<p>almost all of the guaranteed scholarships at colleges and universities around the United States have some sort of matrix with SAT/ACT scores and High School GPA, plus a minimum gpa you must maintain while in college. </p>
<p>There are many generous private colleges out there for good but not stellar students, thank God…where a 3.0 or 3.2 gpa and a decent SAT, plus perhaps some good EC’s can get you some decent scholarship money to make it affordable…though “affordable” is a relative term and always involves student loans and maybe some parent plus loans. </p>
<p>Its a huge investment of money, but hopefully the investment pays off over your lifetime.</p>
<p>The really really good plans like Harvard, Princeton and Yale go to those lucky 10% of kids who are admitted from their applicant pools and those kids are all with uber stats (except athletic scholarships).</p>
<p>The simple truth is that many people have to go to a local state flagship or even a local state university that is not the flagship campus, and live at home (like many kids did in earlier decades), to save money. </p>
<p>You dont know if you don’t apply for aid/scholarships/admission, so it always pays to apply and see what happens. Sadly, the results are not always very equitable. There are gross injustices in doling out scholarship monies and even grants under FAFSA. No school is required to give you what your needs are. There is disparity even among upperclassmen, when the 'have you locked in" and you are less likely to bolt for a transfer school. </p>
<p>Universities have oodles of highly paid consultants (charging sometimes millions of dollars) who take a long term view of things with capital expenses, capital campaigns, endowment management and all sorts of agendas, including sports…where college coaches routinely make millions of dollars a YEAR to coach basketball or football. Its insidious.</p>
<p>We live in a very uneven world. Nobody will EVER convince me that some kid with a 1350 or even a 1300 SAT (1600 scale) is unworthy of the SAME scholarship monies that a kid with 1400 gets…but that is where they often draw the line, particularly if you are not a URM. So the kid with a 1400 gets a half ride or even sometimes a full ride and the kid with a 1300 gets squat. Statistics show that the gpa’s of college students with that small a differential in SAT scores is infinitessimal. Sometimes the higher SAT score has a lower gpa in college. It happens. </p>
<p>I wouldnt want the job of doling out the money. Tough and thankless job. But on the other hand, they need to find a way to give some relief to middle class families. </p>
<p>If your family makes 120k a year, you likely don’t have a lot of money to spend on college tuition/room-board for your kid. After taxes and expenses (mortgage, food, insurance, clothes, car payments etc.), a family of 4 may not have much at all to put away for college. So if you kid is below the 1400 magic number, he gets burned. Meanwhile someone with more money than they know what to do with, has a kid with a 1400 SAT and gets a huge scholarship to somewhere like Duke. Seen it over and over and over…many many times. Its very unfair.</p>
<p>And we can all lament the somewhat mysterious sharp spike in tuition and room/board rates at colleges the last 5-10 years where it has tripled at some schools. Its just outrageous. What is causing that? Meanwhile their endowments have largely recovered from the crash of 08 and many schools have hundreds of millions socked away for a rainy day, while they soak the incoming students and parents.
These schools are often preaching about social justice but not practicing it.</p>