Hi, I decided a long time ago I wanted to go to a small liberal arts school but they are all extremely expensive. I most likely will not be eligible for financial aid, so I was wondering if there are any schools with tuitions that can be brought down to 25 thousand or less a year with merit aid.
Stats:
33 ACT
4.2 w gpa, 3.6 uw
strong music and leadership extra-curriculars
NHS and some volunteering
hopefully strong essays and letters of recommendation(:
The location doesn’t matter to me as much as it being a place that I have a chance at being accepted and getting merit aid!
Click-sort on the “non-need-based aid” columns to identify LACs that award relatively many merit scholarships, or large average amounts. You’ll need to focus on less selective schools to have a good shot at that much merit money.
Be sure to run the online net price calculators for any schools that interest you. Sometimes they do show merit grants (although the focus seems to be on need). Also search the individual schools’ sites for information about scholarship criteria.
For your stats, you might have a shot at better-than-average grants from Lawrence, Beloit, Hendrix, Wooster, Rhodes, Juniata, or Centre, You might have a chance at an ~average or below-average grant from Oberlin or Grinnell.
There are many schools that may yield a net COA of $25,000. You may need to look outside the northeast to the mid Atlantic, south, midwest and Pacific northwest: New College of Florida, Willamette, University of Puget Sound, Lawrence, Hendrix, Sewanee, Earlham, Rhodes
Run the net price calculators. Several will ask for GPA and test scores. These tend to include estimated merit aid in their results.
Getting merit awards entails applying to schools where very few applicants with 33 ACTs are seen and being very flexible about location, size, religious affiliation, and a whole host of other factors.
You most certainly would have a reasonable chance at a full ride or a very sizable award in the Honors College at Providence College, great school, great location and well known in the east especially but it is a Catholic school.
I would guess a 33 is the top 5% of all applicants.
With your ACT and gpa, you would qualify for a high academic scholarship at t Northwestern College in Iowa (http://www.nwciowa.edu/financial-aid/scholarships) plus you may be illegible for a music scholarship as well. It’s a small Christian liberal arts school–class sizes are small and professors/staff develop close relationships with students. I’ve had children attend and be within your $range after their academic and extra curricular scholarships were applied. Good luck!
In addition to the suggestions above, Trinity University in San Antonio and Southwestern University in Georgetown are LAC’s with a good shot at merit for students with stats like yours.
Rollins College in Winter Park, FL. I am an alum (my undergrad). I received several different merit aid scholarships from them that brought my tuition down to an affordable level (many moons ago). And the school is beautiful and an absolutely wonderful place to spend 4 years. I have fantastic friends that I have kept in touch with in the 23 years since graduation.
Rhodes College
There are also a number of small Catholic schools that would give you large merit. They don’t care what your religion is or even if you’re atheist.
My son had lower stats than yours and received generous merit awards from New College of FL (attending), Eckerd, Guilford, and Willamette. He received a modest award from Whitman, and Occidental met our family’s EFC. The automatic scholarship for out-of-state students at NCF brought the cost of attendance down to around $25k (comparable to our own state’s public colleges). You might get more generous scholarships from some of those colleges or receive additional need-based aid. I’ve heard that Goucher can be quite generous. If you want an urban environment, look at either Fordham-Lincoln Center or Eugene Lang/New School. They might not offer you enough, but there’s no harm in trying. Fordham has a free application. Neither of them will offer the traditional, leafy campus, however.Drew, in NJ, would be an academic safety for you (as would Eckerd, Guilford, and probably Willamette, with NCF a low-match). It is one of the most expensive colleges in the country, but I’ve heard they can be very generous with merit aid.
In the Southern LACs thread on CC there is a lengthy discussion of people’s merit aid experiences in the past year. Several of the colleges mentioned above are discussed in the thread, including Rollins, Eckerd, New College of FL, Rhodes, Hendrix & Centre. Many of these colleges are so good that if you relocated them to the northeast, they would be far more difficult to get into and merit aid would be much less.