Our son is a junior and scored a 35 on the recent ACT test. His GPA is 4.57.
Are there any (safety ?)Colleges that give out merit scholarships based on ACT scores and GPA, etc?
He will have 8 years of foreign language on his transcripts. And he will be taking German this summer at Harvard summer school. Any suggestions would be appreciated.
I remember your previous thread. I remember that you’d like as much merit as possible.
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mom2collegekids - It is highly unlikely that we will get any need based aid. We are hopeful that our son will get offered merit based scholarships. We want him to feel like he is contributing towards his education without him having to get a job. Our older son received a full tuition scholarship at a private school (valued at approx. $200,000 before taxes) and an additional $4,000 per year for four years. And our younger son has almost the same stats.
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He doesn’t seem to care about the size of the school or the location. He has an interest in Duke, Notre Dame, Harvard, Princeton, and UCLA. All of which are extremely competitive. We understand that the Ivy league schools do not offer any merit based aid. With the exception of these schools he wants us to pick our preferences for him.
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Little to no merit at UCLA since you have no need. Trustee at UCLA is a tiny award w/o need.
ND almost has no merit.
Duke’s merit is highly competitive, and since it has super-stats students, an ACT 35 would maybe get him considered, but who knows if he’d get anything.
Looks like older son got Full Tuition at USC, but you don’t want S2 to go there. I would hope that he would at least apply since it sounds like your sons have a background that USC likes and may award your younger son as well.
There are two types of merit awards…those that are ASSURED for stats, and those that are competitive.
I would suggest having son apply to a couple of schools with ASSURED huge merit, and a few school with competitive merit.
mom2collegekids - That is what we would like for him to do too. Do you know of any schools with “assured huge merit” Now that he has a 35 we might change his college list some. He will also be taking German this summer at Harvard. So we are hoping that 8 years of foreign languages will help him too.
Besides those schools the offer automatic scholarships, this score and GPA may get your S merit aid at may schools not the list too although not automatically. You should pick a few low match schools that he likes but not on the automatic list and hope for the best.
What does he want to major in? What state are you in? What is his PSAT score? What was his English and Math score on the ACT, class rank?
mommdc - He thinks he wants to major in the Classics/Classical Civilization/Greek or Ancient History/Political Science. We are in California. He did not qualify for NM. His English score was 35, Math score of 36, Reading 33, and Science 36. He goes to a private school which does not rank.
The big one at UCLA is the Stamps scholarship (tuition and fees), but it is highly competitive (five California residents and five domestic non-residents per year).
I don’t know if he would be interested in the University of Pittsburgh, but I thought with his stats he might have a chance at a full tuition merit scholarship there. They look at E and M score of ACT or M and CR of SAT and superscore.
I asked about the PSAT because dome schools will give full rides to NMF.
https://www.oxy.edu/academics/course-catalog/classical-studies
Have you looked at Occidental in CA? I don’t know if they have merit scholarships.
I believe Occidental does.
Not guaranteed, but Holy Cross has some full scholarships for classics majors, I believe. If he did Latin and aced the National Latin Exams, there are also some small scholarships available through NJCL: http://www.njcl.org/pages/scholarships
I’d suggest he have a good talk with his Latin/Greek teacher(s) about college scholarships for classics students.
It has been several months since I have posted. We are narrowing down the College’s for our son to apply to to be considered for Merit Scholarship. They are: University of Miami, TCU, Villanova, and SMU. These College’s also have great honors/scholars programs.
How much merit do you want? Villanova is not great with merit.
Is your son applying to any schools that have assured merit for stats so that you’ll know for sure that he’ll get at least $XXXXXX amount for his stats?
What do you want his remaining costs to be?
We are hopeful that he will be offered somewhere between $10,000 - $20,000 a year.
Interesting choices with all the great schools you have in CA that you would list those. I guess kids always want to leave their own state? 
Our son is applying to five Universities here in California 
Update: Our son received his first merit scholarship offer at SMU. They are offering him $130,000 over four years. Still waiting to hear back from several more.
That’s great…as long as you can pay the high remaining costs for SMU…which I think will be about the same as his scholarship.