I think firefly meant to say, “what the government/school believes you can afford.” The two figures are not always equal. 
U of South Carolina offers in state tuition to OSS if they have a strong gpa and SAT score. I’m not sure how high the scores need to be.
NationalMeritMom
Grinnell College in Iowa gives excellent merit scholarships and is an academically great school with tons of resources for internships, research and everything else. I don’t know, however, about how they package need-based aid in conjunction with merit $$. I think I remember SBDad being disappointed that his son’s merit award subtracted $$ from the need-based award. However it is worth checking out. Also a beautiful campus. My son is getting anout half-tuition from them and it was his first-choice school among 10 great options.
Saint Vincent College has a number of Full Tuition awards for merit
Greetings!
Can’t reinforce what jersey44 has to say enough. Meeting your financial need as defined by EFC may be very different from meeting financial need as you see it.
Also, there are a number of schools (I think Brown is one) that suggest they will meet financial need to the point that your cost will be what is typical for your state university. But note that in Massachusetts that currently translates into about $20K – considerably less than Brown, but still substantial for many families.
We had a rather lengthy discussion of merit aid at Top 20 Univ. and Top 20 LAC’s on another thread the results of which are as follows.
Amoung top 20 National Universities 8 offer it: Caltech, Duke, Chicago, Wash StL, JHU, Rice, Emory, and Vanderbilt. Northwestern has a hybrid part merit part need called the “Founders Scholarship” new this year.
Among top 20 LAC’s 5 offer it: Davidson, Harvey Mudd and Claremont McKenna, Smith, and Grinnell. Colby has a hybrid program like Northwestern.
Many of these same schools plus some others also participate in something called the “Questbridge” program which appears to be aid to low income students that is based on merit.
curious, add Hamilton and Wash and Lee . W & L has an extensive program while Hamilton’s is melting away VERY quickly. Maybe so melted as to be unrecognizable. (Hamilton has some geographically limited scholarships that may survive the Inquisition , as does Swarthmore, but when I consider merit aid schools I consider those that have generally available merit aid). I’m not so sure BMC doesn’t have some merit-y “leadership” awards, too. 
<a href=“http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/usnews/edu/college/rankings/brief/webex/merit_brief.php[/url]”>http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/usnews/edu/college/rankings/brief/webex/merit_brief.php</a>
(Most students receiving merit aid list)
anyone have any info on MERIT aid at Case – do they do anything foreign language based?
<a href=“http://finaid.case.edu/Finaid.aspx?Types_of_Aid&Option=Scholarships&Level=004-001[/url]”>http://finaid.case.edu/Finaid.aspx?Types_of_Aid&Option=Scholarships&Level=004-001</a>
Nothing listed on languages specifically, but they have nice merit scholarships ranging (this year) from $16,400 to $26,800 plus a hand full of full-tuition awards.
“Eligibility is based on academics, including high school performance (GPA, class rank), strength of high school curriculum, involvement in school and community activities, evidence of leadership, and standardized test results.”
I read that Hamilton eliminated their merit scholarships and is going to all need-based awards. Don’t remember where I read it, though. Did anyone else see it?
Yes, Hamilton did announce that. However, there is a specific endowed fund for scholarships for students from Texas, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and one county in New York which has been used to offer merit scholarships. I don’t know if that will continue, or if that will be used for need-based only.
I dont mean to complain, but… it doesnt seem quite fair to me. My husband make good money.Works in an industry that had taken years and years of training and education to get to…as well as a lot of hard work and focus.We live well, but must provide for retirement for we are in an industry that has lost pensions, work rules and currently find ourself earning 1981 wages. We have only one child ready to enter college. We can not afford to send him to the school he really wants to go to, rightfully he should be able to, for he has work extremely hard throughout his educational career to get to. He a really good student , but not stellar, or special in anyway other than to me.
We are obligated to cover $51,000 a year for our son’s education as told by the financial aid people. That is not going to leave a lot left for us to live on. We dont want our son to leave college with a massive debt around his neck even before he starts working. So we must consider another school than the one he really want to attend. Lesser in his eyes.
Meanwhile, our neighbor who has a job as a shopkeeper, has an A.A. degree, one son as well, has been given a 100% free ride to the college of my son’s choice, for his son. While I am happy for the son, it just seems to me the harder one works to provide a good job and make something of themselves.The more they must pay…because it looks like we can pay more.
as I said, I dont mean to complain, we are doing all we can to search for scholarships… but again, we have to work a lot hard to get where we want to be … i wonder if other parents feel the same way, that education has gotten so out of reach for the ( little higher ) middle class poor. Thank for hearing me out.
Speaking as an affluent but not superich parent who is also paying full price for the LAC of my S"s choice (the same general income category as a person with a 51,000 EFC) I can only repeat what I have said in other places.
We all wish that we could give our children everything that they want. However, with respect to the college situation, we need to keep to things in mind.
First, attending a private college is a pure luxury item, not a necessity.
Second, financial aid–particularly at a private or out-of state college is a matter of grace, not of right. If a college wishes to base discounts solely on merit, that is its right. If the college wishes to use a purely need-based system, that is its right as well.
I think it is sometimes the system of determining who is needy that angers many people. Strong work ethic and frugality seem to be penalized (two parents working, frugal life style, saving).
