Late to the party - playing catch-up on merit aid for a solid, if unspectacular student.

Thanks for the update! I’m a proud Ohio University grad…so I’m sort of biased towards that one. But really…all of her choices sound great!

Let us know the final decision!!

What a great update!! Good luck and happy choosing!

Also in Ohio is Ohio University. The Scripps College of Journalism is one of the better in the country, they have a good Fine Art Dept. and their history dept is fine. It’s a beautiful campus and relatively inexpensive as OOS schools go. Your D would likely get some merit aid as well as an OOS scholarship since her scores are in the top 5-10% of their admitted class. There really are a number of good journalism schools located in all parts of the country and many of them are not the “elite” schools. You will find that schools with the best journalism schools often may not be extremely selective, however, their journalism schools may be more selective than the school as a whole.

^OP said she did get merit from Ohio U

I LOVE updates. Thanks, congrats, good luck, etc!

OP congratulations. Your daughter has some nice choices especially with the full or close to full-tuition offers.

One final cost savings tip that we used is to get a Southwest credit card. Hunt around for offers and try to find the one that gives you 50K in points and I think some other benefit. We did that when our DS started college in Ohio and we used the points to pay for his flights his first year and at least one free flight the other years. Plus Southwest does charge for luggage which also saves $$$ We just made sure to pay it off each month.

Re: post #2, it’s not really true to say that Temple takes the weighted GPA. They convert the weighted GPA (for only academic courses) to a GPA on a 4.0 scale. My son had a weighted GPA of 4.08/5.0 which converted to a 3.26/4.0 leaving him ineligible for their full-tuition scholarship. Second comment about looking at National Buckeye scholarship for OSU. That’s where my son will be attending - he received the Buckeye plus the Maximus scholarship bringing the cost to below that of our in state flagship.

I think based on everything you’ve said, she will love OU. I am 98% positive my son is going there too!

Good tip. Going off topic here, but since it came up in the thread here, I’ll share what I’ve learned, having had the Southwest card for years. We almost never pay to fly anymore. I had more than 200,000 points built up, but we’re burning through them on our Great College Tour of 2016. For anyone unfamiliar with it, you can also get a companion pass (where one designated companion gets to fly free with you for a year) if you can either spend $110,000 in a year or (a lot more achievable for most of us) some combination of bonus points like the 50k signup bonus + spending. I try to spend every dollar with the card, from a coffee at Starbucks to major home improvements. So it definitely pays NOT to sign up until they have the 50k point bonus (standard is 25k; they sometimes do 40k and I get the impression they do 50k for a few weeks a couple times a year), and to structure major expenses within a calendar year to maximize the benefit.

What a refreshing thread to read! Good luck to your daughter,@Hoppyness, and congratulations on all her successes. I can’t wait to hear where she chooses.

We’re almost to the finish line. Visited Ole Miss and Alabama last weekend. Kentucky the weekend before, and Ohio U. previously. Next weekend it’s UT Dallas, then decision time.

And … for anyone who remembers this thread (I’m a dad who really didn’t do his homework and belatedly realized my D was eligible for much better scholarships than I anticipated), the decision was made a few nights ago … Ole Miss it is! It was an excruciating decision for her between Ohio U. and Mississippi. She would have been comfortable at any of the five finalists we visited (Kentucky, UT Dallas and Alabama were the others).

It was a razor-thin choice. We met Monday night to get her decision and she told us Ohio. Then, as I was about to start entering credit card numbers, she told me she wanted to sleep on it. By morning it was Ole Miss. We waited a couple more days to be sure, and her resolve grew during that time.

Ohio and Ole Miss both have top notch Honors Colleges. Ohio’s is a little more exclusive and definitely unique. The scholarship is a little better at Ole Miss (full tuition + about $3,000 a year vs. full tuition - $3,000) but we stressed to her that they’re both affordable to us and to not to let that influence her. They both have beautiful campuses in fun college towns. The students and faculty we met at both places are fabulous. We found a real sense of caring and community both places that you just can’t fake.

The difference that finally swung her is that she would have had to keep a 3.5 GPA to stay in the Honors Tutorial College at Ohio, which is necessary to keep a good portion of her scholarship. Ole Miss requires a 3.0 to keep her scholarship, and it doesn’t require her to remain in the Honors College. One of the other parents on one of the campus tours we took at Ohio asked the student guide a fantastic question. “If there’s one thing you could change, what would it be?” The student said, “I wish we didn’t have to keep a 3.5 to stay in the HTC. It’s really stressful. If they’d just make it a 3.3 or something, we’d have a little margin for error.”

Although she’s super confident (as are we) that she could do better than a 3.5, and I’m sure she will, I think she ultimately decided that she’d enjoy these years more without the burden of that stress. She knows it’s a double-edged sword. High standards lead to higher achievement, but she’s done a great job of supplying her own initiative so far, and I have no doubt she’ll continue to. So there it is. Ole Miss.

Thanks again to one and all who helped me get up to speed quickly and find her some great options. There is a fantastic community here on College Confidential. I hope I can be of help to someone sometime along the way.

I think that GPA difference to keep the scholarship would be a deciding factor. Good call and congratulations.

@Hoppyness Great thread. Just stumbled onto it this morning. Enjoyed all of it. My S will be in the same boat this fall, looking at almost the same schools. We’re in NY, so our comparables will be SUNY schools. I think the point that resonated the most was maintaining a high GPA to keep honors and scholarships. I don’t think enough people really think this through the way you did. My S will be studying engineering so it is especially true. Congrats and best of luck to her!

You’re a great dad, @Hoppyness. Good on you, welcome to the SEC, and Hot Toddy!

Way to go @Hoppyness and D! Good call on the GPA threshold.