In the end, no she did not. There were two big ones for $5000 each that I think she had an excellent shot at, one from the Society of Women Engineers and one from her Prep School. But unfortunately, they would not be awarded until after the decision deadline. Had their award dates been earlier, she would have applied for both, and had she won both it very well could have affected her college choice. But given her full ride, it didn’t seem right to apply for any outside scholarships, even though I believe they would have stacked with her existing merit aid at UofSC.
No, she looked very hard at UVA, but from their essay prompts and application questions, it seemed like they valued community service far more than anything else, and she didn’t have much in that area. Plus she did some simple math on the number of nominees vs. the number that were actually awarded the scholarship, and the odds were very low.
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Regarding the tax implications - to be honest, trying to figure that all out right now would make my head explode. I know the taxable amount won’t be insignificant, so we plan on setting aside at least half of her excess scholarship amount, and I realize that might not even be enough.
I have done my own taxes every singe year except once - the year we bought our house. Next year will be the second exception - I will definitely have a professional look at all of the tax implications and figure out the best course of action. I will certainly mention to them the advice given above so that they can take it under consideration!
Hopefully I’ll even come back to CC in 10 months or so and let folks know the final results!
Good morning, and Happy Mothers Day, to all! I just started reading this forum this week, because I have a daughter who will graduate HS in 2021. So I’m about a year behind the OP. I’m only through 11 of the 79 pages, and so far I’m very impressed with the amount of knowledge everyone is sharing.
I’m also very interested to hear what school the OP’s daughter chose - KevinFromOC, can you tell me around what date (or message #) I should look for to see your post(s) that describe the conclusion(s) to your process? I sincerely hope that she is able to attend a school that she is very excited about!
My daughter has somewhat similar stats - probably slightly below yours, but we should benefit from Iowa’s NMSF cut-off being lower than Cali’s. Investigating available scholarships even for semifinalists I now see why that particular avenue was disappointing to barely miss.
Also, I do hope that your family is healthy and that your daughter has had as nice of conclusion/celebration of her senior as possible in these strange times. I feel for the seniors of our family’s friends, and hope they can have a relatively normal college freshman experience.
Thanks,
B
I also have a follow-up question to the entire group. Thanks to your advice I started looking up information about automatic merit scholarships based on ACT score and National Merit Scholar status, and I just wanted to check that my understanding of these is accurate. I know each school’s is different, and we’ll carefully read each college’s scholarship rules, but just as an example I’ll you all about the U of Mississippi, which was mentioned early in this thread. Am I reading their information correct, that (assuming Covid-19 financial implications don’t lead to changes) an OOS freshman with a 34 ACT automatically earns a full-tuition scholarship (without having to go through a competitive process)? And that a National Merit Semifinalist automatically gets their room paid for on top of that? Her NMSQT index is 219, so I’m optimistic she’ll at least be a semifinalist her in Iowa. It also appears that Washington State offers 4 years for full tuition for OOS semifinalists? Similar to KevinFromOC, we’re starting the process of searching for the best automatic scholarships for our daughter to have in our backpocket - we need her to narrow down her list of dream/reach schools a little bit before investigating their available competitive merit aid. Thanks in advance, everyone!
Welcome to CC. I’m sure you will find a lot of helpful suggestions here…things for you to then research for yourself, as Kevin did.
Kevin’s daughter chose the full ride McNair Scholarship at University of South Carolina.
Please please…start your own thread with your own questions. As you have noticed, this thread is many pages long already. Also, highjacking other folks’ threads can be a problem because those responding get don’t know who to respond to.
You are more likely to get answers to your specific questions in your own thread.
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Welcome @ClassOf21inIowa
It’s best to start your own thread to ask your question, rather than take over this user’s thread…use the orange rectangle that says ‘ask your question now’ in the upper right of this (and other) pages.
Edited to add: Join the conversation on this thread as well! http://talk.qa.collegeconfidential.com/class-20xx-community/1954065-parents-of-the-hs-class-of-2021.html#latest
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Hi, again. I apologize - I didn’t mean to take over Kevin’s thread. Thanks for the update, Thumper, on how his search panned out 
Since this thread is where I heard about the Mississippi scholarships, I thought it was an appropriate place to ask. I will definitely start my own thread with some questions we have that are unrelated to Kevin’s experience. Again, thanks to everyone that contributed to Kevin’s discussion - even, as an outsider, starting to read it 8 months after he started it proved quite insightful.
