@MAandMEmom No my husband’s school is not a member of CIC. i will also add that for each school I contacted the relevant officer and asked for the stats on admission, and how they evaluated candidates. One impetus for this thread is that the schools appeared to accept many fewer students than in previous years. Of course I only had a small sample – hence my interest to see if this is occurring more widely.
I do agree that the high price of tuition is a squeeze even for tenured academics, which is why we are seeing an increase in TE applications.
Sorry I didn’t read this thread thoroughly but why would Admission Offices restrict TE recipients? TE funds are ‘free’ money to them. They don’t come out of the FA budget. They are part of a schools HR budget. AOs are going to be told how many TE spots they can offer and they are going to be happy to offer that many.
My D went through TE this year. After being approved by my work she got it at 2 schools so far - USCali and BU. USCali is the best because they stack it with Merit Aid. Apparently anyone that gets into USC gets it because they have more employee’s kids going out than they do coming in. My D’s Merit +TE at USC is better than their top named scholarships. She did not get it at Pitt but she did get a FT scholarship anyway - we are in-state. It makes sense for them to offer it to OOS people because that’s more funds coming in than for an IS student. She didn’t get it from Fordham but got a FT Merit aid which is better.
@Dolemite Thanks for your experience. I didn’t know that TE comes out of the HR budget – Do you happen to know if that is true at every school or just some schools? If HR controls the slots at every school, my assumption is that the only pressure on keeping up a certain number of slots for the exchange would be to not get such an imbalance that a school is kicked off the exchange.
Tuition Remission is an employee benefit. Tuition Exchange is just tuition remission exchange. I can’t speak to know the absolute at every university/college that has tuition exchange but generally speaking employee benefits come out of the HR budget. If my child were to attend the university where I work - HR would send money to the academic side for my child.
@MAandMEmom CIC requires the importing school to award just 3 new scholarships a year. Of course the institution can choose to offer more. The schools on that list tend to be smaller and less selective’ however, the award is full tuition, and schools can use whatever criteria they choose to make their awards. While admission to many cic schools is easier, getting the tuition exchange award definitely is not.
My hubby will about kill me if we are not able to take advantage of either program as I suggested he move positions from a nearby state U… I’m at a state institution too but the fees outstrip the tuition something like 10 times over.
@MAandMEmom Yes I guess my point was my son is doing better on straight merit then at TE – for example, just got merit at CMU. I kind of wish I had spent less time worry about the exchange, and more time strategically thinking about merit.
Now granted, he is applying for more competitive schools.I think there are still schools around that give TE to most or all applicants. Perhaps HR departments should demand data from schools of exactly how many TE slots are filled each year. That would be a lot more informative than giving a broad ranged like “10-40%”, especially of these percentages are not accurate.
My son applied and was admitted to 8 TE schools. He is offered TE at 5, rejected at 1 (the most selective), wait listed at 1, and still waiting to hear from 1. He is very happy with one of his offers. I think TE worked for us because he applied to a diverse group of institutions. I would encourage applicants to apply to 8-10 schools and make sure there are some out of state, some with a gender dominance that is different than your child, and perhaps some where they are trying to build a program for which your child is applying. Schools want to diversity their admit pool and this is an easy way for them to do it. I believe a male engineering student will not get an offer at a male-dominated in-state engineering school unless he is a superstar. Also, if you have just 1 kid, don’t build your career around this benefit. It’s only worth it if you have 2+ kids. When all is said and done, it really is only $35K less the $20K in merit he would have received = $15K x 4 years = $60K. Save your money.
We have three kids and we both work in higher ed so we’re hopefully going to make the numbers work. Some of the schools do offer full tuition so the value would be higher. A few also include room. They are lower on the ranking scale of course.
I do recall reading here that Syracuse takes all TE applicants who are admitted in case this helps anyone.
@psycholing , I think you are being kind of harsh to people who are trying to offer their own experiences, knowing that historically there are not that many TE people on here who can answer. I think @InigoMontoya was just trying to be helpful. This is a stressful process, I am finding, and it sounds like you are too. It also sounds as though it’s been successful for your son, so far, so that’s great.
My daughter applied TE for three schools this year and received it at all three, but she does have high stats and it’s our first child through, so it’s hard to judge if it’s especially difficult this year or not. On the Tuition Exchange website, the %’s ranged from <10% to 11-40%, but when I asked each TE Liaison the number that were awarded, they each gave me a number indicating 10% or lower.
