Rising Junior Seeks Merit: 32ACT, 4.0W/3.5UW, 19 AP/Honors, 4+2 FL. Public Policy/History

Paying for College
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This is why we’ll be headed skiing somewhere over Mardi Gras - he may love the cold! The substance stuff for him is probably similar to what your D felt about the religiously affiiliated schools… an intellectual discourse on it won’t change that gut reaction.

At present, he has six that he likes and where his scores are at or above the top 25th percentile (includes a safety). He’s also got a couple reaches and a couple safeties. But he has not bothered to check out schools in PA yet. Dickinson might work, and they do have a 35K per year scholarship, some 30s and then on down… but before we start to cull, he wants to take one more peek to see if he’s overlooked some great options.

Not quite porridge that is “juuuust right” but you’re spot-on, Mama Bear! Love it. Thank you!

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There is cold and snowy winter at Dickinson.

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Perhaps Holy Cross?

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It might work - will have him take a look, thanks!

To clarify -He does not specifically want only a job with the government as his lifelong career plan. If he can serve in that role for a few years, he would like to do so as he feels like everybody should serve some way. He is not choosing public policy or poli sci degree programs to get a job… he is interested in studying PP or PS because he absolutely loves it. My husband is of the opinion that a poli sci degree is mostly worthless in and of itself - he’s hired a slew of finance people who have BAs in it and ended up manageing the bar at TGI Friday’s. But, it’s what floats the kid’s boat, and combined w his interest in international studies and history, will lead him somewhere other than tending bar. Does that make any sense? I wish I’d never answered the person’s question about what he wanted for a career… kind of took us on a tangent.

Thanks very much!

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Cold and snow are great! He’s gone camping in 28 degree weather!

But there is a difference between New Hampshire or Montana and southeastern PA or DC or VA or northern TN (which are all fine).

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RE: UNM

The OP’s son would qualify for the Amigo Scholarship which would give him in-state rates at UNM. In-state tuition is $7.5K/year. Living costs depend on dorm & meal plan choices. (But generally dorms & meals are less expensive than most other places. About $11-12K/year.)

UNM is ranked higher in history and poli sci than LSU. It offers a robust international studies program with a focus on Latin American countries. Public policy is a grad level program (MPP only…

Sandia National Labs does not offer internships in policy, only cs, engineering and geoscience fields…

LANL internships are also mostly focused on tech fields.

ABQ has tons of outdoor activity access. There’s a ski area 30 minutes from campus. Students can take the city bus to a variety of national forest/national monument lands that encircle the town for hiking, mountain biking, rock climbing, etc. . The upper Rio Grande is primo white water rafting and kayaking.

ABQ occasionally gets snow, but it melts quickly, usually before 10 am. I’ve lived here for almost 4 decades and I still don’t own a snow shovel. Snow mostly stays where it belongs–on top of the mountains.

And an even bigger difference from SE PA (where I grew up) and DC (where DH grew up) and the southern Rockies. Winters days here are bright, dry & sunny vs. overcast, drizzly, damp and gray in PA, DC.

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What is YOUR priority? If he MUST come within your 30k budget, he needs very substantial merit aid. So he might have to consider a good school in a place he says he doesn’t want to go. I don’t believe in giving a kid complete control over the process. You pay, you get a say. That doesn’t mean I think you should choose his major or make the final decision. There are plenty of parents here on CC who throw a “parent’s choice” school into the mix, because most sixteen year olds don’t know what they want.

I made my daughter look at a college she wasn’t interested in because I felt it would be a good fit for her. It ended up being one of her final choices.

Now is a good time to make very clear to your son exactly how much you are prepared to spend. I expect you might already be wondering how many merit awards a given college hands out. That’s the $64,000 question, because the vast majority of colleges don’t share that info, and merit awards can disappear or reappear from one year to the next, depending on how much they need to entice students with money. Schools that were well known for merit awards less than four years ago are suddenly handing out very few. Or they may only give merit to the very top applicants. It’s very difficult to say.

If it’s merit money or bust, then your son will have to cast his net wider. That doesn’t mean you have to buy plane tickets and visit schools right now. It might mean that come acceptance time next year, you might want to visit Kalamazoo College, or Lewis and Clark. Basically, your son’s best chance of getting merit money is going to be at colleges where his UW GPA and test scores put him in the very top of accepted students.

I’ll use my daughter as an example, because she was offered merit at several colleges. This was for the 2016-2017 cycle. Her SAT (old) was the equivalent of 34 on the ACT, and her UW GPA was about 3.8 with many rigorous courses.

