Forgive my ignorance. If a family knows they will not qualify for aid (no idea how they calculate EFC, but they certainly pay NO attention to cost of living, housing in particular, and seem to focus on income), are NPC’s on school website of any value?
As far as I can tell, after providing all of the necessary inputs at 10 or so schools, only 1 estimated any merit aid. And many of these are schools I am certain provide merit aid- and this is based on many hours of research here.
Are they a complete waste of time for people in this situation? Should we simply look for COA, assume 5500 in Stafford loans and proceed from there? Apply to schools known to give good merit aid and hope for the best?
Is there a better way to zero down to what schools will cost?
If college’s NPC says “list price”, then it is best to assume that the college will cost list price for you to send your kid there. Any merit scholarships will be a bonus.
Due to the relatively low transparency on how merit scholarships are offered (other than automatic for stats merit scholarships or some such), it is best to consider the merit scholarships to be reaches, even if the college is a match or safety for admission.
I think they are valuable at schools that offer guaranteed merit (or merit without any sort of competition, etc).
My D22 has been accepted at 2 state schools (she only applied to 3) and the NPC’s both indicate the merit she was awarded if I go back and input her info.
D20 applied to a private and her awarded merit was exactly what the NPC indicated. However, they also offered additional merit for students invited to attend a scholarship competition (min guaranteed was $1,000 for attending, but was up to like $10,000) and that was NOT indicated on NPC calculator.
In a strange way, this simplifies things quite a bit. To me, there are then 4 categories- for us at least:
1- very expensive and selective schools (top 50 or so) going to be 70-80k+, and IF you get in, expect to pay full
2- very expensive and less selective privates- going to cost the same, and need to decide whether it is worth the effort to apply in case you get merit. Likely will with stats good enough for
top 50, but a crapshoot - especially at schools that yield manage.
3- out of states- most selective ones will be 50-65 and there will be no aid (UVA, UC, UNC).
Less selective ones will have the MOST transparency on merit of all schools which could bring costs very close, and in some cases less, than in state (Alabama, ASU, Utah for example)
4- in state- I guess this will vary- but we are
Lucky SUNY will be about 30 at all of them.
No. Sounds about right and similar to our search. I probably ran 100 NPC’s and flat out didn’t let my kids apply anywhere that wasn’t affordable - which pretty much eliminated every single reach school for D22 (except the University of Michigan because we are in state).
Less selective privates do tend to offer merit and “institutional grants” (which aren’t tied to your finances - which seemed weird b/c “grant” seems to imply financial need to me, but I guess not always) for good stats - you just have to run NPC’s.
There are also OOS public’s that will offer enough merit to top students to bring things within spitting distance of what residents pay.
What I found for D22 is that she had a ton of options in the 25-35K range (a budget we are comfortable with). They’re weren’t necessarily glamorous options, but she had a lot of choices. She also had options in the 13K - 15K range from our directional state universities, but she was not interested in those schools.
D20 had lower stats and fewer options, but she still had options.
For our son, we set a top number, $200K. Once he figured out what type of experience he wanted to have, we narrowed to schools that met those wants and would be in budget outright, or with likely merit. Ultimately, he was well under budget at every one.
For the most selective schools, yes, I assumed full pay of $70-80k/yr. Same for all University of California system schools (assumed $67k/yr. for OOS.)
As far as other privates and out-of-state publics go — my child applied to schools that did not necessarily automatically award aid based on stats, but we considered them as long as they offered merit aid to a significant number of applicants based on their Common Data Set and we estimated that she would fall within the top 10% of their applicants. Not all results are in yet but, so far, she has received merit from all of them in excess of the average award indicated on the Common Data Set.
This is an important point. Schools don’t offer the same amount to everyone. They offer the most to students qualified to go elsewhere. It helps boost their rankings to lure them in. Even though a 3.9/1450 is extremely respectable, they won’t get the offers a 4.0/1560 will. The CDS holds the key to understanding this.
