Background- Parents of rising junior hoping to get some hints as to how to move forward logically in the college search process. Name of school and reputation are not particularly important. I attended an Ivy League school and found that while the experience was great, the costs did not pencil out in the end. (Today I would only suggest the financial sacrifice involved for most students to attend an Ivy school if the student was 100% committed to entering finance or 100% committed to pursuing medical school. Of course some families can pay the costs without too much stress but I mean for families like ours.)
Student- Our son is, like many on this website, a “good” student. 4.0 unweighted, 1300 PSAT, many athletic experiences (perhaps too heavy in this area), 4s and 5s on AP classes, a bit light in community service but we have left that to him rather than setting up some experiences/internships through our own connections.
Finances- For most of my son’s life we lived on 1 teacher salary. Thus our “college savings” is quite meager compared to some families. Recently I moved into school administration and my wife returned to work so our new combined family income is roughly 140,000 per year, enough to exempt us from a lot of need based aid. (Yes, I know this story is pretty common on College Confidential).
Question- Given our current realities, and what we have learned from our own research, it seems like the 2 most common pathways are for our son to attend a local public university and hope for some merit awards, or to try and find a unique private school that would allow him to attend for a more reasonable cost. With our numbers crunching we can’t find a way to pay out of pocket more than 20k per year and from what we have read here, that eliminates an awful lot of options. (He has a sister coming 3 years behind him as well). So I’ve finally rambled into my 2 questions…
How does he work in the next 2 years to increase his chances of shrinking his in state university costs (which likely means merit awards)?
How do we begin to find those private schools that would offer an affordable option?
PS. We are on the west coast, Oregon, if that matters.
PPS. At this point he has expressed interest in statistics and perhaps actuarial sciences.
Thanks so much. This website is an amazing resource.
And review their financial aid websites regarding merit options. There are also some schools that offer good merit for OOS students (U Alabama among others). Look at the pinned threads in the Financial Aid forum.
Generally speaking, your most economical options are going to be instate. The most merit will come from schools where your son’s stats put him above the 75th percentile.
During the next two years, your son should concentrate on keeping a high GPA while engaging in the most rigorous courses which are of interest to him & to get a merit scholarship worthy SAT or ACT score.
Many state supported universities offer full tuition scholarships based on one’s GPA & standardized test scores.
Otherwise, teach him to throw a football really, really well.
First, make sure you set expectations with him. Make sure he knows what you can pay.
Second, I’d have him study HARD for and retake the SAT, or see if the ACT might be a better test for him. If he is getting 4s and 5s on AP exams then I think he should be able to bring that SAT score up by quite a bit. That’s going to matter a lot for merit aid.
Well, his grades are straight A’s, so keeping that up would be helpful. Honestly your biggest payoff would be test prep and lots of it. Many many students are able to notch up their scores significantly by lots of practice tests and examining errors. An excellent one-to-one tutor is probably most effective, partially by setting up expectations for practice. I am not great at getting my D to do “extra” work on top of sports, music, school work, etc. But she would not want to show up to tutoring session unprepared, so she would do the work. She gained five points and that really made a difference financially (single parent teacher here!). Also applying to a bunch of different types of schools helped–surprising the difference in offers from seemingly similar schools.
Do you expect he’ll be a strong enough potential D3 athlete to enhance his merit aid potential at D3 schools?
I loathe telling people to focus on test prep, but with a 1300 PSAT he has the potential to do very well on the SAT/ACT, and the better he can do, the more merit $ he can attract. His GPA is already maxed out so test scores could really help bring desirable schools into reach. The National Merit threshold in Oregon is pretty high - probably around a 1450 11th grade PSAT score would be needed - but it would add a bit more merit at a lot of schools.
Some out-of-state options:
Check out some of the more affordable WUE schools that offer merit in addition to the WUE discount. http://wue.wiche.edu/search1.jsp
For example, he’s well on track to get $8K+ in merit from U of Utah, plus the $14K WUE discount, which would put the total COA comfortably under $20K. (And they allow you to establish residency after year one, which would drop the costs another $4K/year.) The Honors College there is excellent. https://www.math.utah.edu/undergrad/major.php
Other bargains within the WUE program include the Nevada, New Mexico, Montana, Idaho, N. Dakota and Wyoming flagships. I know kids from states with expensive public flagships (CA and CO) who have gone to Montana and absolutely loved it. (Though to be fair they weren’t specifically looking for a hotbed of the financial industry.)