At Private Small University A, her first EA acceptance, she was offered the top scholarship of 20k a year. Acceptance rate at the time was about 70%.

At Private Midsized University B, the one I made her look at, she was offered a good, not top, scholarship of 17k a year. Acceptance rate at the time was about 35%, if I recall.

Private Liberal Arts College C offered 15k, the second highest merit award. Acceptance rate at that school was about 40%

Private Liberal Arts College D offered the top scholarship of 15k. Acceptance rate at that time was about 40%.

Public Liberal Arts College E offered her a 5k scholarship. We are instate, so it was a nice little scholarship, but definitely not the top. Acceptance rate was about 60%.

Then came the surprise waitlist offer with an annual 8k scholarship from Private Liberal Arts College F. Acceptance rate was about 35%. We were surprised she was waitlisted, but that’s why she had a list with safeties.

Of the other private LAC’s she was accepted to, one had stopped all merit awards two years before she applied. Another very selective college offered her no money at all, but does offer merit to a very few stellar applicants. The most selective college she was accepted to had stopped offering merit awards several years previous.

In short, if merit is required, do your homework and cast a wide net. Meanwhile, your son should work hard to improve his GPA and study to retake the ACT.

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Very helpful and specific info - thank you very much. I went to geology field camp in Taos for a couple of months and have been back with DH multiple times to ski, hike, raft. Will have our son take a good look. Again, my thanks.

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Your personal examples are very helpful. Thank you. To answer your queries, I am here on CC in order to “cast a wider net” as you put it, looking for specific suggestions for schools to research. Secondly, he has not and will not be given complete control over the college selection. It is a collaborative effort, but if he doesn’t want to go to school in Michigan or California or Nebraska or Minnesota, then we’re not going to shove that at him. This is, after all, his life. Third, I have no problem buying plane tickets to visit a group of viable schools if it can be combined with a mini vacation, visit to relatives, drop off for camp, etc. Fourth, I do in fact understand that his stats need to be at or above the top 25th percentile by next summer. His current list includes ONLY those schools, and he will retake the ACT and also SAT, followed by test prep, and another go.

As for the “merit money or bust,” If we wanted to, we could cough up full COA for any school anywhere. DH and I are self-made, however, so we regard throwing that type of funding at college as foolhardy. Beyond our personal thriftiness, it furthermore would be ridiculous because 1) our eldest son will be in a group home for probably 60 years of his life and we’d like it not to be an inexpensive nursing home and 2) our college bound boy has good enough stats and other attributes which would draw merit at some very decent schools. There are thousands and thousands of colleges in the US. Surely there are some half decent schools in the mid Atlantic and elsewhere in his desired areas which would provide the merit to meet our OOP goal.

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Sure, visit any that you can. Be aware that often, the best time to visit a college, especially if it’s far from you, can be after the acceptance comes in. In hindsight, it would have saved us a lot of time and money if we had simply waited to visit some colleges after she was accepted. We ended up visiting two of the final three choices a second time, because she needed to see it with her new perspective. Kids care more once they have the acceptance in hand and have to picture themselves as a student on campus.

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One thing that’s a little different about the social sciences is that some students do very well in a smaller department and can shine. A lot of students at G’town and American want to be in politics or government so lots of competition for student body president.

For two years in a row, students at Colorado majoring in political science and international studies have been named Rhodes scholars. CU isn’t particular known for political science and it’s a small department, but both kids made it work for them. They had other awards too (she has a Fulbright, he’s a Truman Scholar).

My point is not that OP’s son should look at CU, but that any school can be a good fit for a political science student if he puts the time into it and takes advantage of the opportunities. The woman was a Boettcher scholar (a high school award) so she had the choice of instate schools (including DU) for close to a full ride. She probably had a lot of elite schools to choose from too, but those would have cost her money. She made CU work for her. The guy grew up in Boulder and like Dorothy, he found there was “No Place like Home.”

So there are a lot of schools that will work and OP and son can eliminate schools because of the pot laws or the weather (I’m not insulted at all, just pointing out that Colorado is not ‘Woodstock West’), because of the liberalness or religion.