Actually, even merit can sometimes cause hard feelings because so many times merit aid is also tied to URM or financial status, rather than pure merit (scholarships for good students who are also URM or are also needy).
Not saying they don’t have a right to do whatever they want, just saying that there are valid reasons for the disenchantment.
same feeling!!!
There are many of us that feel that way but it is their right to only offer need based. In our situation I can afford to send my Son to a Harvard, Yale or Stanford but they wont get our money or my son. Not to say it wouldnt set us back to pay 50k a year.
He has a 4.2 GPA, is taking his last class needed this year and also taking a Physics class at Georgetown College. He is ranked 1/220 and had a 32ACT last year. If it wasnt for football he would have gone right on to college this fall. He will be applying to colleges such as Rhodes, Wash STLouis, Back up U of K and a few of the top schools in conjunction with the Air Force ROTC. He is also applying for West Point which he has already passed the first cut and the Air Force Academy which he met with today.
I am encouraging the service since I wish to this day I had served my country. I have talked with him about the importance of doing something with your life that you are proud of and can feel good about and has meaning. Its not all about how much money you make. The service will instill a high level of discipline and character. The Academy’s will give him the basis he needs to succeed whatever road he decides to take in life.
lfk… >>>> I think it is sometimes the system of determining who is needy that angers many people. Strong work ethic and frugality seem to be penalized (two parents working, frugal life style, saving).
Actually, even merit can sometimes cause hard feelings because so many times merit aid is also tied to URM or financial status, rather than pure merit (scholarships for good students who are also URM or are also needy).
Not saying they don’t have a right to do whatever they want, just saying that there are valid reasons for the disenchantment. <<<<
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I do think that the EFC system is “out of whack” - it assumes that families with a certain income always had a high income and therefore always had discretionary income to save for college. That is often not the case - family incomes often rise when kids are in high school cause many moms go back to work (or change from part-time to full-time) at that time to pay for the rising family costs that occur when teens are in the home and because of the anticipated college costs. This sudden higher income is assumed to have always existed.
The EFC system also assumes that such families weren’t spending some of that money paying back student loans for the education that gave them that income!!!
Some of us, who came from families who couldn’t pay anything towards our own college costs, so we took out loans for undergrad and grad and then married someone with similar loans. Then we spent years paying off those loans. Not everyone has that situation - some had parents that did pay for their college so no loans were needed, so those could more easily save for their kids college education. But where is any of this taken into consideration?
Again, The EFC system assumes that “higher income” families should have been saving for college all along but some haven’t because those dollars were used to pay back their own student loans. The system refuses to consider the family’s history of repayment of parents’ student loans even though such loans are not “credit card or car debt” used for luxury or unnecessary purchases.
I also don’t like a system that only takes into account what a custodial mother earns and not what a non-custodial father earns. If a non-custodial father’s income is not considered then why would any parents’ income be (since the students are adults)? The system is talking out of both sides of its mouth - implying that non-custodial fathers’ financial liability ends at age 18 while everyone else’s liability ends after the student graduates from college.
Also, it does seem a bit odd that an educated, but lower earning family’s child can “live the dream” and get a free ride to Harvard (and then, via his H connections make a fabulous living) but a child of say, an engineer, won’t be able to go because his family can’t afford the $55k per year price tag. In both cases, the parents are educated, but one family chose a lower paying career while the other chose an “above average” income career.
We had the exact situation you describe, jlauer. We had years of lower income while paying off maximum college loans and saving what we could (which was not nearly enough). Finally when our kids were around hs age, our income increased. We were certainly penalized, but I think lots of people are in the same situation. I’m not sure why, with all of the forms that have to be filled out, institutions cannot see that some families were not born with silver spoons in their mouths, but rather worked like crazy to get where they are and were not saving at the necessary rate all along because they couldn’t afford to.
I can’t understand why the income of the divorced parent doesn’t count but the income of the married parent does? That says that we would be better off to get divorced for now and then dad can support the kids with no penalty. Weird.
These things are wrong, but what irritates me the most is when institutions or groups give false hope to good students, implying that all excellent students have a chance to get merit scholarships. Sometimes this is true and fair, but very often it is not. They should just list their requirements up front, rather than have some unspoken criteria for race or socio-economic status.
Do you remember when a group made a Caucasian scholarship a while ago? Wow, what an uproar. Of course, it was meant to make a point.
<a href=“http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15840916/[/url]”>http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15840916/</a>
Still, it is the same as others merit scholarships in that it applies only to some students and excludes others based on race. Maybe I should make a merit scholarship available only to middle class kids whose parents have sacrificed and worked their butts off. (Before anybody gets hostile, I am just kidding). But seriously, I would like to see more MERIT scholarships based on MERIT, rather than some brew of unspoken racial and financial criteria. The process is very discouraging to excellent students who aren’t poor or URM. Why not let all excellent student have an equal chance?
I think that there are many people who have similar situations. Unfortunately, there are also people whose parents paid for their college or lived in areas that had commuter colleges with “cheap tuition” (and therefore have no student loans). They were able to enter their professional lives without the “strangle hold” that student loans held and were able to start saving for kids college funds right away.
The rest of us, because of the burdens of college loan repayment, had to limit our saving towards retirement plans, large necessary purchases, and other emergency savings accounts, with little left to save for college.
Unfortunately, the EFC process doesn’t take any of that into consideration.