Are there any schools that have full ride or near full ride in mountainous areas?
Thanks!
We live in Colorado and DS19 is a NMSF, so we’ve looked pretty closely at CU Boulder, CSU, Colorado School of Mines, DU, and Colorado College. To my recollection, of these, only Colorado College had any NM scholarship at all and it was like $2,000-ish.
As far as the public schools go, Colorado does a pretty poor job at adequately funding higher education. I know a lot of local kids are looking out of state for merit aid–national merit or otherwise.
If you are only looking for being close to mountains, what about Idaho? We looked at University of Idaho and they have a big national merit scholarship–full ride or almost full ride I think.
Actually University of New Mexico has a full ride and Albuquerque is right next to a mountain - Sandia with skiing. Also. further north is Santa Fe and Taos.
Idaho could work. Thanks! I just put Colorado/Utah because I know them somewhat. My son is pretty interested in Colorado College.
The University of Utah has 30 full ride Eccles scholarships per year (see https://honors.utah.edu/admissions/eccles-distinguished-scholarship/) plus additional Presidential (full tuition plus) and Academic Excellence (full tuition) scholarships (see https://financialaid.utah.edu/types-of-aid/scholarships/freshman/#list). The Honors College is great, with amazing apartment style dorms, and very interesting small classes. And it has the best skiing in the country ~30 mins away. My D18 is loving it so far.
None of these scholarships are exclusive to NMFs, the merit scholarships are selected based on GPA and SAT/ACT scores, while Eccles has a separate application and interview process after you are admitted in Jan (a few hundred apply then they interview 60). The stats needed for full OOS tuition are likely to be around 4.0UW and 35-36 ACT, for Eccles they appear to be more holistic in constructing the cohort with a variety of majors, backgrounds etc.
Check out Colorado State University-
https://financialaid.colostate.edu/scholarships-for-entering-non-resident-freshman/
I will look at CSU. I see that it has a relatively large scholarship, but that is available to students with considerably lesser stats. It is just hard to choose CSU or really any CO school when other schools offer a lot more. My son may just have to live with going to a great school more local (TU or UTD).
Thanks!
@liecdre UTD’s NM package is really great. It’s really a full ride depending on which meal plan you pick and later housing options. Use their semester abroad perk to go to some place with mountains, Swiss Alps maybe???
@3scoutsmom You don’t have to convince me. My son’s the problem 
@liecdre have him do the math and make some campus visits.
@3scoutsmom I’m working on it. We have the visits planned and I have the math ready. I asked him, if I would give you $20-25k per year to stay in Tulsa or Dallas instead of live in CO for 9 months, would you? Education the same or better in Tulsa and Dallas. The more I go through this process and the more I see these people searching for the “perfect” school and making huge trips to do it, the more I think what a waste. Unless you know exactly what you want to do, where you go to undergrad just isn’t as important as people make it out to be. You’ll still get your degree, you’ll still make friends, you’ll still get the “college experience” (whatever the heck that is). TU and/or UTD are great schools that will provide the education and “prestige” he will need (assuming he seeks out opportunities) to get into almost any grad school he wants. Anyway, why start life out in debt? As always, @3scoutsmom, thank you for your help.
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@GTAustin, somehow I missed your post. UNM seems like a great compromise school that’s not too too far away (9 hours), but near mountains and…most importantly…mostly free. Thanks!