A couple other options: Chatham University in Pittsburgh and College of Charleston.
Also Rollins College in Orlando, FL.
In terms of career path, she might consider Actuarial Science, not sure if that’s too math/business for your daughter. Good career & earnings prospects driven primarily by success on challenging professional exams (particularly early on in career).
@ucbalumnus: “However, Sarah Lawrence has rather limited academic offerings. Visual and performing arts, writing, literature, history, and psychology are its emphases. Other subjects are only minimally offered.”
True, plus enough for pre-health/pre-engineering fields.
op,
my hi stats , highly accomplished DS also thought that he wanted to go to a LAC on the east coast, and ended up at a mid sized U here in Calif,in part because that 's who offered him the BIG merit scholarship. And he loved it there.
I strongly suggest you eliminate the focus on potential career and LAC’s for 2 important reasons:
1- U’s have more $$ available for merit scholarships.
2- U’s offer a wider range of majors than small LAC’s.
Did she take the PSAT?
I don’t think you can quite get down to $20k debt-free, but New College of Florida might satisfy many of your criteria, and the cost for us, with automatic out-of-state scholarship, was around $25k (comparable to in-state cost for our public flagship).
Did I miss whether or not the OP stated that her daughter will be considered an international student? That will change the entire list of prospective schools as the merit scholarships in most cases are vastly different for international students.
You will need to apply widely, then select based on what’s affordable and meets her criteria. It’s going to mean a lot of work.
With a 38+IB and a 1450+SAT she can pretty much apply anywhere from an academic standpoint.
So, you can look into
- public LACs and Canadian LACs
- top or solid honors colleges at large universities that come with good scholarships (Usc Columbia, Temple, Miami Ohio, Ole Miss…)
- scholarship-driven: UTD McDermott, UHouston Honors, WKU, Ohio University, U Cincinnati, NCSU…
- take a chance on LACs that offer merit and hope they’ll be within your budget; many won’t include competitive scholarships in their net price so subtract their highest merit from their npc 's net price and cross out.
She can also look at Huntsman at Penn, they do offer merit scholarships for these admits even if officially Penn doesn’t have merit. 
See if your budget could get to 25k; with federal loans it’d open a lot more choices for her.
As for the ‘career’… Do you mean vocational like nursing or accounting? Or do you mean a collector major with good graduate school or job prospects?
Because in the US it varies a lot and it’s not straight forward. It can even be counter intuitive compared to other countries.
Music majors do very, very well at med school admission.
An art history major at Williams has access to incredible opportunities a business major from Youngstown university (or Ole Miss…) won’t have.
A sociology or psychology major with strong quantitative skills (CS, date science, statistics) from any university can write their own ticket because they’re quite rare.
Rare and useful (“critical”) foreign languages and cultural knowledge (politics, culture, issues…) about troubled zones would be in need.
Critical language flagships have excellent job placement.
Re #66
Student is a US citizen living outside of the US.
Another option is to apply to those state universities which are generous in offering resident status to students after a year’s attendance. UT Austin helps US students get classified as residents in time for sophomore year, dropping the tuition to under 10k.
I want to thank EVERYONE for their time and their answers.
To answer a few of the questions posed:
She is a US citizen and we have been told by many, many admissions departments (they visit her school frequently) that she would be treated as a US applicant with a unique background. So not an international student.
She is a very strong student in all subjects - so it has been difficult for her to figure out a “passion” or a career path or even a likely major. All things being equal, we would like her to pursue something that has a good ROI. She agrees with that priority.
I personally had no financial guidance before going to college. I am hoping to help her find a path that doesn’t leave her burdened with educational debt the way I was.
I have been successful in one goal -which was to move the emphasis away from prestige and towards quality education. That has been my mantra for two years and we are all on the same page that way.
She is coming out of a VERY small school (her class is 100 kids - largest class ever for the school). That is why she is leaning towards smaller colleges. Yet she is a “city girl” and hopes to have easy access to a large city.
Going to the US has been the college plan for a long time. We have looked at Canada (still a potential for her) and the UK as well.
I will be using this thread as a research jumping point for the next few weeks.
Thanks again!
@cvalle @purpletitan Just a head’s up: Pretty sure Waterloo (and McGill engineering) international tuitions have gone up quite a bit in the past few years (closer to 35k CAN per year for tuition only). 20k x 4 = 80k US = ~ 105 - 110 Can might just cover Waterloo non-engineering tuition, but you’d still need to figure R+B. McGill engineering is ~35k as well. McGill BA, Waterloo non-engineering are less, 30-40k CAN per year all-in including R+B depending on exact major/school.
Good news about McGill (and other Can U’s) is they tend to give you full credit for APs (and maybe top IB scores - dunno to be honest) and kick you out once you’ve got enough credits, so your kid might be able to get out in 3 years which would just about fit the budget. Also, as noted, McGill is still a bit of a John Houseman style school. Not for everyone.