I think that we will be in a very similar situation in two years with my daughter. Is there a way to bookmark this thread so I can read from the beginning? OP, thank you so much for providing updates along the way.
Scroll up to the top of the page and click ont he little bookmark symbol to the right of the thread title.
There are a couple of threads that might be helpful to the newcomers. Search for NMF scholarships, and several schools will show up with full or hefty scholarships (Benacquisto for Florida schools; Alabama; New Mexico; U of Texas-Dallas; Alabama Huntsville)
They do come and go, so after you get the info make sure you check that it is current.
@KevinFromOC
Congrats to your D! I skimmed through your post and it sounds similar to what we pursued and the choice my D made. However, she did not apply to many schools since she got a quick admission and full tuition offer from University of Pittsburgh early on, which ended up being her second choice. . I read some general stuff about Michigan State and she decided to apply there as well. She received the University Distinguished Scholarship (full ride++) and decided to accept that since it was a little closer to home , she liked that it was a Big Ten school with all the activities, and she liked the Honors Program.
Anyway- regarding taxes, I will give you general info on what to expect for the full ride. First of all, I think it is a huge pain in the *** to figure out whose tax returns to put which benefits. Tax days were very tense in our home. Of note is that the first year of college that you and she file will have a slightly different way and the next three years will be the same. You can still use the American Opportunity Tax Credit if she gets a new computer or takes a summer class. We took advantage of that for computers first and last year and summer courses the second and third year. She took a senior level research course before her sophomore year so that she could get a good research position at the university. The following year she took an online class for her minor.
As an FYI, I can tell you we usually use our tax refund to pay her tax bill. Federal taxes for her scholarship and research job (approx. $3-$6K per year) average about $1,500 . Unfortunately she has to pay city, county, state taxes in two states and that total comes to approx. $2,000/ year. So, we tried to keep our tax refund at least at $3500 to pay her tax bill.
Your daughter will most likely have a great time at U of SC with her full ride scholarship. It is nice for both you and her when you don’t have to worry about expenses. My d was able to do two study abroads and she went on some nice vacations with her college friends. After her freshman year, she won additional departmental scholarships, research grants, and even a scholarship from her sorority. She will graduate this Saturday with a 4.0 GPA. On top of all the stuff that was covered with her scholarship, the university even gave her a $1K Trustee Award for graduating with a 4.0. She never did apply for any Ivy League colleges- said she was not interested in the atmosphere, yet she had a fabulous undergrad experience which I think she will treasure all of her life.
So happy to hear that your daughter also has this opportunity :).
If benefits in this context includes taxable scholarships, that’s easy – taxable scholarships are always reported on the student’s return. If either the student or a parent can claim the AOTC, just run it both ways and see which presents the most favorable outcome.
Strictly speaking, a computer is only an AOTC qualified expense if a student is “required” to have one. Yes, I understand that these days pretty much every college student will have a computer that is used at least in part for school work. Some schools in general or professors for certain courses in particular will formally require a student to have a computer (maybe even a specific model or software suite), but if there’s no formal requirement, the IRS can always make a stink about it.
This is such a good point that gets lost sometimes in the race for prestige. For people who need merit to make the numbers work, the economic freedom and the ability to have experiences outside of school that you wouldn’t be able to afford at a more expensive (and likely more prestigious) college are huge. So many kids are making a stretch for a prestigious college when they really can’t afford to be full pay (even though the FA says they can) when they can a have a great experience elsewhere.
Computer is required for U of SC students- https://www.sc.edu/study/colleges_schools/cic/library_and_information_science/distributed_learning/technology_requirements.php.
We purchased a Macbook freshman year and then an IPAD Pro with the keyboard and pen her senior year (pen came in handy for taking notes/ drawing scientific pics and for med school in the future).
@KevinFromOC . I was trying to figure out an estimate of taxes owed due to D getting a research grant that had no taxes withheld so that we can make some tax payments to avoid the penalty. I got some really detailed info on Kiddie tax and full ride scholarships from parents on this thread- http://talk.qa.collegeconfidential.com/discussion/comment/22277298#Comment_22277298.
