<p>Gustavus in MN–very generous aid packages
Seton Hill in PA–award merit on GPA, test scores or both–also have Art Therapy major</p>
<p>I would focus on schools that meet 100% of need. If your EFC is $7000 there is no reason why she can’t come up with at least half of that in earnings over the next couple summers. That leaves you with about $300/month while she is in college. Can you find that much? SHE can make that much working at Walmart or something while in college. $7000 is VERY manageable.</p>
<p>The best thing she can do is get her GPA up, NOW and take the ACT and SAT, soon. Without a real score in one of those it’s hard to know where she falls for merit aid.</p>
<p>I also agree with looking outside of the East Coast. Schools there just are not as generous with merit aid. Look to some LAC’s in the midwest for your best options for aid–merit and financial. </p>
<p>Truman, for her, is still going to come in at around $15,000, probably not affordable but an option to consider.</p>
<p>In fact D had an ■■■■■■■■ photography shop in grades 9 and 10. She only shut it recently. Maybe she should open it again. She has also had a blog since 7th grade. She also had quite a thriving blog-design business until last spring, and has just started doing that sort of work again. In addition she’s written 3 books and self-published one in 8th grade. She also sold a magazine article to a national sailing magazine in 8th or 9th grade. So maybe she does have some things to list after all, besides her 4 years of theatre at school. I know she just entered the Scholastic Writing award… I’ll look into the art side of that too. What about things that she did pre-high school? She was locally famous for a while because she spearheaded a campaign to get her city council to change the laws to allow her to raise backyard chickens. She had to give presentations in front of the council meetings, meet with reporters, do grassroots work, etc. but it was in 6th grade…</p>
<p>With regards to EA/ED, most schools will have one, but not the other. My family’s EFC is about the same as yours, and I applied to schools mostly RD, because I needed to be able to compare financial aid offers. I think the ‘trick’ to finding safeties is that they’re not going to be the type of schools with full aid that the reaches or matches are-- something has to give. So schools like MHC and SL, where the prestige is higher, are probably not going to meet full need the way you need them to, and that’s just the way it goes. Safeties with full aid are probably not going to be on the list the first time around, because they’re not necessarily the schools that everybody ‘dreams’ about going to-- they’re the schools that I can go to, because of the money issue.</p>
<p>I also focused a lot of my matches on schools with competitive full-merit aid that I would be a good candidate for, which included (in Texas), schools like Southwestern, SMU. One or two of the Claremonts in California might be an option, though the distance might be an issue. My real safety/match/plan was a full-ride at Indiana Bloomington-- though the school is bigger than I would like, it’s got the programs I want and a community I can’t beat, and I found out pretty early, so I didn’t end up applying to more.</p>
<p>To those who asked, her historic grade history is below. </p>
<p>Grade 9 (mostly As, one B)
92 Honors English
93 Science Foundations (CP)
85 Honors Algebra 1/Geometry
95 PE
94 Spanish II
95 Theatre Arts I
94 Honors World History</p>
<p>Grade 10 (this is when things started going badly for her, mental-health-wise. If you look at the quarter grades you see she started out very strong then just nose-dived…)
81 Algebra II (CP)
91 Art I
91 Art II
75 Honors Chemistry
90 Honors English
91 health
79 Spanish III
93 PE
89 Honors U.S. History</p>
<p>Grade 11 - these are “guesstimates” since she had a breakdown in November and missed a lot of school and hasn’t completed all the makeup. SHe started out as a Full I.B. student but has now dropped IB math and IB history, replacing with CP Advanced math and Honors Art History…</p>
<p>Quarter 1
81 IB Biology HL
88 IB Theory of Knowledge (social studies)
96 IB Art SL
(74 - dropped second quarter) IB Math SL >> switched to Advanced Math CP in Quarter 2
83 IB/Pre-AP Spanish IV
88 IB English HL
(72 - dropped second quarter) IB History of the Americas</p>
<p>Has she considered the option of a Gap Year? If she starts planning now to take a year off between HS and college, the stress of this whole process will be greatly reduced. She can concentrate on mental health first, grades second, and not even think about the SAT/ACT for a whole year. From your description, it looks to me like she would have no trouble at all in finding productive activities for the gap year given the varied interests that she has.</p>
<p>However, her earnings may have to go to the expected student contribution (Stafford loan plus a few thousand dollars in work earnings assumed). EFC is not the same as net price, which is EFC + ESC.</p>
<p>Re: Truman State and the like</p>
<p>Schools like Truman State, University of Minnesota - Morris, and the like which have low list prices and which give out merit scholarships may be worth a look, but since the scholarships are not automatic-for-stats, they cannot be safeties like University of Louisiana - Monroe.</p>
<p>On the off chance that the student is a documented Native American or First Nation Canadian, University of Minnesota - Morris has a tuition waiver (though that would leave about $11,000 per year net price).</p>
<p>She has mentioned the possibility of a Gap Year. I think she’d rather go to school, but we’ve discussed it as an option. If she’s still struggling in a few months, I think that’s a very viable option.</p>
<p>I do understand this. I’ve also noticed that the various NPCs deal with the figures differently, and have learned to read them carefully so we’re sure we are comparing apples to apples. For all the schools I am using the total cost of attending MINUS grants offered as our “Net price”. Since I assume everything else (all types of loans, student contribution from savings and work/study, parent contribution) is constant, this is the best way I’ve come up with to compare. The unknown then is how accurate the grants offered by each NPC actually are.</p>
<p>At schools that do not meet full need or schools that meet full need with merit aid, schools can and will offer more grant aid to more desirable students or offer less grant aid and FWS to students who are not at the top of their list. One of probably the least constant things is work-study, as schools can often replace that with grants or increase that amount as they choose.</p>