Of those three schools, prior to being awarded the TE Scholarship, she was offered merit in the amounts of $13,000 (UDel); $15,000 (Pitt); and $27,000 (WPI). The first two were equal to around 50% tuition, the second about 65%. Now, with TE, we are looking at two full-tuition scholarships and one 75% off tuition offer. So, TE is definitely a good thing for us.
@mageecrew would you mind terribly sharing some general stats on your student? My kids are still young-ish and I want to make certain I target the right schools. I know that WPI might be out for my son but Wentworth could be an option.
@MAandMEmom Sure… she is a female in engineering, 35ACT (36M, 36E, 35R, 34S), Nat’l Merit Finalist, 95.5% gpa, normal ECs with a couple leadership roles, 8 APs. I was nervous about the schools we picked as far as the competitiveness of the TE scholarships, but she only ended up applying to the three because she had enough other options already: she would have been happy to attend the school I work at and she also had a couple of large National Merit scholarships at other schools.
@psycholing – my D is eligible for TE through my husband’s workplace. She applied to 3 engineering schools that are TE participants and received TE from 2 of them. However, as you mentioned in your original post, D’s stats were high enough that she would have (or did) receive about the same amount of merit aid. Her ACT was 35, and her UW GPA 4.0. She’s salutatorian of her class.
She had applied to Drexel and received merit equal to a $2k more than TE. They did not offer her TE.
D applied and was accepted to WPI with $31k merit. We just received a letter the other day that they were replacing that with TE.
D applied to Stevens Institute of Technology and recently got her acceptance. Her financial aid award included a TE scholarship.
I can’t comment on how competitive TE is for 2017-2018 vs. previous years, as this is my only child going to college. I can say though, that I think TE has an advantage as there is no GPA requirement to keep the TE, and it is adjusted every year or so (3-5%) to adjust for increasing tuition costs.
D has not chosen which school she will attend, but we feel that overall Stevens or WPI will have a lower COA over her time in undergraduate school – since it will possibly increase at least once over her time in school. The Drexel award will not, and it is the most expensive of the 3 schools she is considering.
@InigoMontoya – We did the same thing. D applied to several schools she was interested in attending, but made sure to include a few that offer TE scholarships. As it turns out, 2 of her favorite colleges actually are TE participating schools! That helped a lot. And it has also turned out that those are included in her “final 3” still in the running as she makes that big decision.
@OCNYmom, my daughter has TE from American University and they treat it as any other scholarship and require her to maintain at least 3.25 GPA in order to keep it. I’m pretty sure my younger daughter’s school requires she meet a minimum GPA to maintain her TE as well. Don’t know if these school are outliers but I bet many if not most schools do the same, so that is something for families to take into account when accepting these awards.
Good luck to your daughter on her school selection.
Thanks for your continued input everyone. The only update I have is that it sounds like no one from my spouse’s college was offered a TE scholarship this year – not sure what that means to the overall picture.
Interestingly, we were offered as much money as we would get from TE under financial aid at a very good LAC.
So, from my perspective there are only certain circumstances in which TE confers a significant advantage.
Situations in which TE is most useful:
The student is ineligible or minimally eligibile for financial aid
The student has tippy top scores (of the type that would get merit most places that have merit), but they are applying to a TE-eligible school which offer minimal merit.
The student applies to a program that allows the stacking of merit and TE.
In our particular case, I would have spent a lot less time worrying about TE and more time seeking high-merit schools had I known last year what I know now.
@OCNYmom & @myjanda Sounds like the GPA requirement varies a great deal from school to school. If I am remembering correctly, Pitt has a 2.5 GPA requirement, Delaware a 2.0, and WPI no requirement. So, my daughter really lucked out :). I know some of the merit she received from non-TE schools required 3.0 or higher. Of course, I hope she’ll do well with her grades, but it’s nice knowing that extra pressure is not there.
Our situation turned out similar to yours, @OCNYmom : she has narrowed it down to her top three of eight schools, and it turns out all three are the TE schools. We’re finishing up the accepted student visits in the next two weeks and then decision time! Good luck to your daughter with her decision!
@psycholing I do know TE was definitely worth it for us, though I’m glad we used the same approach some of the other posters did here and applied to a mix of schools: TE, non TE, schools with automatic merit scholarships, etc. That really worked out well for us. She ended up with a wonderful package at Alabama (almost full-ride); and a couple great offers at other non TE schools that we knew tended to give good merit. That way she had a lot of good, affordable choices in front of her.
One thing we like about TE over most any need based aid/merit mix is that it is a guarantee for four years whereas you can’t count on need based aid staying steady each year. That gets reevaluated every year based on your latest FAFSA, and can be reduced or eliminated.