Of note is that a new tax law was passed (2018?) and this affected the tax rate, but not how to fill out the forms. So, the detailed info at the end of this thread is still good. The rate was increased from paying at the parent’s rate for student’s earnings over a certain amount to the higher Kiddie Tax Rate (of approx. 24%). The higher tax rate was then nullified retroactively effective January 1st of this year and now it gets paid at the parent’s rate again, which results in a reduction of what is owed for most ppl.
@BelknapPoint:
Whoa. We have never used the AOTC as a qualified expense (your points on a strict read for qualification being so noted.) Yikes.
@KevinFromOC : My kid got slammed this year for a mix of reasons, including receiving income wages which were not paid out as wages, but attached on the end-of-year statement regarding institutional grants and scholarships.
Will definitely sit and go through that thread.
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@KevinFromOC said he could afford $10,000 per year for his kid to attend college (actually he said $15,000 but it would be a stretch).
The scholarships she received from U of SC gives her a surplus of $8000 a year. Add that to his $10,000 and you have $18,000.
Yes, they will have to pay for books and personal expenses, but those aren’t going to cost $18,000 a year.
It seems to me, he will have enough to pay the taxes…which will be far less than paying the college bills would be without the excellent scholarships.
So I thought I’d make a post on the lessons we learned by going through this process to hopefully help future students in a similar situation.
Looks like this will have to be a 2 part post because of it’s length…
To summarize our goal :
I felt that my daughter’s credentials were strong enough to have a very good chance to get her into just about any school, such as MIT, Stanford, Cal Tech, Ivies, etc. However, given our income (around $160K), I realized that financial aid from any school would be woefully inadequate and would put our COA at over $30K per year, which to us puts them out of our price range. Therefore, instead of taking the financial aid route, we went all in on looking for significant merit aid instead.
I’d like to think her credentials put her well within the top 1% of all college bound students, possibly as high as the top 0.1%. Now certainly there are crazy high stats kids out there who would blow her credentials out of the water. Assuming there’s several million students applying to college every year, even if she is in the top 0.1% that means that there are still thousands of students above her. But even so, I felt she definitely had a great shot at significant merit aid.
First, I’d like to point out a couple of earlier posts that lead into this one :
1468 - the top 10 misconceptions I had 18 months ago about the college application process
1526 - A summary of all the schools my daughter applied to, complete with financial and merit aid awards
Next, I’ll quickly summarize my daughter’s stats :
Grades & Test Scores :
- Never got a grade lower than an A in her life
- Took primarily all honors, AP, and post-AP classes in high school
- Finished her freshman year at our local public high school, and ranked first out of 580 students
- Went to a New England Prep boarding school for grades 10-12. This school does not rank students, but I’m confident she would rank first, second, or at worst third out of 134 seniors, and if you don’t count international students would rank first.
- Accelerated Math - scored a perfect 5 on the Calculus BC test taken as a 15 year old sophomore.
- Scored a 5 on the AP Chemistry and English Lit tests
- Scored a 35 as a junior the only time she took the ACT, and got a perfect 800 on the Math II and Chemistry AP Subject Tests
- Scored a 1490/1520 (Perfect 760 Math, 730 RW) on the PSAT, for a selection index of 222. Unfortunately, the cutoff for Massachusetts was 223 (the highest in the nation), so she just missed out on a NMF.
Extracurriculars :
- One huge extracurricular that I think made her stand out - she has played ice hockey at the highest level possible for 7 years, and has played for 13 total years. She dedicated an average of 15-20 hours per week for this from September thru March.
- She was also involved in peer tutoring at her school, through which she helped several other students improve their grades
- Involved in a girls in STEM club at school
- A few one time volunteer opportunities
And the kicker which I believe helped greatly is that she is 50% Hispanic, and the number of female Hispanic students with those credentials looking to major in a STEM field are extremely rare. This also got her the NHRP (National Hispanic Recognition Program) award which for most schools is the same as NMF.
So anyway, the next post is a summary in no particular order of what we learned about this process and what worked for us. And it goes without saying (but I’m saying it anyway) that your mileage may vary.