I always think that people should go to school where they want, but they may rule out some really nice schools because they don’t want to live in a city (out go Harvard and UCLA), don’t want religion (sorry Notre Dame), don’t want a southern school (goodbye Emery, Duke, Vandy), and no party schools (there go most of the rest). I didn’t like small, rural schools and I knew that meant I was eliminating Grinnell, most of Carolina schools, and a few that might have been an academic fit for either of my kids, but weren’t an overall fit (location/academics/cost). You have to make cuts somewhere and that’s where we started. Starting with weather is fine, but IMO, DC has some of the worst weather around. In Vermont it is snow; in DC it is snow and rain and ice and mush and sleet. I’d take the real snow any day.

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Am assuming U arizona and Arizona State have been mentioned? I have a relative who attended Arizona State (well for grad school) and worked for the NSA.

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The perspective about smaller departments and lesser known departments is definitely something to consider. Good insight.

When we initially started adding campus tours to family vacays last spring, he had no interest in colleges smaller than his high school (2000 students). Since then, he’s come around to looking at a couple small ones - absolutely loved Sewanee and was so-so on Rhodes. But at least he looked. Likewise with PA… and remember, he is just 16 and has some maturing to do… he initially wanted nothing further north than DC because of the sustained low temperatures and the idea that as a “moderate” he might be viewed with disdain by overwhelmingly liberal profs and students. Now that I’ve started talking with him about Dickinson and another one or two in SE PA, he is opening up his little paradigms.

Thankfully, we started this process during the second half of his sophomore year. We are, taking our time, enjoying the trips together and comparing notes. He still has time to investigate, and I’m trying to do the laborious pick and shovel work on research so he can focus on studying.

Very thoughtful post - thank you.

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Looks like you have three safeties already chosen:

University of Mississippi: with automatic scholarship for current stats, net price about $18k/year (could be reduced to $17k/year with 33 ACT or 1450 SAT); increases later years since scholarship is fixed amount rather than value of tuition

University of Alabama: with automatic scholarship for current stats, net price about $25k/year (could be reduced to about $11k first year and $20k later years with 36 ACT or 1600 SAT); increases later years since scholarship is fixed amount rather than value of tuition (unless he gets the 36 ACT or 1600 SAT)

Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College: $34k/year in-state list price, minus whatever scholarships he gets (holistically determined, according to web site, so it may not technically be a safety due to list price exceeding the $30k/year limit – seems like you are expecting him to get significant scholarships, even though they are not automatic)

When sorting out the large list of colleges being suggested here, he and you may want to discard any that are not either better (however he defines that) or (at least potentially) less expensive than the safeties. Put it another way, if there is no way he would choose College X over any of the safeties, even if College X offered its highest scholarship, then College X is not worth applying to.

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If he weren’t averse to snow and cold, for another safety, I’d suggest the program my son is in at Michigan State–it’s a residential college within MSU called James Madison, and it’s for political science/public policy types. The 4 potential majors in the residential college are International Relations, Political Theory and Constitutional Democracy (my son’s major with a European Studies minor), Comparitive Cultures and Politics, and Social Relations and Policy. The students in the program all live in the same dorm for the 1st 1-2 years, their prof’s offices are also in that dorm, and several of their classes are there. They require either a study abroad program or an ‘experiential’ semester–my son did this, working for a law firm while taking 3 other classes. They are also really focused on analytical writing skills–those kids come out of the program as amazing writers!

My son has had an amazing experience in the program. He’ll graduate in 3 years with relevant work experience (other friends of his worked for campaigns or in legislator’s offices in the state capitol or in some role in federal gov’t in DC). He loves his classes in the major and his history classes to get the European Studies minor. He sounds somewhat like your son in that the prof of his most recent history class was surprised the he could identify political inclinations and land mass areas on a map of Europe in the time of the Reformation. He also is a founding member of a (moderately conservative) political student group which has held programs and presentations with bipartisan politicians on both the state and national level, and he’s super active in a mock trial club.

Your son would almost definitely qualify for the Honors College (like my son), which brings in OOS scholarships to take the COA under $30k. I know it’s not super selective or elite, but it really is a great program…

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His best chance of merit aid, IMO, is probably going to be at Private LACs which will be interested in the geographic diversity he offers, and the fact he’s male.

Reading your original post, I definitely think schools such as Dickinson and Gettysburg should be considered. Neither is full of “liberals.” I would strongly suggest Franklin and Marshall, but they don’t give any merit aid at all. Sounds a lot like his type of people though.

Earlham in Indiana is a good school and I think you should consider it. Read the Wikipedia page, sounds like it might align with his values and interests. What about Denison U in Ohio? Definitely more moderate and I think he’d get decent merit there. Furman?

