First day of school today. Took my older kid’s very last ‘first day of school’ pic early this morning. 
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So we are going to see Davidson in two weeks. They have very limited scholarships. As of right now it is not S24s ED choice but who and when do you ask if ED candidate are considered for merit scholarships. There are both music and academic ones that would be nice he got them. Some require an application others don’t.
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Whitman (a terrific SLAC, where my S23 is starting in 3 weeks!) has a financial pre-read program that will give you their guaranteed amount of need and merit based aid before applying. We did this last July, and the number they came back with two weeks later granted S23 the ability to confidently apply ED, knowing it was 100% affordable and not a financial risk to do so.
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Has she looked at Grinnell? Their merit and financial aid is very generous. If she likes Wes and Brown she will probably like it as well.
…and Grinnell (and St. Olaf) also knock $20k off annually for students who are admitted via ED.
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Grinnell would be great —it was one of D22’s top choices. But D24 is adamant about close to home, which means Northeast pretty much. If she is willing to go further afield, I think both Grinnell and Oberlin could both get added to the list.
Whitman would be great, but too far away! I wish more schools did financial aid pre-reads. It would make me much more open to the idea of Early Decision.
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She will have to figure out what to compromise on. My D decided that she’d rather compromise geography over other things. Received incredible merit from both these schools. Ultimately, things worked out and she stayed in the NE.
She also liked W&M. Even OOS the price tag is significantly lower than private colleges.
Yes, she will have to compromise, I’m sure, but she has to decide what she actually wants in order to figure out the compromises and trade-offs! It is driving me a bit crazy. I guess that she’ll have to sort it out with the college advising office when she gets back to school in the fall. I suspect that she finds me more a nag than supportive even though I am trying not to be too pushy.
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We did not go the ED route which left us with having to apply to a lot of schools (and not a single option until first results on 3/11 - DO NOT RECOMMEND!). I encouraged (made her, really) throw in a couple of schools that I just knew were a good fit if that is what it came to.
Your D will figure it out though. There is a lot a growth between now and December. I honestly think if my D had ED to her school she would not have gotten in. She didn’t even decide to apply until winter break. We knew it was her dream school, but she had to get there on her own.
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D24 is on U of Arizona’s email distribution list. They sent out a notification about upcoming “Arizona Experience” days. 1st one coming up is 9/9 with the one after that being on Saturday, 12/2. Mentioning it here in case anyone else is interested. All day event that you have to register for ahead of time. Here’s the schedule for the day:
- 8:30-9:00 am - check in, choose your sessions for the day, meet campus partners
- 9:30-10:15 am - welcome session
- 10:30-11:15 am - Academic Breakout session 1. “Choose which of our academic colleges and majors you’d like to hear from.”
- 11:30-12:15 - Academic Breakout session 2. “Choose which of our academic colleges and majors you’d like to hear from.”
- 12:15-1:15 - lunch break. Lunch provided for free.
- 1:15-1:45 pm - Resource Breakout session 1. “Hear from our partners like Financial Aid, Housing, Honors, Admissions, and more.”
- 2:00-2:30 pm - Resource Breakout session 2. Same thing as session 1, but you can pick a different presentation to go to.
- 2:30-4:00 pm - Open Houses & Tours. “Explore campus, take a tour, or attend one of the resource open houses.”
You have to register for the event through their website.
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This was mentioned in 1 of this week’s “Your College Bound Kid” podcast episodes…thought it was really interesting. It’s worth the hour to watch this.
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Similarly, I don’t want D24 to apply early decision anywhere because I’d like her to have more time to figure out what she really wants and which schools are good fits. But mainly, I want her to be able to compare financial aid offers. The fly-ins that interest her are all at early decision schools.
I just ran the net price calculators on all of the schools on her current list (all of which claim to meet need fully). Their net prices came in between 2k and 15k, which seems crazy to me and further proof that schools will define need however they wish. I would like her to apply EA some places for peace of mind, but unfortunately, there are very few small liberal arts colleges that fully meet need and also have early action (as opposed to early decision), particularly in the Northeast. There are some medium sized universities that have early action and meet our price point, but so far she doesn’t have much interest in any of those.
