Which elite private colleges are most affordable for full pay applicants from two income upper middle class families(too rich for aid and too poor/too frugal to pay $75k+ per year), colleges with lower sticker price and/or merit scholarships.
Harvard, Yale, Stanford, MIT, Princeton, Duke, Rice, Vanderbilt, UChicago, Brown, UPenn, Caltech, Amherst, Williams, Pomona, Columbia, Cornell, Northwestern, Dartmouth, Johns Hopkins, George Washington, USC, CMU.
USC has merit scholarships. I think most of the others don’t but I’m not sure about all of them.
If you’re looking at top-20 universities, merit aid is either nonexistent for the most part or, at best, so highly competitive that planning an application around the chance of receiving it is ill-advised. State schools at that level, even with OOS tuition, tend to be slightly less expensive in terms of “sticker price” than their private school counterparts. And, schools like Vanderbilt, Emory, WUSTL do offer some scholarships, but it’s not something you can count on. When you start looking at schools in the 30-40 range of the USNews rankings, however, merit awards become more of a factor for the “average excellent” student (say 34-35ACT/3.8-3.9UWGPA/10-12APs/local leadership ECs). Even there, however, money is getting tighter. My daughter, who had average-excellent “stats”, received a very nice merit package from Rochester three years ago. From what I’ve seen in the most recent application cycle, however, I’m not sure she would have fared as well if she were applying in 2018 instead of 2015.
Yes, echoing what @EllieMom said - for families who don’t qualify for need-based aid and can’t pay what a full price private school costs, your best bets are either your top in-state schools or private schools that are not in the top 30 or so, and also the state schools that do give merit aid to OOS kids.
The Ivy schools do not give merit aid so I’m not sure how those schools in post #1 fit in.
I think the OP isn’t really aware of the merit landscape, so is asking about the whole pool of top schools, including Ivies. You need to go further down the selectivity list to reduce your cost. That is pretty much it in a nutshell.
@CupCakeMuffins - The full-pay family needs to define just exactly what it is willing to pay, and go from there. What one family thinks is affordable is going to be very different from what another family thinks is affordable. Some will put the cut-off at $70k which means that many places remain in play, and others will put the cut-off at $30k, $20k, or even lower. Each figure will pull up a different list. In my area, a fair number of full-pay families send their good-but-no-merit-money kids to the community colleges for two years, and then to an in-state public.
I like the College Navigator search engine which lets you search by maximum tuition and fees costs, and adjusts for state of residency. Make your own best guess about how much you are willing to pay for housing, meals, books, and other personal expenses, subtract that figure from the total you are willing to pay, and run the search based on your best estimate for maximum tuition and fees. https://nces.ed.gov/collegenavigator/ This will get you a list of places in your “lower sticker price” range. You can work through that list to decide which you think are good for your kid.
I’m not asking about cheapest or free ride options, just about where these colleges stand for families who are looking for most affordable elite colleges.
I know Ivies don’t offer merit but still wanting to creat a helpful list for families who’ll apply this year. Even among Ivies, it costs more at Columbia then at Princeton, not all Ivies cost exactly the same.
I know for sure that Duke, Rice, Vanderbilt and USC offer merit scholarships and probably UChicago, NU and CMU as well.
I hope posters who don’t have any useful input wouldn’t derail the thread with their personal biases against this demographic.
I don’t know what OP’s “upper middle income” is at, but even at $250K and a sizable asset you can get some FA grant from some Ivys, notably HYP. If over $300K then your best bet is to look at your in-state public as well as in-state private.
My post is about high acchiever kids whose families are not eligible for financial aid and not able to pay $80k every year for one kid but may agree to pay $40K or $50K so if a college’s sticker price is $60k and it may give $20k merit, they’ll only have to pay $40k vs a college where stick price is $75K and they get $0 in merit. Similarly, a $60k Ivy would be more affordable compared to a $70k ivy when you are scraping your savings account or applying for private loans.
@CupCakeMuffins I don’t understand what you mean in post #8. If you know IVYs offer zero merit, why are you asking about them? My experience is that all the top private colleges have a similar sticker price in the 65K range (actually even many low ranked private colleges have that sticker price).
“I know for sure that Duke, Rice, Vanderbilt and USC offer merit scholarships and probably UChicago, NU and CMU as well.”
What another poster was saying is that the chances for merit are really really low at these schools with the exception of USC. Perhaps the post should have called those out specifically in terms of cost and merit chances.
Have you run NPC on your desired top schools?
@suzyQ7 Please check my post #10.
@TiggerDad Not a family specific question. I’m hoping to creat a list for whole demographic so they can focus on applications for colleges on this list which may end up working out better than others, even if by $10k or $40k.
I think you are just asking for sticker price for the top 20 schools since I believe they don’t offer merit aid. It should be easy enough to create this list by googling the name of the college and “cost of attendance.”
Cupcake- the problem is that not every asset is going to be treated the same by every school. So a family on the “bubble” with a lot of home equity will have a different financial picture (at some of these schools) than a family who rents a home but has high retirement savings (generally not counted) and a lot of money saved in the kids name (which will absolutely be counted by everyone).
So although in general- Princeton is “more generous” than Brown, there really isn’t a good One Size Fits All answer. Except to run the NPC’s for your OWN particular financial situation.
And as far as merit goes, higher stats are typically better than lower stats- except if a college believes that there is zero chance that the kid will go there, in which case how generous the merit aid is is moot- kids who get rejected don’t get to see what they WOULD have gotten!
@gallentjill Yes and no as that list would be helpful but at least 7-8 of these colleges do offer merit or cost slightly less than others.
Forget the Ivies, zero merit. Some of these others might have some super-competitive merit. I suggest creating a tab in your college spreadsheet recording COA and possible merit. Go to the scholarship page at each of their websites and see what they have. (But don’t hold your breath.)
Note that George Washington is ranked in the 50s - that might be a good place to start to look at scholarships (COA 71k). From what I have seen, nearly all schools in the top 20 will cost in the neighborhood of 70k, perhaps a couple thousand more or less. (If two thousand makes the difference, honestly that doesn’t sound like an affordable plan to me.) Nothing is going to be 60k in the top 20.
Why not just go to each school’s website and look up tuition and fees?