UBC is way more chill - but no less expensive…
Dunno how common it is but an employee got exceptionally good merit aid from Elon, fwiw.
@roycroftmom - I found your comment interesting and surprising so I looked at their website. I don’t see how by just attending for one year a student could become in state at UT Austin. Am I missing something?
This is what is says about establishing residency:
Requirements
If you are independent for tax purposes, you may gain resident status if you establish domicile in the state. If your parent(s) claim you as a dependent on their federal income tax return, they must establish domicile in the state for you to claim residency.
To establish domicile, you or your parent(s) must meet the following criteria:
Live in Texas for 12 consecutive months; and
Establish and maintain domicile for 12 consecutive months, as evidenced by:
Gainful employment in Texas;
Note: Student jobs do not qualify as gainful employment.
Sole or joint marital ownership of residential real property in Texas by the person seeking to enroll or the dependent’s parent, having established and maintained a domicile at the residence;
Ownership and operation of a business in Texas; or
Marriage for one year to a person who has established domicile in Texas.
Meant to also add that, while R+B will bust your budget and while it is a quirky school that isn’t for everyone, Cooper Union tuition works out to 21k US. Again NYC living expenses will be a problem, but if you had any wiggle room or could manage outside scholarships, I know a few recent attendees who love(d) it.
Cooper Union also has limited academic offerings – mainly focused on engineering, art, and architecture, with other subjects mainly as supporting or breadth subjects.
I would give great consideration to location and size of the town/city/metro area. While your daughter might be in a school of 350 high school students, if she’s in a city that is a whole lot different than going to a college like Williams which is small, in a small town, far from a metro area or Grinnell. It is really hard to be a city kid and move to a town that has 2 movie screens and a handful of restaurants. Is she going to be able to visit the schools before making a final decision? My kids thought they’d like small schools in small towns, but when we actually arrived at those schools? No go. Too small and isolated.
You didn’t say where you live overseas, but I assume you and most of your family is still going to live there. If you are in Europe, then the New England schools will be closer. If you live in Asia, the west coast schools are going to be closer. It is brutal to extend a 13 hour Japan to SFO flight into a 20+ hour travel day to NYC (and then to some tiny town in Maine? yikes). There are some beautiful schools in California and Oregon. Some are Catholic schools, but that doesn’t mean they are liberal. They are service oriented.
As said above, sometimes something has to give and it may be that she should consider a bigger school, a Catholic school, a school on the west coast or in the south. Like you, the one thing that couldn’t give for us was the budget. Size of the school, public or private, location, women only or co-ed, and a lot of other things were flexible, but not the budget.
@twoinanddone We are in India.
She has seen many US colleges. Did a summer camp at Wellesley, visited GW, did the Amherst, Williams tour, has seen Columbia and Yale while traveling. Tried to expose her to a variety of types of campuses whenever we were in the area!
My dd who thought she wanted a small LAC but decided she wanted a large campus attended a school with a graduating class size of 1. A small high school does not necessarily translate to needing a small college. 
Based on your list in #76, if you truly don’t qualify for enough need-based aid to receive large institutional grants and your $20000 budget is not arbitrary but actually the realistic amt you can afford, your visiting of a variety of campuses lacks the very variety she is likely to be able to afford to attend. If you are seeking a list where she can get costs under $20000 that is similar to those schools, you aren’t going to be able to generate one that is truly realistic.
A tiny handful of schools like Duke and Boston U offer a very few large $$ scholarships, but statistically they are incredibly unlikely. BU offers something like 20. That is an unlikely award for for every applicant regardless of their unique strengths. Applying to a couple of schools that offer them is a good "reaching for the stars " type approach, but definitely not an application strategy. It takes dropping way down in selectivity to find schools that are even close to matches, let alone safeties.
Do you have US health insurance now or does your budget need to include it? You haven’t said and it could consume 1/10 of your budget. Or is there more flexibility to the budget so that it really doesn’t matter?
To put things in perspective, a 1490 barely squeaks in for Alabama’s presidential scholarship: “A student with a 33-36 ACT or 1490-1600 SAT score and at least a 3.5 GPA will be selected as a Presidential Scholar and will receive $100,000 over four years ($25,000 per year).” And that is no longer fui-tuition, but that is the type of school where your budget safeties are going to be found.
@Mom2aphysicsgeek - the schools she visited were a result of location - close to a grandparent (Yale), part of a vacation to NY (Columbia),or a trip (Williams, Amherst), my school (GW) My point was she has seen urband-rural, small-big, women’s-coed,etc. Given that it is impossible for us to do a quick trip to the US…she saw what we were easily able to show her. They were not intended to be in-depth pre-enrollment trips.
She will need health insurance, very good point.
There is some flexibility - it is not a hard-stop at that number but more like a genuine target.
Either double your tuition target or revise your school list completely.