He can study almost anything he likes at LACs. I agree with others that he should approach college with an open mind and not be too focused on studying something very niche.

Speaking of Niche, your son should use the Niche website to explore schools of interest. Niche provides thorough student-based reviews which will give him a great feel for colleges and their vibe. It also has a chance me feature. He can put his stats in and it will show him on a graph what his chances might be. It’s useful because he will see where he stands amongst other students who might be applying.

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I say this a lot but I think you need to really firm up the budget in your mind. Really figure out if you want to spend no more than $30k or if you are truly willing to spend more. I say this because this is a stressful process and budget is one of the biggest stressors. It is no fun to get to April of senior year with some great acceptances and then mom/dad decides that they really don’t want to spend/don’t have the 10-20k more a year that ‘might’ have been available (theoretically).

If your budget is $30k, and it is firm…I agree with @Lindagaf that LACs will often be your best bet to get the best price if going OOS is the plan. I also think that when budget is the prime driver, the idea of location being a top priority needs to be let go. Don’t worry about going too far Northeast, most of those schools will be out of your budget.

Some schools that come to mind with very good scholarships for the type of stats your son has (and would be excited to get a male, southern applicant - that would be a good hook at these schools) are:

Juniata
Ursinus
Ohio Wesleyan
Miami Ohio
Willamette (really good if interested in government)
University of Puget Sound
Earlham

The best thing to understand in college admissions is that when money is something you are looking for - you need to find the underrated gems that not everyone is looking to grab. Look at the college search as a “buy low/sell high” opportunity. Most of the colleges you (average mom/dad of college age child) know are most likely known because everyone knows those colleges. And most of them will have the price tag (and lack of merit money available) that comes from being an “Apple” “Google” or “Coke” kind of college. Those are colleges where you have to “buy high” if you want to attend.

Find the colleges that are well regarded that not everyone and their brother has heard of. Those are the ones with money to give excellent candidates as they look to get the strongest class possible. And those (employers, grad school, etc) who actually pay attention to colleges and universities will know those colleges and be impressed.

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Yes, indeed - great strategy. Thank you!

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Yes, you have nailed exactly what we are looking for - those gems whose names aren’t widely known. We do have the Fiske Guide which helped initially, but the advice here (we hope) will help unearth good potential matches. Thankfully, neither the son, the hub, or I am concerned at all with name brands. We are the types who can afford a couple Mercedes, but choose to drive Fords… if that makes any sense. The financial needs of our older child who’ll likely spend 60 years in a care facility further influence our attitudes. That said, it would be unfair to “penalize” the college bound one by deeply restricting the budget. I realize this attitude is wobbly for most families, but we walk a meandering tightrope as do all families that are impacted by substantial disability.

As for the budget being firm, it is not - we just needed a starting place and that seemed reasonable. Other than published matrices for his two OOS safeties, we have very fuzzy notions of what to expect from the private LACs. In starting this process a bit early (testing cold & before even taking Alg 2), he at least has a basement level.

I am most grateful for your suggestions and strategy points. He’ll be back home this evening, and will starting looking. Cheers!

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Your son said he isn’t interested in colleges smaller than his high school, which is a common refrain with a lot of kids who disregard LACs out of hand. Something to consider with smaller colleges is that, unlike high school, these students are self-selecting. They choose to be there. I do think it’s one reason why a lot of LACs have very high retention rates.

For example, Dickinson College has a very good freshman retention rate of 90%. That means that 90% of students come back after the first year. It is a very good school with excellent programs in international business and commerce and has one of the best study abroad programs around. It gets high marks in a number of categories in Princeton Review’s list of best colleges. https://www.princetonreview.com/college/dickinson-college-1023261
Its grads are doing very impressive things: https://www.dickinson.edu/info/20258/dickinson_edge/1395/dickinsons_distinctions
It definitely offers merit aid and I suspect your son might be given a nice scholarship because they would probably like what he has to offer in addition to grades and test scores. Plus, their mascot is the Red Devil, and that’s cooler than any other mascot, hands down.?

In terms of establishing relationships with professors, I might draw some ire, but I’m pretty sure there are very few universities that foster early and close connections with professors in the way LACs do. Professor connections are very important for all kinds of reasons. If your son is interested in classes based on discussion and interaction with classmates and professors, LACs are the way to go, so consider some of the ones already mentioned. There are many more, including some good ones in the South, such as Eckerd, Hendrix and Centre.