<p>Do you all think the NPCs are pretty accurate? In other words, should I just totally cross off the list those that show net prices we just can’t afford, or is it worth applying on the off chance they might offer more? (Of course, since her stats are low or borderline for these schools, I can’t imagine WHY they’d offer more…) SLUMOM said her experience is that many of those I’m wondering about DO NOT meet much need… anyone else want to chime in on this?</p>
<p>We’re doing a weeklong New England circle road trip in February, mainly to look at schools, and I wonder if it’s even worth driving through these places to see how she likes them. (We will definitely be doing the info sessions and tours at Skidmore and Hampshire, since those both seem like possibilities academically and financially…)
Bard
Bennington
Wheaton
Sarah Lawrence
Marlboro College
SUNY New Paltz
Bryn Mawr (we’ll already be at Princeton visiting her boyfriend…)</p>
<p>My memory of having done this 30 years ago is that work/study is really nothing more than just the student’s income from a part-time job, usually on campus, that’s set up by the school. Is it that much harder for students to come up with a similar figure themselves by getting a part-time job off-campus? I haven’t been worrying too much when the occasional NPC did not include work study because I figured she could earn that money by finding a job anyway. What DID worry me is when the work/study amount was really high, like $2,800. That just seems like a lot of hours to expect a first-year student to work: 15-20 hours/week? I can see for older students and grad students, but the average freshman?</p>
<p>Federal work study (where 75% of the pay is federal government, and 25% is the dept), is offered to meet need, not to contribute to the EFC. This can sometimes lead to a higher hourly pay rate by the school, because they can give the student more money while having it cost them less. At schools that give out a lot of work-study, if your child is not offered work-study, it can be hard to find jobs on-campus that are not designated for work-study students.</p>
<p>The mixed blessing of work-study is that because it is a part of the ‘need’ component, it does not get counted towards the family EFC, and it takes time away from a job that could be counted towards EFC.</p>
<p>From personal experience, at slightly above min. wage (8.25/hr), the only way to earn my 2k/semester, 4k/total award is to schedue myself to work 19.5 hours in a 15 week semester. It depends on where you can find a job… the only way I am able to pull this off is because I have a work-study job that is superflexible with hours, so I can get an hour or two between classes, and we are open in the evenings and also on weekends. I wouldn’t be able to get the full award amount, for example, in an office/student assistant job.</p>
<p>I have always found the website college data dot com to be very helpful when it comes to financial aid numbers. Go in and register & check out “Money Matters” for each college and also use the Net Price Calculator for each school. (you can compare to the NPC each college has on its own website)</p>
<p>Numbers below are for Sarah Lawrence College (NY)</p>
<p>SARAH LAWRENCE COLLEGE - Cost of Attendance now over $60,000/year </p>
<p>PROFILE OF 2011-12 FINANCIAL AID Freshmen
Financial Aid Applicants 282 (75.4%) of freshmen
Found to Have Financial Need 247 (87.6%) of applicants
Received Financial Aid 247 (100.0%) of applicants with financial need
Need Fully Met 93 (37.7%) of aid recipients
Average Percent of Need Met 90%
Average Award $31,959
Need-Based Gift Received by 231 (93.5%) of aid recipients, average amount $31,047
Need-Based Self-Help Received by 219 (88.7%) of aid recipients, average amount $2,623
Merit-Based Gift Received by 10 (4.0%) of aid recipients
Merit-Based Gift 27 (7.2%) of freshmen had no financial need and received merit aid, average amount $6,890</p>
<p>The advantages to work study: on campus, no commuting, no cost or weather/ traffic issues to get there, flex hours (eg, when there’s an exam upcoming or your sched changes next semester,) often can get a job where you meet other students, usually very easy, etc. Disadvtg: not all schools actually have a long list of openings- </p>
<p>Off campus disadvantage: need to find that job. </p>
<p>Purple: 4k/year is the highest I’ve ever heard of.</p>
<p>It’s definitely a lot, that’s for sure. I think I’ve read before that 2k/sem is the max award allowed, but I don’t actually know that. I think most students don’t actually make it to the 4k/yr… I may or may not.</p>
<p>Work-study jobs are nice because like lookingforward stated, most supervisors will understand that you are a student first, and tend to be more flexible in letting you take time off for a one-time exam or speaker or soemthing of that nature.</p>
<p>The info SLUMOM offered is also in each college’s “Comon Data Set,” section H2. I’d caution: “average award” is truly that average between those who got the absolute max and thise who got far smaller amounts. And etc.</p>
<p>My impression is that colleges are not consistent on whether they show potential merit aid as part of their NPC (and I can’t usually tell whether they even did sometimes when I look at the results). Also, there is the question of whether & how the college will use any merit aid (or outside scholarships) to offset any needbased aid (so you can end up right back where you started in terms what you have to pay out of pocket in some situations). I don’t know if we have ever had a thread where we tried to provide that info for different colleges, but it would be quite useful!</p>
<p>So you might do the following (someone else might suggest a better methodology than this, so go for it if you have better ideas!):</p>
<ul>
<li>Look at each college’s financial aid website and Common Data information to try to figure out the odds of your D getting merit aid.</li>
<li>Look at the NPC results, see if you can figure out if they include merit aid in the result.</li>
<li>Post on the specific school forum out here on CC to see what has happened to accepted students this year with a big need based aid requirement who also got merit aid. How was the merit aid applied, and what did they end up with as an expected payment compared to their EFC?</li>
</ul>
<p>You might suggest she contact the local newspaper or television stations and see if they need any freelance photography help for their websites. She could make money, and add a very nice line to her resume.</p>