[Continued from post above…]
(1) The recommended advice for most students is to apply to about 6-8 schools, and surely no more than 10. Well don’t call me Shirley (Airplane!, anyone?) - we applied to 23. This rubbed against the grain of much of the advice here on CC. Knowing what I do now, would I still have had my daughter apply to this many schools? Absolutely, positively, without a doubt, YES! Had she only applied to 8 schools, she would not have applied to South Carolina or Rose Hulman, the two schools that gave her a full ride.
So yes, apply to a ton of schools - as many as practical. Here’s how I look at it : Suppose you could buy lottery tickets for $100 each. Each lottery ticket gave you between a 2% and 10% chance of being a winning ticket, and a winning ticket was worth anywhere from $50K to $200K. Even with the caveats that each lottery ticket is a couple days worth of work and that you could only cash in exactly one winning lottery ticket, given those odds I would still buy as many tickets as I could.
But choose wisely. For example, there are many public schools that offer automatic scholarships. Definitely apply to a few, but you don’t need to apply to all. For us, schools like Alabama, ASU, Utah, Kentucky, Florida State schools, Nebraska, and several others all offered essentially full tuition or pretty darn close based on her stats. We choose several from this pot to apply to (probably too many), but we obviously didn’t apply to them all.
(2) Be open to just about any school anywhere in the country. Don’t have your heart set on any one school, and don’t fall in love with any one school. Be open to schools that are rural, urban, hot weather, freezing cold weather, close to home, far from home, etc. Make your “fit” as wide as possible.
In our case, we only excluded 2 schools from where my daughter would apply :
(1) Any school in New York City - I took my daughter to NYC for a couple days and she absolutely hated it.
(2) UC Berkeley - It’s a great engineering school here in California, but the political drama and shenanigans that go on there would be absolutely intolerable to either of us.
Any other school was fair game.
(3) If applying to a ton of schools, visiting them all (or even most) before applying is impossible. We didn’t visit the vast majority of schools she applied to - our plan was to wait until she got the awards before visiting them. This will eliminate a bunch of schools - no need to visit a school if it is unaffordable. And some schools that offer the big full ride scholarship competitions will have you come to campus for 2-3 days - there can be no better visit than that!
(4) Realize that more “prestigious” a school is, the smaller the chance is that they will give out a significant merit award. Know full well that you will probably have to turn down acceptances to T20 schools and instead attend a T150 school. In our case, my daughter turned down Princeton, Johns Hopkins, Vanderbilt, USC, UCLA, and Northeastern to attend South Carolina. That was initially difficult for me as the parent to accept, but I realize by looking at the entire picture that it was the best choice.
(5) Read up on schools’ websites about merit aid. Some schools make it clear how many awards there are and what the amount of each award is. Many do not.
For example, ASU and Kentucky make it pretty clear what automatic merit awards will be awarded for certain grades, test scores, and/or NMF/NHRP. South Carolina and Miami clearly stated what their big full ride merit award competitions entail.
But on the other hand, many schools are very vague. For example my daughter was awarded a full tuition scholarship to Rose Hulman, and then competed for and won a full room & board scholarship as well, giving her a full ride. But nowhere on their website were these scholarships even listed, nor did RHIT even say that they even had full tuition or full ride scholarships available. Thus, for those where it isn’t clear, you’ll have to investigate further or just roll the dice. A great resource is here on CC - asking questions and searching previous threads.
(6) Look at the number of essays and the prompts required to apply to each school. Figure out how much work will be involved in applying. We applied to some schools only because it was “easy”, such as no additional essays required other than the common app essay, or because some school essay prompts were very similar to other schools, and essays could be reused with very little modifications. On the other hand, there were some schools that we wanted to apply to they but had several essays with unique prompts. We wanted to apply to Kentucky, which in our case had the best automatic merit aid, but the essay prompts were like nothing she had done for any other schools, so because of time constraints we had to eliminate Kentucky.
In effect you have to come up with a “degree of difficulty” for each school’s application. Eliminate schools that are low on the list that have a high degree of difficulty.
ARGH! Looks like it’s gonna have to extend to a 3rd post…
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