<p>Helping a friend here. Can anyone offer suggestions for schools w/merit aid for women math/science or engineering majors?</p>
<p>No Tuition:</p>
<p>OLIN, Cooper Union</p>
<p>Merit Aid up to full tuition:</p>
<p>Rice, USC, RPI, Case-Western</p>
<p>Rose Hulman</p>
<p>WPI (can be huge based on conversation at tour last spring), RIT. possibly your state school. </p>
<p>Olin now charges some tuition, but it’s still a bargain.</p>
<p>Definitely need more information about her to give accurate advice, but here’s a list mostly composed of schools I found as a woman searching for math/science schools. </p>
<p>I was looking for a school with a great bioengineering program, but the schools below have good overall math and science programs. She would have to research her specific field. There are <em>many</em> scholarships for women in engineering fields not attached to specific schools; she should research the Society of Women Engineers for more info. If she is a National Merit finalist, many more scholarships open up to her. </p>
<p>-UCs (especially if she is in-state); many, if not all of the UCs give merit-based Regents’ scholarships to their top candidates. The amount varies greatly, and Cal will also meet full financial need with scholarships if selected.
-UCSD has the Jacobs Scholarship for the tippy-top engineering applicants; it is a full ride scholarship for four years, completely merit based.
-Harvey Mudd is an excellent liberal arts science school which offers various merit-based scholarships.</p>
<p>Several other schools that I looked at but ultimately didn’t apply to, so I don’t know as much about their merit-based aid, only that it does exist in some form or another: University of Rochester, USC, Rice, Cooper Union, Olin College, Rensselaer.</p>
<p>The merit aid isn’t common, but for top math/science female students Smith (and some of the other women’s colleges) should be under consideration. Smith’s the only women’s college that offers engineering, and also has a merit program that provides both 15k in scholarships and paid research as a first-year.</p>
<p>Carnegie Mellon has some rather sporadic merit aid that depends on being both a desirable candidate and being in just the right income bracket (too high for need-based FA, but in a place where full-pay still wouldn’t be easy). Definitely looking for more women in science/engineering/CS.</p>
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<p>Olin is no longer tuition-free. Their endowment took a tumble and students/parents now pay half the cost while Olin pays the other half.</p>
<p>If you read the Purdue board on CC, the general consensus is that Purdue gave much more merit aid to female than male students. Don’t know that it’s true, but those posters believe it is.</p>
<p>This is a bit of a different suggestion, but have a look at Queen’s University in Ontario. Because it’s Canadian, you may not be familiar with it, since it won’t show up in USNWR, but its highly regarded. As they note on their website regarding their Canadian rankings: </p>
<p>Received more A pluses (4 A+'s and 10 A’s) than any other university
Ranked #1 for student retention and #1 for proportion who graduate
Ranked #1 in Canada for awards per full-time faculty
Ranked #2 (tied) in Canada in the medical-doctoral category for overall academic excellence
Ranked #3 in Canada for average entering grade for first-year students </p>
<p>Their engineering school also receives the highest ranking in the country in terms of student satisfaction. They have a 91% graduation rate, and more importantly, it’s very female friendly. They have currently 28% females in the student body, the Dean and Assc. Dean are women, and the current head of the student engineering society is a female as well. It’s cooperative, team based culture seems to be an attractive feature. </p>
<p>[Queen’s</a> University | Faculty of Engineering and Applied Science](<a href=“http://prospective.appsci.queensu.ca/Home.html]Queen’s”>http://prospective.appsci.queensu.ca/Home.html)</p>
<p>Tuition for Americans is about $22,000, but they also have quite a few merit scholarships as well.</p>
<p>Thanks for the replies! Now, she tells me that she’s leaning more towards a math major rather than engineering or science. She would like a small to medium school and would like to continue on to grad school. California is her home state but she’s open to OOS.</p>
<p>She might look at something like Harvey Mudd - it has the advantage of being a small school within a larger consortium. For pure math a standard university like U of Chicago might be a good choice, but it doesn’t have engineering if she changes her mind. Do you have any idea of grades, scores or ranks?</p>
<p>I got my undergrad degree in Chemistry eons ago- not as many women in the sciences then. Please- don’t encourage her to look for schools just because they offer money to women in science. She should set her sights on schools best in her fields of interest. In math and sciences this often means the large flagship U’s- California is lucky to have at least two excellent in math- UC-Berkeley and UCLA. She should not settle for a lesser education just to get money because a school is trying to increase its number of women in math/science. </p>
<p>She will find a “school within a school”- ie she will likely run into many of the same students in several of her math science courses and will develop a core group of both men and women who share her interests. Students in math and the sciences often choose to go on to grad school and she will not only have college name recognition but well known professors to write her recommendations as well as opportunities to do more advanced work (at UW my son took some grad school math courses while an undergrad). The large research institutions have more chances to work in labs and see the world beyond being an undergrad. She is likely to find more women with similar interest when there are more students.</p>
<p>Math is brutally competitive for grad school admissions. Her best preparation will be at a school with a known name and excellent reputation. She should consider top ranked math grad schools for her list of undergrad choices- eg the Uc’s I mentioned. She should not be scared by an institution’s size, especially if she can be in an Honors Program/College. Not all schools’ curriculums are equally rigorous. Not only do courses cover different amounts of material (AP Calculus is only an average college’s semester’s worth of material, not as much as covered in schools such as even UW-Madison, for example) but there can be a huge difference in courses required for a major or even available in some majors.</p>
<p>Even in the absence of an Honors Program/College, the Math department may offer Honors Math courses.</p>
<p>My mention of an Honors Program/college was for the idea of being in a smaller group in a large college- not just for the academic courses available. This is one way of making a large school seem smaller and less impersonal.</p>
<p>Case Western Reserve offers merit scholaships.</p>
<p>Look at Wellesley, with option of taking classes at MIT.
I’m also thinking of Hollins in VA for my daughter.</p>
<p>Is it still unusual to find women in engineering? I know when my sib went there were only 2 in her class but that was over 30 years ago, but we see many posts from women who are interested in engineering. Maybe search on women and engineering and scholarships if you are looking for a scholarships specific for women?? Many of the unis post their scholarship requirements…you could also look at the specific uni, search the scholarships for something for women…finally you could look at the unis that attract heavily male because of the locationand might welcome women…Michigan Tech etc.</p>