@suzy100 My parents aren’t holding me responsible for my undergrad debt because they know I’ll have a lot of graduate debt. It’s not easy for them but it will be manageable.
For help narrowing your group with respect to pre-med, you can see “The Experts Choice: Colleges with Great Pre-med Programs.”
To assist in ordering your fairly heterogeneous choices by selectivity, you can see “The 50 Smartest Colleges in America,” a standardized scoring ranking by Business Insider.
I would start by cutting out of state public universities from your list (except for Michigan, UNC-Chapel Hill and UVA). If your parents are going to pay a premium for a public university, you should get some value added. UMCP, Rutgers, and Penn State don’t seem qualitatively that much better than Bing to justify the upcharge, IMO. Especially, if you intend to pursue med school.
Georgetown requires 3 SAT subject tests, just in case you didn’t know.
As for the rest, you’ve got everything from small LACs to large state universities, urban/rural, spread all over the country. Do you have preferences with respect to weather, distance from home, size of campus/student population, interest in sports, Greek life, etc? Make a list and see if that helps you to narrow it down. Have at least two safeties you really like (both admissions and cost) and then build your list. Ten well-chosen schools should be plenty.
Your undergraduate debt is the least of your worries, some of the schools on your list are over $60,000 per year. You and your parents should start by running the net price calculator on the website for every school on your list. You can usually find a link to each calculator on the school financial aid webpage.
@mamaedefamilia thank you for your response! I really want to go to North Carolina which is why I have Elon, Chapel Hill, Duke, and Wake Forest. My next choice would be DC so GW and Georgetown. The others I just randomly like. I live in a city and go to school in a suburb so location really doesn’t make that huge of a different to me although a campus is a must. I would want to participate in Greek life if the school offered it but it’s not a deciding factor.
@intparent My parents think they will be able to afford it. They make good money… a little more than I originally thought and education comes first to them so I don’t think they’d have a problem spending it on tuition
@merc81 that’s really interesting about colgate… do you think the fact that UNC and UVa are much harder to get into out of state would make a difference?
@a20171 : Yes, it could make a difference. However, your SAT score is currently ~50 points higher than UNC’s 75th percentile – that’s not insignificant. (Whereas for Colgate, you would place within their middle 50th percentile.)
Given that you’re amenable to southern schools with Greek life, you might want to give Alabama a look. They may increase the SAT threshold for the new test format with respect to merit aid consideration. And I’m not sure how your GPA will translate to a 4.0 scale. But there’s a good chance you’d be eligible for significant merit aid there.