@cptofthehouse - there are actually more full tuition and now also full ride scholarships at Tulane than there were several years ago when my (and I think your) son applied. Yes its competitive. That said, this student sounds like a strong candidate.
While much reading on this forum would suggest that Ohio, MN, and IL are the only Midwestern states that have schools worth considering, this is not the case. South Dakota School of Mines and Technology has a full sticker price for out of state students of 25K and change. Her ACT would make her eligible for the presidential scholarship of 11K a year, and "SD Mines commits to awarding scholarship funds to as many students as possible. " You could conceivably come in under budget. The school is in Rapid City, the heart of the black hills, so there’s plenty to do, and who knows, maybe she’ll take up motorcycles due to her proximity to Sturgis. No Hockey. I think you can find options within your price point. FWIW, have you run a FAFSA forecaster? I think you may be low balling the EFC a bit. Most of see numbers in the 30% of our gross income range.
@jym626 , my son applied in 2014 for the 2015-16 year, and the word at his school was that Tulane was the place to apply for merit scholarships. A lot of his classmates who applied did get nice merit money. None got the full ride and I believe he got the biggest award with the half ride. I’ve heard that since then, T has cut back. They don’t have to offer as much as their last year acceptance rate was a low 13% ! Their generous merit program apparently worked !
Great school, and was my son’s second choice after his ED school.
Just as a heads up to the advice about application burn out, my kid felt like he was done after applying to all of his early schools. All the grand plans of applying to other schools if his ED choice didn’t pan out, went out the window. He was really dragging, filling out the App for Tulane full ride scholarship and other outside awards. (He ended up getting not a single one of those outside scholarships, though got some honorable mentions in them-certificates, no scholarship money !)
@cptofthehouse - I am very familiar with Tulane’s scholarships, and have seen and kept a very close eye on the changes, and things they have tried since the old Dean of Enrollment Management retired. Its more complex than what your s’s classmates may have experienced, but thats a discussion for another thread- not to hijack this one.
Have not read entire thread but here are my comments. Look at Marquette. Not sure they have ChemE but they do have a good engineering program. She will have to go back and get a masters anyway. Apply early for best scholarship money. My D attends Scripps which is part of the Claremont consortium (including Harvey Mudd). I think you can major in something another school offers in the consortium even if you do not attend that school. My D has taken classes at every school except Mudd. Take a look at that and possibly apply to Scripps. No ice hockey out there, but very few “Mudders” play sports anyway, they don’t have time. My D plays basketball and was a recruited athlete for Scripps. I fully expected her to get merit money, but she did not, but your D’s stats are better than my D’s were. Good luck. Oh, take a look at UMass and Umass Lowell.
Nope. It wouldn’t save us a dime for DS at the school he’s going to for engineering due to having to follow the sequence and being one price for 12-18 credits. It would lighten his load which has value, but we’d have to make sure he still kept enough to be full time each semester or he’d lose his scholarship.
AP credit that covers subject requirements may allow the student to have additional free electives in place of the subject requirements, even if it does not allow for early graduation. Free electives may include courses outside the major, additional in-major electives, and/or (at some colleges) the possibility of a coterminal master’s degree without needing more than 8 semesters.
For situations where AP credit covers important prerequisites to other courses, it would be a good idea to try the college’s old final exams for the courses that can be skipped to verify knowledge of the material by the college’s standards. E.g. if the student has a 5 on AP calculus BC that allows skipping the college’s calculus 1 and 2 courses, it would be a good idea for the student to try the old final exams for the college’s calculus 1 and 2 courses.
I’m not saying AP courses aren’t of value, just not necessarily a money saver.
@jym626 , I’m glad you have some info on Tulane’s scholarsgip situation and, yes, it can be pertinent here and in many threads. And for me too! It’s good to know what the scholarship situation is at the various schools. For instance, no more auto awards at Temple. So, it’s good to know that Tulane is a good source of substantial merit money. I haven’t looked at the Common Data Sets to see what the pattern of merit awards are, if more are being given and the amounts per students are high.
