Most affordable Ivy or Top 20 college for full pay families

@nw2this That’s a “brilliant” idea but i thought some statistics lover may enjoy helping out.

@evergreen5 You are wrong.

@blossom I know all that but as i mentioned my demographic is not eligible for any aid so keep that in mind.

If you already know the answer, I’m confused about why you started the thread. If you’ve researched and know which of these have merit and what the overall cost is for them, why not list that? If you have a specific cost limit and stats for your student, why not list them so specific suggestions can be made?

I have no bias against your demographic, usually reside in it myself — have had some years full pay at the most expensive college in the country, some years with some FA at the same college, and another kid who picked a school in a lower tier where she got nice merit and and excellent education.

Echoing @happymomof1 advice. Go to College Navigator site. You can easily search any college and see current tuition plus room/board/costs as well as see how they have raised prices over past few years.

Scroll down to see percentage of students who receive some kind of aid (I don’t think it specifies merit/need) based on income bracket.

It’s a “just the facts, Jack” site that I find very useful. https://nces.ed.gov/collegenavigator/

For the past two years on this site, I have been trying to understand this logic.

How is it hard to pay tuition at $300,000? I guess there may be some unique financial circumstances where special medical expenses or debt make full tuition hard to afford… or a sudden job loss not yet reflected in tax returns… or a large family with a lot of children… but don’t colleges’ financial aid offices consider these unusual situations?

We earn “only” roughly two-thirds of that income, and we have one child. It is not comfortable, but it is completely possible to pay full tuition/room/board for one child at our income. Doing so will not endanger my 4-bedroom home in a high property tax area, my Chevy Malibu or Subaru Forester, or my retirement savings. There is no way I would have told my child he needed to attend an in-state public for financial reasons. (If he had wanted to go to one for other reasons, we would have enjoyed the savings and given them to him in another form.) Saving for his education always has been our highest financial priority.

I just don’t get it. Are colleges so unreasonable in considering things like medical expenses or job loss or seven children that may make it harder to pay tuition than a high income like $300,000 suggests? Because absent an unusual factor like one of those, full tuition should be completely affordable at such a high income.

If you look at Section H2A of each school’s Common Data Set you can see the exact number of enrolled freshmen (and total undergrads) who do not qualify for financial aid yet received merit aid (excluding athletic based merit awards).

Here is the number of such freshmen at each of the top 11-30 US News ranked universities (based on most recent CDS I could find for each school).

Vanderbilt - 134
Notre Dame - 39
UVA -102
Wake Forest 59
UNC Chapel Hill - 86
Rice 110
Wash U -189
Emory - 55
Michigan -1200
Carnegie Mellon - 42
USC - 630
UCLA - 170
UC Berkeley - 348
Tufts - 12
NYU -193
Northwestern - 85
Hopkins - 16
Gtown - 0
Brown - 0
Cornell 0

OP, I know you’re looking for a helpful list, but what blossom (and others) are telling you is that such a list would be DIFFERENT FOR EVERY FAMILY. Elite schools generally cost about the same (obviously some may be a bit higher due to higher cost of living in the area) but many differ in how they assess parents’ financial standing. It’s sort of like taxes – the right offs vary based on what you do with the money you have.

I’m done with admissions, just thought it may help other kids like mine. If I won’t find a helpful volunteer, i’ll make one on a free day and post it.

It’s pretty easy to check sticker prices. They’re right there on the ranking page. Full tuition (not including room&board or other customary charges, which may add an additional $20K+) at private schools at that level of selectivity varies somewhat but not as much as you’d expect—it will be somewhere between $46K (Rice) and $57K (Columbia), with most in the low-to-mid $50s. Top LACs are in the same range. Highly ranked public schools, assuming OOS full-tuition, range between $34K (UNC) and $47K (UMich). I realize those ranges aren’t exactly narrow, but, if you check, I think you’ll find that cost variance is pretty low for the most part. And, if you think there’s any chance that you might qualify for financial aid, it would still be worth your time to run the NPC, because differences in calculations can affect families very differently, depending on income and assets.

If you truly want a substantial discount as a full-pay family, you need to search for merit. However, sticker price at slightly less competitive schools, such as those in the 30-50 range on the USNews, tends to be about the same as the top-20 or so. And, since merit is not automatic and reviewed holistically, it’s difficult to get a good estimate for that, as well. (Obviously, the big exceptions to this general “rule” would be the service academies.)

Lol… that seems like a good idea. Sorry we aren’t the “helpful volunteers” you are looking for. The Common Data Set is a great source of info. Remember that merit at state schools may be more focused for in-state students (but not always).

@cupugu Thank you for a helpful input. I’m not looking for state schools but its helpful to see that some of private elites do offer merit.

Be your own “helpful volunteer.” Finding the sticker cost of the schools you list is so easy it’s a no-brainer, and finding a school’s merit aid policy is almost as easy. You could have done all that in half the time this thread has been in existence.

I completely understand what you’re looking for here…if a family has a decent amount of cash, which schools still give money. The problem is, it differs for each school and you really can’t tell until the award arrives. It can be surprising sometimes, though, how much the schools give, especially if you have multiple students in college. I’ve known families making nearly $300,000/year who have still gotten money from elite schools (they’ve had multiple students in school, though). I think your best bet is to have your student apply to the number of schools that you decide on together with the understanding that the final decision will have to be based on the amount of aid that’s provided by the school. Also make certain that your student has a school on the list for which you’re willing to pay full price. I haven’t heard of families over the $300k/year threshold receiving any funds. Good luck!

Well, in fact the public elites (eg, Michigan, UCB) are a slightly cheaper, high quality alternatives to the schools you listed.

Elite private colleges have enough top students who are full pay to not need merit scholarships…enough that they can also subsidize financially needy students.

So you have to look for:
Colleges that want to attract top students through merit scholarships. These might still be top 50 colleges.
Colleges with a lower sticker price to begin with

I know every bit of information is available somewhere but there are always lists for almost every thing. If we go by some posters here, statistics grads would have a massive employment crisis.

Available and easily found somewhere. Come on, you’re only asking about 23 schools.

I think one of the issues is that while merit aid is crucial for many middle-class families who have high-achieving students, it can be difficult to figure out what to expect at schools, like CWRU and UR, where merit is used as an incentive to attract top candidates away from Ivies and “Ivy-equivalent” type schools.

At Rochester, for instance, merit aid ranges from $2K to $55K. But, like admissions at selective colleges, the merit award process is holistic rather than automatic. UR used to offer a qualitative estimator that provided average merit awards for five or six “scenarios”, but they discontinued that about five years ago. And, from what I’ve seen recently, students with very similar stats can wind up with very different merit packages.

However, in this case if Princeton gave a better package and Columbia was the first choice, you would ask for a financial review and include the offer from Princeton

@CupCakeMuffins, are you a NYS resident? That is the only way that you may see the difference in the cost to attend an Ivy. If you attend one of the land grant colleges at Cornell as a NYS resident, it will be less expensive than attending as an OOS.