<p>My son's all-safety strategy may be of some interest to future applicants...</p>
<p>He applied to 10 schools. All are academic safety but very strong in his major. One (the in-state flagship) is also a financial safety. He treated the full-ride merit scholarships at these schools as his "reach", and the partial scholarships and honors programs as his "match".</p>
<p>His results: 1 reach and 9 matches.</p>
<p>So, why did he take this approach? When he was still a sophomore, we sat him down and went over the college finance with him: COA, EFC, FAFSA, CSS, need-blind, full-need, etc. We told him we would not qualify for need-based aid. We would give him $80,000 in total, and we would not co-sign any loans. He could finance the rest with scholarship, internship, co-op, summer job, campus job, paid research, his own student loan, etc. It's all up to him where to go and how to structure the finance.</p>
<p>He soon decided he didn't even want to visit the elite schools like the Ivies. That saved us a ton of time :)</p>
<p>This strategy may be of some value to families not qualified for need-based aid but not exactly "cost-blind", either. Remember, if you can't afford a school (and it doesn't give merit aid), it's already a rejection! Don't waste time even thinking about it.</p>
<p>Even if they are all admissions safeties, only those that are sure to be affordable at list price or with guaranteed-for-stats merit scholarships would be actual safeties. The others would be assessed as reach or match depending on how difficult getting the scholarships are.</p>
<p>This is a great approach for families that can not afford their EFC for any number of reasons. It might be prudent to invest education $ wisely for post graduate studies. </p>
<p>However, problems may arise if there are no academically reputable flagship universities in one’s own state, which might impact on campus recruiting & employability after graduation. Thanks for sharing.</p>
Perhaps the title of the thread should have been All-Safety Admission strategy, but I think this is a very credible strategy. One assured financial safety with the potential for better financial news. Well done.</p>
<p>We did the eact same thing as the OP, identified a list of safety schools in the $20 - 25,000 per year range by utilizing NPCs and looking at automatic scholarship amounts. We could not afford to pay our EFC so we did not look at any private schools where the cost off attrndance was much over $40,000 per year. Our thinking was that a large merit award would bring the COA down to our range. This required us to only look at safeties. Son weanted a large school with decent programs in archaeology, geograpy/geology, and econ.</p>
<p>We settled on U Wyoming, Montana State, U Montana, U MN, Iowa State and Iowa (instate for us), Arizona State U, U Nebraska, and Kansas U. All would have been within our budget.</p>
<p>Indeed, isn’t such a strategy* pretty much required if your AFC + ASC is significantly less than what colleges’ financial aid offices will calculate for your EFC + ESC, meaning that colleges that give need-based financial aid only will be unaffordable even if they “meet full need”?</p>
<p>Of course, the true safeties in this case would be the colleges that are affordable at list price, or with guaranteed scholarships deducted from the list price. (But watch out for unreasonably high college GPAs needed to keep the scholarships.)</p>
<p>*Except that there may be some colleges that are match (not safety) for admissions where the student may have a realistic chance at a large enough merit scholarship – such colleges may be included on the list as reaches.</p>
<p>^ It’s certainly what many long-time posters advocate but it’s by no means what often happens. How many threads have we seen stating “I only need $9K more to attend my dream school” with no other options on the table?</p>
<p>I did the same thing, and it worked out pretty well for me. I only applied to one top school (Emory, because of the Woodruff Scholars program - a boy from my high school got a full ride to there the year before me. He’s a doctor now) and the rest of the schools I applied to were good, decent colleges/universities that I knew I would be eligible for substantial merit aid from. The result was that in April I was comparing financial aid packages. I got admitted everywhere I applied, and I got at least full tuition everywhere I applied. I ended up taking a full-merit scholarship to a great LAC.</p>
<p>I think this could be a great strategy for middle-class kids whose parents can’t afford the entire EFC. Although I think if the family thinks there’s even a small chance they may be offered sufficient aid at need-blind, full-need schools, they may want to consider applying there. NPCs will help with that determination. Also, the student needs to be okay with the idea of essentially being a big fish in a small pond (although they may be surprised at their actual relative “size” to the rest of the student body. Although I was the top admittee to my class the year I applied, I did feel consistently challenged at my LAC, and I grew a lot. The academic work was pretty easy, but I grew in other ways.)</p>
<p>Something to consider with scholarships is whether a specific college GPA is needed to keep the scholarship.</p>
<p>For example, if a scholarship is needed to afford to attend the college, and it requires a 3.5 GPA to keep, then that is effectively the GPA needed to avoid “flunking out” (financially) of that college.</p>
<p>Yes, I know. It would be quite wasteful to apply to 10 true safeties. As I said, only the in-state flagship was both academic and financial safety. The rest were just academic safety.</p>
<p>Someone asked about how he came up with the actual list. He was interested in three engineering majors. He researched the schools that were top-15 in at least one of those majors, and had much lower average stats than his. For the rankings, he considered many sources but relied more on the USNWR undergrad and graduate rankings. For the stats, he used the common data sets and picked the schools where his stats were well above the 75% mark in all categories. Then, it’s a matter of how likely he might get a merit scholarship, and CC proved to be a very useful research tool for that. Of course, the elusive “fit” was also a consideration.</p>
<p>He actually didn’t focus too much on the guaranteed scholarships because he already had a financial safety. He wanted the best school he could still afford, and not necessarily the school that would give him the most money. In hindsight, maybe we shouldn’t have told him he already had $80K in hand, but we really wanted him to have ALL the facts so he could decide what’s best for him.</p>
<p>We took this strategy and our result is 8 full tuition/cost of attendance scholarships (3 were guaranteed for National Merit Finalist because we wanted choices in case nothing out came through), 2 half tuition, 3 acceptances with no scholarship. 11 of the schools are top 100 in USNWR. Stats: 35 ACT, 780 SAT 2 Physics & Math 2, valedictorian (out of 500), engineering major. We were crisscrossing the country interviewing for these scholarships and luckily got great results.</p>
<p>Out of curiosity, for those who have pursued this approach: how would you modify it (if at all?) for a liberal arts student who doesn’t have a well-determined major in mind? I know that my state university and financial safety had only an average program in my intended major at the time, and didn’t offer what would turn out to be my actual major (only as a concentration). I’m sure I would have grown in non-academic ways and made the best of my experience, if I had gone there, but it would certainly not be an ideal choice for my personal academic trajectory.</p>
<p>For liberal arts, I would start with that “Colleges that Change Lives” book and follow up with state liberal arts colleges like Geneseo in New York and St. Mary’s of Maryland.</p>
<p>CRD…your post is quite insulting. You don’t know this family’s situation. Many people don’t qualify for aid (or enough aid) but that doesn’t mean that they have “plenty of money” or that they don’t value education.</p>
<p>I paid for private K-12 education for my kids. I would never say that those who used the public system as not valuing education.</p>
<p>Perhaps I read more into what the OP said than I should have. But perhaps not. </p>
<p>80K is a lot less than the 240K that private school actually costs. That seems like a very small amount for someone that doesn’t qualify for need based aid.</p>
<p>I can understand not being able to afford 240K, but 80K for someone making close to 200K, which is what a family would need to make to not qualify for ANY need based aid at a top private.</p>