Depending on test scores, he could also be looking at big automatic merit at some non-WUE flagships like Alabama, Ole Miss, & Kentucky… and Michigan State and U of South Carolina have some big merit awards too.
U of Minnesota Morris is a highly reputable public LAC with an OOS sticker price in the mid-20’s before any merit $, and they have D3 sports. https://academics.morris.umn.edu/statistics
Since you don’t have to apply the very limiting “must have engineering” filter, he should also have lots of options among private colleges with good merit; he’ll just have to choose schools where he’s sufficiently overqualified to get substantial merit grants. (Again, sports could help with this.) The challenge is getting all the way down to $20K out-of-pocket on merit - he will basically need full tuition scholarships for this to happen, and many schools max out merit aid at less than that. The CTCL schools are a good place to start looking. https://ctcl.org/category/college-profiles/
Good luck - it’s good that you’re ahead of the curve on the planning!
Thanks all for the thoughtful responses and keep them coming. His athletic ability is good for high school but I don’t consider him a college athlete, at least based on my experience. Info about WUE is new to us so thanks to aquapt for that tip.
Take Macalester College as an example (which isn’t one of the richest or most selective “full need” schools).
Assume $140K income, $140K home equity, $70K cash savings, 2 children (1 in college next year.)
According to the online Net Price Calculator, you’d qualify for almost $31K in grant aid. The net price would be $35,777. That is without applying “self help” (student loans or student earnings.)
For Bates College, using the same assumptions, the estimated net price would be $29,173. Again, that is without applying “self help”. For Haverford, I get $29,983.
After factoring in self help, or if your asset mix etc. is a little more in your favor, you may be close to your $20K target.
An in-state public university(or a WUE school) still might turn out to be a better cost/quality trade-off, but I do think other options are worth exploring.
Just to be clear on WUE, you can’t claim the WUE discount and then use that time to qualify for residency. Not an issue in most states but for Utah (where residency is easy to get for the second year if the student moves there by July 1 before freshman year) it is one or the other. They discourage use of WUE (and limit the number of WUE grants based on GPA/test scores) and prefer OOS students to go for residency instead. The merit aid aligns with this objective by offering generous discounts to some OOS students for the first year only, on the assumption they will then gain residency. In state COA is very cheap, it’s doable for about $20K per year even with no aid.
I wouldn’t overlook LACs. There are some very prestigious mid-western private colleges that offer merit money and an approach to liberal learning very similar to the ivies, including, Carleton, Macalester and St. Olaf’s - all in Minnesota. Who know?, His h/s athletic experience may even have greater traction at these smaller, DIII schools.
^^ I actually thought about suggesting St. Olaf - went as far as to look at their Merit Scholarship page - and saw: “The total value of all merit scholarships cannot exceed half of the comprehensive fee, unless the family’s demonstrated need exceeds that amount.” That’s not going to get to the $20K price point, unfortunately https://wp.stolaf.edu/admissions/scholarships/ I do think that some of the other CTCL schools might be generous enough for high-stats kids, though.
Right, although with a $140K/year family income, you might get somewhere in the ballpark of $25K-$35K in need-based grant aid. Factor in “self help” (student loans and employment), and a place like Carleton might be affordable. Run the online Net Price Calculators to estimate your EFC.
Some of the less selective ACM schools (https://www.acm.edu/about_us/college/index.html) might offer merit awards approximately that large. Combined with less expensive sticker prices, the resulting net prices might come in lower than Carleton’s or Macalester’s. Are the qualifying stats for a merit scholarship that large similar to what it takes for admission to a school like Carleton? That I don’t know. My guess is that, if a school like Knox wants to compete for strong students with Carleton, then it does need to offer significantly lower net prices … but, Knox can do that more cheaply just by offering smaller merit grants to higher income families who’d be full pay at Carleton.
Apologies as I am sure this is a much asked question, but when posters refer to the “net price calculator” are they referring to the one that College Board runs?