<p>*We saw Georgia Tech over the summer and really loved the school. Great labs and curriculum offerings. They are trying to increase the number of women in their engineering school and told us they would be generous with merit scholarships. *</p>
<p>If someone told you that they were being misleading. GT cannot be depended on to give good merit to females in eng’g. I know female engineering applicants with ACT 35 and top rank/GPA who got NOTHING from GT for merit. They got towards the end of the merit competitions, but in the end they weren’t selected.</p>
<p>NEU can be very generous. I’ve heard anecdotally, though, that most money is given out to students that apply EA. Not sure how true this is.</p>
<p>Is WPI still on the list? They guarantee at least $20K to Val and sal as well as NMF. They do things a little differently with four 7 week terms (rather than 2 semesters) where students take 3 pretty intense classes per term. They also focus heavily on projects, with 3 rather large, typically cooperative, projects required for graduation. Most students do at least 1 abroad. Job and grad school placement is excellent. The term system and projects definitely aren’t for everyone, but for those for whom the school is a good fit, it’s an excellent choice.</p>
<p>Just confirming that merit aid at Georgia Tech seems hard to come by. My son was offered nothing at GT, so Case Western and RPI were cheaper. GT does allow transfer of more AP/early college credit, if that matters. RPI caps Credit you can transfer in at 32.</p>
<p>Merit aid at Georgia Tech is holistic, scores and grades help you get to be a semi-finalist. At the finalist stage, it is much more about the whole student with an interview, recommendations and EC’s. Most of the students at GT have high grades and scores, so they are looking for student leaders and kids that get involved on campus. So to keep saying a high score/ high GPA got nothing is misleading as a more involved student( and slightly lower stats) with good recommendations could receive generous merit aid.</p>
<p>BillysDad, Thanks for letting us know of your experience. NEU will be on our list of schools to apply to. RPI was problematic for us because of its location, she would like to be at a school an hour or less away from a major city (translation: airport with many flight possibilities). </p>
<p>GTech and Ohio State are schools that we thought were generous with instate and the few superstars OOS but we will look into it. </p>
<p>With all the great ideas on this thread, we will have to work to keep the list to around 10.</p>
<p>That sounds like a reasonable restriction. (For us, the extended family near RPI was a perk that compensated.) </p>
<p>For families that live in a city with direct flights from Albany, I’ll note that a few years ago on summer tour we learned there are special shuttle buses to/from the airport at break times. </p>
<p>For travel logistics, Northeastern can’t be beat. Students can take the T right from campus to Logan Airport. The only restriction we found was that the T does not run til 5:30am - we ruled out very early morning flights. Boston is one of the cities where public transit is more dependable for time estimates than driving.</p>
This may be the case for Northeastern, but I think it is worth repeating that many schools that offer merit aid have application deadlines that are quite early in order to be considered for scholarships, making them EA in practice if not also in name.</p>
<p>For example, the University of South Carolina has a November 15 application deadline to be eligible for scholarships, many of which are very generous to OOS students.</p>
<p>Results from accepted student threads can also show that EA students get more merit aid, although admittedly it is hard to say decisively if the application pools are equal in quality between EA and RD.</p>
<p>Does anyone know if WPI ever matches merit offers from other schools and if so which schools? My DS’14 is quite interested, but my DS’11 found that even with a very generous merit scholarship, their net cost remained quite high.</p>
<p>Echoing an earlier mention of Lafayette. OP’s stated stats make the Marquis Scholarship, which is $20k, seem very feasible. Lafayette is 90 minutes from two major airports, Newark and Philadelphia, with frequent busses to both airports from a bus station only a couple of blocks from campus.</p>
<p>@mathmomvt - My D got an additional 5K from WPI when she e-mailed them requesting a reconsideration of aid and showing them her (better) merit package from RPI. This brought the 2 schools to within a few hundred dollars of each other in net COA.</p>