Please chance me for merit aid :)

Paying for College
1

Hi, everyone. I’m a high school senior, and I’d really like to go to two specific colleges. However, I need to get the cost down to, at most, $35,000 or so.

My top choices are Occidental College and Scripps College, and my scores/GPA are:
SAT (out of 2400): 2250
CR: 730
Math: 720
Writing: 800
GPA: 3.94 (unweighted)

I am multiethnic, and two of my races are minorities. If there’s any more information that I need to add, please let me know.

Thank you so much. :slight_smile:

2

Have you looked on their web pages to see what merit aid they have?

3

What are your two minority races?

Did you look to see where your M+CR fall in their quartiles? Did you look to see what merit those schools offer?

4

Assuming you are not eligible for need based aid, and have already run the net price calculators on the websites, is that correct?

Then Google " common data set". Find out:

  1. The total number of students getting non-need based aid out of the whole student body. Calculate what % of the student body gets merit aid.
  2. Look at the average amount of merit awarded.
  3. Figure out where your test scores seem to fall by percentile. How does it compare to the % getting merit?

Say 10% of the students get merit with an average of $12,000. If your stats appear to be in the top 10%, then you can say you have a good shot at about that amount of merit. It is a rough estimate, but one way to try to figure it out.