@cptofthehouse - my point is that going off on a side tangent into too much of a digressive, back-and-forth discussion about the specifics of any particular school’s scholarship/merit award strategies is taking the thread off topic and that’s not allowed. Better, IMO, to stay on topic than to have posts edited or deleted. So, best we not continue a back and forth discussion about any one particular schools’ scholarships.
Don’t forget to find out what GPA is required to keep merit scholarships at each university. Engineering is a tough major even for a great student such as your daughter.
Alabama has a 3.0 UA GPA requirement to retain its scholarships and has a generous probation period if a student comes in under 3.0 at any point.
Also worthy of note is that the published COA at Alabama is based on the most expensive accommodation and meal plan. If cheaper options are selected it should be possible to meet your budget.
https://scholarships.ua.edu/policies/
https://housing.sa.ua.edu/2019-2020-residence-hall-rates-per-semester/
University of Toledo has auto merit awards in addition to some competitive awards
http://www.utoledo.edu/admission/
Holy Cow Batman! I was hoping for maybe 4 or 5 informative responses, and after 1 day there’s 4 or 5 dozen! Thank you all for the extremely useful information. My head has officially exploded!
Some quick thoughts and comments after reading through the comments to date :
Hockey scholarships are out. That door has closed - she’s not going to get any money to play hockey anywhere. As far as playing hockey in college - absolutely NOT required. She’d like to continue playing, so if the college she attends has a club team, or even if she makes a D1 team as a walk on, then great. But the quality of the school’s engineering and total cost are way more important drivers than the hockey aspect.
Regarding limiting the number of schools to apply to : Well, with all this useful information, I’m now wanting to increase the number of schools to apply to! Based on advice in this thread, I count at least 15 more schools to research. From the comments, it sounds like we need to target schools that offer full tuition scholarships. But there’s probably at least 20 good schools that do that based on her stats. If her chances of winning a full ride to any one school are, say, 10%, then from a statistics standpoint that tells me we need to apply to at least 20 schools to have a high probability of one or two full tuition offers. If we only apply to 8 or 9 we run the risk of getting 0.
As far as total cost, I’m only factoring in COA, room & board, and books. Travel expenses are mitigated since my wife is a flight attendant and my daughter can fly standby for free.
Regarding her major - it will be some kind of engineering. If she had to pick today it would be chemical engineering. That may certainly change, and if she is awarded a full tuition scholarship at a school that doesn’t have chemical engineering, well then maybe she picks a different major…
Timing : Many schools have an early application of Nov 1 required for consideration for merit scholarships. She already has several essays written, and our plan is to apply to many/most schools sometime in October. We have to wait until she is officially notified of the NHRP, which occurs in September, before we can submit the applications.
Has anyone used this : https://www.mykidscollegechoice.com/full-scholarship-list/
It’s not free, but might bring to light some additional schools to research.
Someone mentioned the Stamps scholarship, and I have done a little research on that. Many top schools offer full tuition via a Stamps scholarship (USC, Notre Dame…) . Has anyone had any luck getting one?
Anyway, I now have lots to do this weekend…
Researching 15 more schools is a lot different than applying to them :).
Also, some of the scholarships mentioned here are guaranteed based on stats. Apply to at least one of those.
As an aside, COA includes room and board and usually books too. COA = Cost of Attendance.
OP, I agree you have lots of research to do. There might be a site where you can search for scholarships which match her stats, STEM interests and possibly URM status? Then map that back to cost. Makes me think, one can never start looking too early. This stuff takes time to compile.
Another question -
How much luck do folks have with contacting schools and asking them directly? If I e-mail them with her stats and ask about her chances of merit aid, will they give me a frank and honest answer, or will it just be the same generic response they give to everyone (which is whatever is stated on their website)?
She was asked to play hockey at Middlebury, and we tried to contact someone in the financial aid department there to see how much it might cost us. We have a couple of additional unique situations that may affect financial aid (don’t want to get into them here and further complicate things). It was like pulling teeth to get a hold of someone, and when we did they wouldn’t even give us the time of day. This caused us to decline Middlebury’s offer without even thinking about the “no engineering offered there” issue…
Well…unless I missed something, there were multiple suggestions of colleges to remove from your kid’s list as well.
