First post, so please be gentle…
Does the U of A offer non-need based scholarships/grnats to local accomplished students?
I keep hearing about a variety of public and private out of AZ schools offering significant $$ to some local folks from top local high schools (UHS, BASIS, etc…) but I am not hearing stories of incentives from UA to keep local talent home. Any Tucson folk care to weigh in on this issue?
@ignoramusdad - My kids all went to BASIS Scottsdale. My two sons that have graduated both were offered significant merit money by both UA and ASU. In fact, in both cases UA was the slightly less expensive option. Both ended up going out of state, but we would have been happy if they had selected the in-state options.
Son number 3 will be a senior at BASIS Scottsdale this fall and I think there is a very good chance he ends up at UA or ASU.
I am too lazy to check the actual numbers, but about 11 recent BASIS Scottsdale graduates (out of 46 or so) will be attending ASU in the fall and around four are headed for UA. This is fairly typical. I would guess that BASIS Tucson and BASIS Oro Valley would skew the other way.
UA offers full tuition scholarships to National Merit Semifinalists. For other top in-state students, UA offers the Wildcat Excellence Award, which can go as high as $10,000 a year. Son number one was a National Merit semifinalist but decided to go to Texas A&M (in-state tuition, Honors College, plus $10,000 per year). Son number two was offered $8,500 per year by UA and was accepted into the UA Honors College. He instead accepted a very nice offer from Miami University in Ohio.
Wow, that’s very helpful information!
When you calculated your EFC (if I may ask) where were you? I’m having a hard time grasping where I’ll be. My income is high but not in the stratosphere. My EFC calculations done at multiple sites average around 50K so I’m pretty sure I’m not going to get anything need based. I’m just not familiar enough with the process to know if the offers you received were solely based on the high achievement level of your kids…or…if they took into account your financial situation too. Sorry for being ignorant about the process…1st kid starts 11th grade in fall so I have a little time to figure this out.
No worries! I was where you were not very long ago. Both my wife and I are working professionals, so our sons will not qualify for need-based aid. But we are nowhere near wealthy enough to afford paying for three kids in college at the same time without merit scholarships to offset the cost.
All the information that I have you was merit based. Here’s the page for UA.http://financialaid.arizona.edu/types-aid/scholarships/scholarships-0
ASU actually has a scholarship estimator, which is pretty accurate: https://scholarships.asu.edu/estimator
So was son #2 offered the Wildcat Excellence Award ($8500) or was that something else?
Yes, Wildcat Excellence Award. He had just over a 3.5 unweighted GPA at BASIS Scottsdale, a 33 on the ACT, passed 13 AP classes, and had decent, but not spectacular extracurriculars. He intended to study mechanical engineering.
good for him! that’s a lot of APs. I am very familiar with BASIS, but I had no idea there was the opportunity to take that many.
Basically they will start college as sophomores. My oldest son passed 15 AP exams with scores of “3” or better (10 “5s”. At Texas A&M they actually limit the number of credits you can graduate with, so he could not take all his earned AP credits. But he still has 79 credits after his freshman year. Right now he intends to graduate with two minors on top of his Aerospace Engineering major: German and History.
Because he still has to take his engineering courses in sequence, he still will take four years to graduate.
There have been a few BASIS kids with more than 20 passed AP classes. And a kid who will be a senior this fall got a perfect score on the AP Calculus BC exam - in 9th grade!
Incredible!
FWIW, my impressions are that ASU off-campus is better than UA off campus, but the UA campus is much nicer than ASU’s. OTOH, Barrett Honors College at ASU impressed me more than UA’s Honors College. Barrett is gated off from the rest of campus and has its own cafeteria, convenience store, dormitories, work-out facilities, etc. But, Barrett costs an extra $1000 per year, while UA Honors costs “only” $500 more per year.
Overall, UA is slightly higher ranked than ASU, but ASU is slightly higher ranked in engineering, while UA is slightly higher ranked in business and life sciences. ASU’s Supply Chain Management program is ranked third in the US and UA’s Management Information Services program is ranked 5th in the US.
Overall, after merit scholarships, I calculated ASU’s annual cost at $18,691, while UA was $17,091. UA looks like it will go up by $446 for 2015-16. ASU will add a “temporary, one-time” (yeah, right) surcharge of $320 next year. One other difference is that UA’s tuition stays the same for all four years.
thanks for analysis. my daughter will definitely consider Barrett. Dying to get out of Tucson so UA is too close to home, but affordability reigns supreme so I’m trying to encourage her to, at least, stay in-State. With that said she loves UA campus and will no doubt have a ton of friends there if she goes. She wants to go Premed.
