@ Ohiovalley16, sorry, yes, Massachusetts state schools do not award merit aid except in very rare circumstances… They do however have a full tuition program based on MCAS scores which in the end is somewhere between $1000 and $1800 PER YEAR depending on the school. Its something that stumps kids all the time, they think if they have free tuition that the bottom line is just room and board, nope.
Many college do not stack the merit on top of need based aid. They replace need based aid with any merit… so your cost of attendance remains the same. It isn’t usually clear from the colleges websites how they handle this, so you have to ask.
Do you know how to run net price calculators? They are on each school’s financial aid webpage, and should give you a good idea of what the costs would look like for each school Note that if you are divorced, own a small business, or have rental real estate, they may not be accurate (you won’t get as much aid as it shows, especially at schools that request the CSS Profile as part of the paperwork). This is a super important step – they are great tools that help give you an idea of affordability for your situation.
@3puppies ~ The “package” offered was the total bottom line cost after merit and finaid. I was under the impression that the NPC would be useless to us d/t self-employment and divorce/remarriage. In most cases though the NPC was pretty close with the numbers that I used (I had to estimate bio Dad’s income as he was not forthcoming). I agree that need based aid at the elite schools is the way to go but of course that only works for those with significant need and students who excel. Because I could only guess at bio Dad’s income (I knew it was more than six figures but not sure how much more) D had to apply to so many schools. In the end, it was “preferential packaging” that worked for us; a school that recognized D’s academic abilities and the reality that just because bio Dad had significant income, it was quite possible (and in this case true) that he wasn’t going to help with tuition over and above a child support order. The one elite school that we knew how much the net cost would be was Vanderbilt because they do not consider non-custodial income…D applied there ED but unfortunately did not get in.
I do think it is a good idea to discuss what your budget is with your kids. I set a budget that was about what I thought the state public school tuition would be, and basically told my kids if they weren’t interested in the state schools (they weren’t) they needed to figure out how to make another school work. Of course I helped them to find the money for other schools, but that budget was still kept in mind. One daughter who wanted to major in theater wasn’t looking at NYU or private LA acting schools because the tuition was just out of the question with the budget.
My kids were pretty easy to please. If a school was too expensive, we moved on. The school DD#2 attends did appear to be too expensive at first, but we found out about some state funding and talked to the school about other merit and it worked out, so don’t just accept the NPC as the final word but look into the aid and talk to the school. However, be prepared to walk as some schools really are just too expensive
Our daughter is a freshman in college. We had a budget similar to yours. We live in Minnesota and our goal as we were saving was to be able to afford to pay for a U of MN education. If we had that amount of money, we knew that all of the state colleges were in our budget as well. So our daughter had a lot of options that we could afford right off the bat. She would have been fine at any of them. Our daughter is attending a private school with a sticker price of around $44K. She got a merit award of $20k each year. She also got a four year renewable scholarship from a local endowment that gives her $5k every year. Her private school education is costing less than what it would cost to send her to a public school. She had a high ACT score and we knew that she would qualify for good merit awards, so we visited the private schools with some confidence that it would work out. Some of those schools cost more and she would have had to take out loans to attend them. We talked about what her financial life would be like after college if she graduated without debt. We were lucky that her favorite school was the one that was the most affordable, so there was no pouting at all about having to attend the cheapest one. She was thrilled it all worked out. If we would have only looked at the state schools and told her to attend her favorite, she would have been happy about that too. She was just excited about going to college and is the type of kid who would have been happy anywhere.
@mom2collegekids
he’s sitting on 1350 right now and wants to do engineering, but he’s a junior and my understanding is that UA is ending the 1330 + Eng = free tuition this year.
he’s trying again tomorrow morning, he just took a practice SAT and got 660-760-730. that’s a 90-point overall improvement, so if he can just hit 1400 that’s Full Tuition + $2500 from UA, and virtually free tuition from OleMiss.
i really like what i’ve read about both of their Honors Colleges and additional scholarships and academic programs. I would be really happy with him going to either on full tuition + whatever extra. Mom will need some convincing though.
oh and this is a dumb question, but how do you tag someone on this forum?
I wouldn’t call merit aid at Mass publics “very rare”.
@BobWallace, I don’t personally know of one Massachusetts resident that got merit aid and these are all very good students in D’s circle, the majority of whom were accepted to CHC. So maybe merit aid is awarded if no finaid is needed? Although UMA is a very good school, most kids I know use it as a financial safety. I would have been proud to have my D attend there, don’t get me wrong (she was accepted into both the CHC and BioTap program), but there were five private schools that came in at less cost. Her BF was accepted into the engineering school where he is double majoring, a top high school student, with no merit aid nor financial aid, go figure.