My daughter is a Junior right now. We live in Florida and she has a 3.9 UW and 4.69 W and a 1460 SAT. Will graduate 9 AP & 4 AICE & the rest honors. We have Florida prepaid with 4 years of tuition, 4 years of fees and 1 year of dorms. She also was 100% bright futures. The plan is UF or FSU. BUT, she is dying to go out of state. Are there any schools that would give her enough merit to make my out of pocket similar to the cost of staying in state? Probably less than 10k all in, per year. I assume the only way to do it would be to go to a school that has a much lower ranking? UF/FSU is a no brainer to me, but I feel bad not looking into other options.
You’d need your D to essentially be awarded full tuition or full ride scholarships OOS to bring the cost in line with what she has available here in FL (I’m in Orlando). These tend to be very competitive, of course, but your D could be in line for one (though don’t assume so). Start visiting college and university websites. All have scholarship pages. Not all schools will have full tuition/full ride merit awards, so it’s important that you create a list of schools that are OOS and that your D might be competitive for in terms of those large merit scholarships.
For instance, the U of Alabama has an award valued at 26K per year for OOS students whose GPA is 3.5+ and whose ACT score is 32 or higher. But that’s not full tuition or full ride; it simply knocks 26K off the sticker price of COA for an OOS kid.
But there are schools out there. I doubt that your daughter wants to attend the U of Akron, where the graduation rate is 38%, but she’d probably receive a full ride there (a kid on YouTube received a full ride for her 33 ACT and A-ish GPA). Find those schools! Don’t waste time applying OOS to any places that do not have full tuition or full ride scholarships (unless you’re comfortable paying more than you would in FL).
Oh, and if your D is open to small schools, LACs sometimes have significant merit money to hand out, though you’d still have to identify which ones have FT/FR awards. Agnes Scott, a women’s college outside Atlanta, has some attractive FT and FR scholarships.
try university of vermont and miami university of ohio.
I kinda just want her to maybe apply to one or two just so she can say she tried. I’m guessing none of the schools that would give her full tuition would be even close to UF in prestige.
She has the a high stat gpa but need to boost her test scores for merit that is similar to her current merit for UF. I know that might not sound fair, but the UF price and quality will be very hard to beat. Maybe she could go out of state for grad school.
<10k on merit alone is extremely difficult. In my DS’s search, we found that It is very difficult to get below $30k/year at an LAC in the 20-100 range. He got a full tuition from Fordham, but that is still 20k. USC would also be 20k with a FT scholarship. You either need a full COA or a full tuition+ low R&B.
The prepaid amount is of course yours to use at any school you want (or she could save for grad school). If she were to get a big scholarship OOS, she could use the FPP to pay for room and board or other costs.
As it stands now with BF paying the tuition you’ve already paid for, she’ll actually MAKE money by going to school in Florida. They’ll use FPP for the full cost of tuition, room for first year, and fees, and you’ll get a check back for BF tuition and the book stipend. All you’ll pay for is meals the first year and rent and food the following years.
How badly does she want to get out of Florida? My daughter did too, and she went to Wyoming! Schools like Utah, South Dakota, Montana all have very good merit aid, but they are a little colder than UF.
Arizona publishes an automatic merit chart and she would get 30K. That is the highest I saw. But, she would be going to a lower ranked school and paying more. I think she will end up at UF or FSU and be very happy once she is there. She has no idea how lucky we are to have such great and affordable options.
Leaving Florida doesn’t make sense for your D. Her SAT makes the “worth it” full tuition/full rides a very long shot. I would recommend she stay in state.
Southeast Missouri State
University of Nebraska at Kearney
University of Central Arkansas
Would all be automatically in that price range.
Lots of other directional Midwest schools in the middle of nowhere 
I can find more…
Will be showing my D this post and I think she will agree to stay in state!!