<p>Wow, what a treat to log in and find all of this great advice - thank you all so much!</p>
<p>Rice is at the top of MY list for D2, but not hers. 
(Lol at the “tame squirrels as big as your head”, markos.) I’ve been talking up Rice ever since D2 was young (saying that the academics are great and the residential houses sound like Hogwarts houses). She’s mentioned that if she ends up going to school in Texas, she’d rather go to UT (Austin over Houston), where she’d be an auto-admit under the top 10% law, and where she’d try for an honors program like Plan II or Dean’s Scholars. Again, :(</p>
<p>@SpiritManager - $10K merit aid is doable, I think. We need something $10K or more to ease the burden of having two in college and potentially having D2 go on to grad or med school. We’ve run the #s and we don’t qualify for financial aid at all, even with two in college. We’ll look into Bard College, especially its science offerings. Thanks!</p>
<p>@collegeprep11 - Yes, that’s kinda my feeling - not to look at colleges that don’t offer merit aid unless she really, really feels strongly about certain schools. MIT, Stanford, Amherst and Tufts fall into that “feel strongly” category for her right now, and she said if she loves them enough after visiting, she would work on trying to get some outside, independent scholarships.</p>
<p>@fiona - Thanks for the reminder about grade deflation. Frankly, schools like MIT, Mudd and CalTech kinda scare me, not only because of (what I perceive to be) their excruciating workloads, but also their lack of English/writing/liberal arts offerings which are important to her. </p>
<p>@vossron - thanks for going thru Reed point by point. I think Reed sounds just about perfect, but it doesn’t give merit aid, so we’d be paying ~$52,000 sticker price for 4 years. Ouch. (Btw, I should have taken “open curriculum” off of the list.) </p>
<p>@momrath - thanks for the pointer to the Tyng scholarship. You’re right, it’s need-based. But even with a high EFC, the FAFSA spits out $3500 loan of some kind, so I’m not sure if that means $3500 would be the max that she could get if she were to somehow be chosen for Tyng? Anyway, worth investigating - thanks.</p>
<p>@misnomer and breall - no possibility of merit aid from Ivies is the reason. If we qualified for need-based aid, we’d be looking at them. (What is it called when the FAFSA says you can afford to pay, but you really can’t - the “middle class squeeze”?)</p>
<p>@huskem55 - thanks for mentioning Rochester. It sounds super cold, though. However, maybe some of the other schools we’ve put on the list are super-cold, too - I’m just not sure.</p>
<p>Thanks again for your comments, and please keep adding them!</p>