Research…and then pick the best of the lot. Applying to MORE schools doesn’t increase anything except the stress it will bring keeping track of all the required submissions and getting them all done.
Colleges will often give a preread for need based aid to recruited athletes. If Middlebury offered her a spot, you should have asked for this. The school doesn’t give merit aid…only need based. With a family income of $200,000, your family contribution would have been well in excess of $15,000…in my opinion.
If you have extenuating circumstances that could give your kid additional need based aid, that is something you need to discuss with the colleges. Schools have a special circumstances consideration process. BUT keep in mind, if you get additional aid for freshman year, there is no guarantee this will continue for all four years. You need a financial plan that is realistic for all of undergrad school.
Be very careful with this trap. 1) the events are not independent. They have a fair amount of correlation. You may think that if she has a 2% chance of getting a scholarship, if you apply to 20 schools you have a 33% chance of not being shutout. If you apply to “only” 10 that decreases to 18%. The reality is that both are likely in the single digits due to correlation. Also, most would say that the more schools you add to the list, the lower your odds become because you can’t do as good of a job. If you half the odds from 2% to 1% by increase the volume from 10 to 20 applications, you end out in the same place (for independent events).
You want to increase the number of schools she applies to, but have you asked her how she is going to do all that work and maintain her high grades and all the other stuff? Are you aware of how many supplemental essays and short responses she will have to write? Multiple each app by at least 2, with a few exceptions. Are you aware that those essays and short responses have to be spot on, and that they exist so schools can determine fit, along with genuine interest? They are not going to give whopping big scholarships to just anyone. Submitting sub-par writing will not help her if she is burnt out after the first ten supplemental essays.
ETA: Think about this: They are going to offer scholarships to someone they think will actually attend. This is why the supplemental writing matters, and why showing interest and doing thorough research on the school matters. She will literally spend dozens of hours researching, never mind actually writing.
A few lessons learned from my twins’ search for merit scholarships:
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I had some good luck calling financial aid offices and very politely engaging them in conversation. You can learn a lot about whether merit scholarships stack on top of financial aid. Sometimes they treat inside University scholarships differently than outside scholarships. Honestly, my strategy was to keep the FA person chatting with me as long as possible. I was also careful to never have a “you’re crazy if you think I’m going to pay that much” attitude (even if I was thinking it!) I might say something like “my daughter is really interested in your school, and we are trying to figure out a way to make it work for her financially. Can you explain xyz to me?” I even learned some things I had never thought of before, like how being an RA (free housing) or moving off campus affects your financial aid. Or how our “special considerations” form (we had extensive medical expenses for that year) had been used, or not, in the FA calculation.
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As @Lindagaf said, colleges want to give scholarships to people that will take them. My DS who got the full COA scholarship at Ohio State emailed his interviewers and the director of the program on the ride home from his interview weekend. He said that the interview weekend activities had confirmed that Ohio State was his first choice and if given the scholarship he would definitely take it. I can’t be sure if that helped him at all, but he did get the scholarship! And he did take it!
My DD got into a top 10 school which does give some merit. She is an unhooked girl, but spent hours and hours on her “why this school” essay and the school’s other supplemental essays. After she was accepted (no merit $$ with her acceptance letter), she emailed her regional AO, saying that the school was her top choice and that her family was trying to figure out how to make it work financially. Was there anything else she could do to be considered for merit scholarships? Her AO emailed her back that he would “resubmit her file for merit consideration”. Lo and behold three weeks later she received a merit scholarship (not huge, but enough to squeak it down to our budget). Again I don’t know for sure, but letting them know they were her number one choice and that she would definitely attend if she could make it work financially might have had something to do with that merit scholarship (which luckily stacked on top of financial aid at that school).
These are the kinds of things it’s hard to do if you’re applying to 30 colleges and are completely overwhelmed with just keeping it all straight, writing essays and meeting deadlines. Many schools take into consideration an applicant’s “demonstrated interest”.