After my third son picks his school, I will need a new hobby. Here’s a list of the schools we have visited: Harvey Mudd, Pomona, Caltech, Stanford, Berkeley, Santa Clara, Portland, ASU, UA, Texas, Texas A&M, Trinity (San Antonio), Georgia Tech, Michigan, Purdue, Illinois, Rose Hulman, and Miami (Ohio). We may still hit Michigan State (we’ve been there for a football game), Iowa, and Iowa State. We try to mix mini-vacations with college visits.
Portland and Trinity are good private liberal-arts schools with very good merit scholarships for top students. I really liked Trinity. Trinity has a huge endowment so tuition is “just” $38k and they offered a $21k merit scholarship.
Miami is kind of unusual (in a good way!) It is a public university, but liberal-arts focused. There are no PhD students and US News ranks it second in undergraduate focus (behind Princeton) second in study-abroad, and 76th overall. The campus is beautiful and Oxford, Ohio has been ranked as high as number one for college towns. There are several pre-med tracks. Best of all, out-of-state tuition is just over $30k, and my son got a $20k per-year merit scholarship. http://miamioh.edu/admission/merit-grid/
wow! i guess there’s money out there. that’s a lot of travelling around looking at colleges; don’t think we’ll be doing that much. old work colleague of mine had a son that was offered a full tuition scholarship to go to Ohio State but instead chose to pay full tuition at Duke. In retrospect, he says it wasn’t worth the extra ~$200k (yikes) that it cost.
since this thread is getting a fair number of views, I encourage others to chime in with similar experiences, even if it’s just a link to another thread concerning other school(s) in other state(s).
We are in AZ. Last year my D was offered the wildcat excellence award at UA of $10000/yr
At ASU she was offered $9500/yr presidents award. These were merit awards, not based on income. She had 4.0UW GPA and 33ACT, and lots of AP classes. She attended a regular public high school. She was not NMF. The ASU scholarship calculator was accurate for her. She was admitted to the honors college at UA but never applied to Barrett because she preferred UA to ASU. So yes, the Arizona schools do offer scholarships to high achieving in-state students. She ended up going out of state, as she had other full-tuition offers that she liked better. Many of her high achieving classmates stayed in AZ.
I agree. Based on all our visits and tons of research, I’ve learned that if you intend to go to medical school or another professional school, it makes little sense to spend the money for a top private school or to pay $42,000 just for tuition at Michigan. No one cares where their doctor (or lawyer) went to college. Save the money, take the required pre-med classes, study hard, get good grades and a high MCAT score. Then it won’t matter for your career where you went to college. Of course, if money does not matter, disregard this advice. Or if parents’ incomes are relatively low, the top schools are very generous with financial aid. Columbia is free for parents making less than $60k a year. (Of course you still have to get in!)
If accredited, engineering schools have pretty much the same curricula. The big key is to get as much paid co-op or internship experience as possible. The top engineering schools will make that easier, but a sharp, hard-working can still make it even from a lower tier school. The son of a friend of mine got his mechanical engineering degree from NAU and is now working for Boeing.
Both of my kids applied to two of our in-state schools as financial safety back-up schools and they both qualified for the top merit scholarships that basically covered all the tuition, so we would only have to cover the room and board. We were not going to get need-based aid, so we needed merit scholarships. I think UofA and ASU are both great schools, however our kids really wanted to go out of state for college. We had told them that they could go out of state if the cost was basically the same as in-state (cost of room and board only). In the end, they both had dreams of serving in the military, so one ended up going out of state on a full-tuition ROTC scholarship to a private college and the other decided to go to West Point.
@MidwesternHeart - That is basically where we came down. All three sons will or have qualified for in-state scholarships. First son got essentially the same bottom line from Texas A&M. Second son made up most of the difference with a nice scholarship from Miami (Ohio), and will make up the rest with work and some small student loans. Third son will likely stay in Arizona and get a good education at ASU Barrett or UA Honors. He has thought a bit about ROTC or the Corp of Cadets at A&M. It is hard to get into A&M OOS, but Corps students qualify for $1000/year and in-state tuition.
@MidwesternHeart - And your kids sound amazing!
Thanks @Beaudreau If you’re 3rd is interested in the process for applying for Navy ROTC or Army ROTC scholarships (or the academies), let me know if you have any questions. Having gone through this process 2 years in a row with our 2 kids, I’ve learned a lot about the process for each.