Towards that end, in estimating what type of merit aid one might get at schools known to give it…
A- if the applicants stats are >75 percentile, assume merit aid
B- If assume merit aid, use the average non need based grant scholarship from CDS
It depends on the selectivity of the school. At a highly competitive school, or for a highly competitive major, it’s much more difficult to predict merit.
CDS can be very misleading too. Take engineering and CS for example. At some schools those are so competitive that it takes hitting the school’s 75th percentile just to get in.
As others have mentioned, that assumption might not hold up, but I think your parameters are good enough to support submitting an application, if interested. At least it was kind of the rule of thumb we used.
Merit might not be forthcoming for various reasons, but I figure it is worth a shot (not completely out of the question).
This would not apply across the board, but you can start to make some buckets or categories.
Duke offers merit aid. It is less than 2 to 3 % that are actually getting it from the sounds of it. And some merit is based on geographic hometown or other specifics.
Furman offers Merit aid and it is a much broader and deeper pool getting generous merit. I have honestly been surprised by the merit awards over the years to wealthy families with non-rockstar stats. Maybe they start asking for annual donations quickly. They go beyond your benchmarks.
UMiami offers merit. And would probably fit within your benchmarks with some creative need aware tiers. There are many full pay from Uber rich families who do not have the stats who get in ED and do not see any merit. Then there are some full pay upper middle class tier who get the average Merit there of around $25,000 off the sticker price because of their high stats - in ED, EA, and RD rounds.
Some schools do require the CSS forms for merit and others do not.
Most in my experience most don’t show merit. Hofstra and Bradley both did.
You have your guaranteed scholarship…right on the website…a Bama. Arizona, UAH, etc. you have your most likely to offer a scholarship…a Miami Ohio, U of SC.
You can glean scholarships from websites like this at privates or even on college websites. For example Ivies and many high end privates are need based only and tell you so.
Best thing to do …let us know type of school (area, size, major and more), stats and we can throw you ideas to investigate that may fit your needs.
My daughter’s school did show merit aid on the NPC, and it was based on scores, gpa, and class rank. One helpful thing about using the NPC was that it showed what she was likely to get, but when the award came out in Feb (back in the day, the FAFSA could not be filed until Jan), it was not the middle award but the lower one. When I questioned it, turned out they did not have the latest ACT score in her file (really turned out she had 2 files going at the school, and it was a mess).
If I had not used the NPC, I would not have known to question the merit amount. there were other things on the NPC that I knew were not correct for us (she was an athlete and at that time couldn’t accept need based aid and athletic aid from the school) but I could make those adjustments.
It was just the base for us. I had to play around with the awards and FA but at least I knew what the school offered.
Going back to one of my questions, can anyone list schools that incorporate merit aid into their NPC?
It would be a great screening tool for us in narrowing down where to apply.
Said differently, if a school shows no merit on their NPC, I’d rather skip it altogether than feed them another application (and all of the work involved) to boost their selectivity.
Hi - We used this strategy to predict merit aid for D21, and the actual amounts came in very close to our best guesses for all of her schools.
One caveat with your formula is that I wouldn’t assume ‘B’. Merit aid is very tiered: the higher the stats, the higher the merit. And lots of schools given ‘token’ merit to lots of students, especially as you go farther down the rankings.
Therefore, I don’t think the ‘average’ amount is a very useful number. Instead, just ask the admissions departments (not financial aid) what your kid might expect. They won’t promise anything, but told us things like: “The top merit award (Presidential or whatever) is usually given to students with and GPA and SAT/ACT scores of xyz”, so we had a very good idea of what D21 would get.
My daughter’s school that showed merit on its NPC is Florida Tech. The merit awards change all the time there (there are new ones and some that have gone away) but I think the main one is there. You can also look on the webpage to find other awards that you might get. For example, there is an award for being an eagle scout/girl scout gold award that may not show up on the NPC, and there is an award for having gone to a STEM high school.