christmas Eve…ever. He was here for only a small part of every summer.
We saw the kid who went to college 3000 miles away more days per year when she was in college than the one who was close drive distance.
The distance thing is really rather random…I mean really…how many times do your parents expect to visit you in college?
East of the Mississippi or west…what difference does it make?
And needing to fund college on $12,000 a year? I agree with @twoinanddone . Your only bet is a NY public college to which you can commute.
Your parents’ friends’ children who got a 30-40k scholarship might be going to a college with a sticker price of 70k. Nowadays aying 25k is considered pretty low.
Do your parents have financial troubles you’re not aware of? Because they should be able to afford more than 12.5k per twin. As a rule of thumb roughly one quarter of total income is supposed to be available to fund college for middle class and upper middle class families. (I know there are lots of circumstances that makes such an amount impossible, such as siblings, debt, etc., but for a 250+ income a reasonable expectation before any special circumstances would be that 25-30k would be available per child).
Is their 12.5k limit ONLY for safeties or does that include your matches and reaches too?
Definitely include SUNY Geneseo and Bing, plus Albany for political science (Buffalo or Stony Brook for stem).
Then run the NPC or look at the merit scholarships mentioned for Hobart WilliamSmith, St Lawrence, Skidmore. Does any description match what you bring to the table?
Good colleges for Jewish students include Muhlenberg, Dickinson, College of Charleston, Elon, obvs Brandeis.
CTCL schools have lots of good merit scholarships. Some will be west of the Mississippi like Reed, Lewis and Clark, Whitman. But airport access may be more important than actual distance.
Look at total travel time. Our across the country kid had six hours total of traveling time to get home. If we drove round trip to get our closer to home kid, it took us 6 hours round trip to drive up…and back.
It was a lot easier for us to just drive to the airport to pick up the kid who flew.
SUNY Bing is not an admission safety with OP’s gpa, and would also make merit at other SUNY schools unrealistic. OP said gpa was 91-92 WEIGHTED–way too low for UB merit.
I have friends whose kids received merit at UB with a weighted GPA of 3.7 and lower test scores. Maybe things have gotten more competitive in the past year or so… but I do think merit is a possibility. I do agree that Binghamton is not a safety.