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That’s why we went after “geographic diversity.” It was hard to not have options until mid March but we were pretty confident of acceptance at them.
I did make her apply to the state flagship - I’d rather she have the choice to not go, than have no option to go.
The biggest difficulty was having to throw a lot of spaghetti at the wall since we had no idea what would stick. Luckily she is a gifted and fast writer.
This is very interesting. I wonder if it’ll increasingly become “a thing” offered by schools which want to hang on to ED in the face of what seem to be inevitable changes coming down the line.
I’m going to list a few colleges for your consideration that offer early action. I don’t know (and pretty much doubt) that they say that they will meet a student’s full-need. But I know that there are schools who don’t meet full need that are more financially generous than schools who do say they meet full-need. Some of the ones I listed below might be some of them, but as you know, run the NPC to see how each school would work for you.
I will include the size of the school and then the net price as reported in College Navigator for incomes of $0-30k, $30-48k, $48-75k, $75-110k, and $110k plus. Based on the net price you can look and see if it’d be worth your time running the NPC and delving further into the school depending on how these net prices compare to the schools where NPCs were more favorable for your family. Additionally, from what you’ve said about your daughter, she might get some very nice merit aid at a number of these schools.
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Clark (MA): About 2400 undergrads. EA deadline gives results in mid-January. $14,937, $13,255, $23,701, $26,118, $38,941
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Gettysburg (PA ): About 2200 undergrads. $13,910, $14,279, $17,057, $25,799, $40,690
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Hobart William Smith (NY): About 1600 undergrads. EA decisions released by January 17. $19,352, $11,523 (not a typo), $19,653, $22,959, $40,907
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Juniata (PA ): About 1200 undergrads. $12,021, $17,361, $17,768, $18,899, $30,325
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Lycoming (PA ): About 1100 undergrads. EA decisions come back by December 15. $11,425, $14,740, $15,949, $21,469, $26,326
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Muhlenberg (PA ): About 1900 undergrads. EA decisions come back by February 1 (i.e. not that early). $15,212, $16,762, $18,477, $25,141, $37,789
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Saint Michael’s (VT): About 1200 undergrads with 2 separate EA1 & EA2. $14,071, $16,234, $19,810, $26,894, $33,769
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Saint Vincent (PA ): About 1400 undergrads w/rolling admissions. $14,709, $15,752, $19,876, $24,058, $26,663
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St. Bonaventure (NY): About 1900 undergrads w/rolling admissions, and notification of grants/scholarships within 2-3 weeks of admissions offer. $13,802, $16,067, $16,146, $27,827, $31,762
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Union (NY): About 2100 undergrads. $12,983, $15,785, $24,998, $26,382, $44,187
Not in the northeast, but I think definitely worth some consideration if the state is okay:
- Centre (KY): About 1400 undergrads. $11,079, $12,400, $16,971, $21,853, $28,672
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Thanks. I will run the net price calculators on all of those and see if I can find out about merit. Clark, Lafayette, and Union were all on the original list at some point. No idea why she took them off. Lafayette and Union claim to meet full need and Lafayette is actually loan free at our income level, which is fantastic.
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S24 is coming home today. I want him to figure out how to get himself back into the swing of thinking about college and finalizing his list other than just the schools CC and I think are good matched and safeties. Has anyone found the virtual info sessions actually helpful? He could spend many hours joining them this week but we have never done any and not sure if they actually are helpful.
We have done a couple, and they seemed to have really helped my kid figure out if a school of interest that we have not visited is still a keeper or not. It also helped her learn more about the process. I mean, what she told me she learned was not anything I did not already know, having read the admissions websites of these schools, but she felt empowered by learning it on her own. And it did help her get excited about the schools.
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At least one that my S24 did was involved in him deciding that school would (very likely) be on his application list. It wasn’t just the information session itself, but that helped focus his attention on that school for a significant period, and collectively that resulted in him arriving at a much firmer opinion.
So I don’t know if that is the strongest possible case for doing such sessions, but I do think in this instance it helped move the process along.
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That is very helpful. I think that is what I am looking for. Guiding him to do that as a start could make him focus on looking into the schools. Thank you!