Beloit, Lawrence and Ripon
For a student with less than rock star stats, I recommend Simpson College in Iowa. I particularly like them for first generation students. Slightly less than half of their students are first generation and they do a good job with mentoring. I know a student there right now and she is grabbing every opportunity she finds.
Flagler in St. Augustine, FL. Low tuition and merit aid.
Valparaiso university an hour outside Chicago.
@Parentof2014graduate. My kids applied to some of the same schools on your list, many of them from Colleges That Change Lives. We have also found that Trinity U, Centre, and Southwestern U all have COA below 55k and significant merit aid. We would also add Hendrix. In regard to COA, it seems many of the lower cost LACs have at least two characteristics in common:
1. They are located away from the coasts and outside the largest metropolitan areas.
2. They are more concerned with recruiting middle class students and to do so keep COA lower.
As a final update to 2017-2018:
Base cost of attendance(fees, tuition, room and board) were below $55,000 with over $20,000 of merit aid at Centre and Trinity University. Southwestern dropped off the list due to their unorganized admissions/aid office. Hendrix is now over $55,000 base cost of attendance.
What about University of Minnesota - Morris, Truman State, UNC - Asheville, New College of Florida, and SUNY - Geneseo? Even for out-of-state, their list prices may be attractive in comparison to some of the schools listed in this thread.
York College of PA, though maybe not quite LAC with nursing and engineering.
About $30K in direct costs, $33K COA.
It looks like automatic merit scholarships available for average students.
An example of what it takes to get $10K per year, their top non-competitive academic scholarship:
“Accepted applicants with an average SAT score of 1274 (Critical Reading and Math) or an average ACT score of 28 and an average gpa of 3.96”
For female applicants, all of the women’s colleges except for Wellesley offer merit aid.
College of Wooster and Denison University offered merit to my D that would have put COA at about $32-35K
Look for this list: Kiplinger’s Best College Values, which breaks out “need” from “merit” aid, and identifies the percentage of students earning that aid, in addition to average award amounts:
The data is listed as 2016; we were very pleasantly surprised that Connecticut College offered my son a $20K merit award for 2017-2018, even though they had not been awarding merit as recently as last year. Otherwise, we found the Kiplinger’s list both a useful and accurate guide
@Massmomm, actually Barnard is the other women’s college that doesn’t offer merit.