What are some good schools with generous merit aid?

Paying for College
21

@CourtneyThurston @mom2collegekids again, thank you for saying that, it was really helpful. I’ve already applied to ASU and am working on my barrett application, I just have this odd and probably unjustified desire to leave Arizona. However, comparing Bama and ASU, ASU would be cheaper and often has higher rankings in their engineering departments, so I see no reason to apply to Bama (correct me if I’m wrong).

My main question still remains that I’m at the point where I have to decide where I’m going to apply, as applications are due by 1/1. This is a pretty pressing question, as all those essays I’ll be writing are no joke. Currently, I’ve constructed this list of colleges that I’m strongly considering applying to.

Already applied:
ASU
Stanford (REA)

Strongly Considering:
Caltech
Georgia Tech
Penn
USC
Yale
Duke
UWashington
MIT
Berkeley
UCLA
Vanderbilt

Considering:
Brown
Carnegie Mellon
Columbia
Princeton
UMichigan

As you can see, these are mostly private engineering-focused schools, most of which I would pay my EFC or more (so around 40k/y). I list so many because they each have such low acceptance rates, and I’m hoping to just be accepted to a few.

That being said, if I do get into one of these, I’m left with the decision of whether or not to attend, given the price tag. Let’s say I pay 35k/y - I’d graduate from undergrad with 100k in student debt, which is pretty high.

The reason I’m considering going into that much debt is the statistics that I see - many of these schools have an average salary upon graduation of 70k+, which is substantial compared to the salaries of 40-50k of my safeties like ASU.

Should I apply to these schools and just see what they offer me? Or would I be wasting my time?

All I want is to make the most of this single life I’m given. I want to take Computer Science or whatever I do far, and not feel like I’m settling for less. However, I suppose another question I’m asking is whether or not choosing the affordable option is settling.

Do I apply to these schools? Are there any that stand out as good options? Bad?

All I want is the brightest future for myself, but this college selection process is unbelievably confusing and difficult.

Again, thank you for reading.

22

IMO, go for your cheapest option for CS. You’ll be very employable and don’t need the debt.

If you want to try for some reach schools, for CS, I would shoot for CalTech, MIT, GT, and CMU.

23

@momofsenior1 Thank you!

24

I feel like maybe you haven’t read my posts at all.

25

Let’s start with the facts. You have excellent stats but you also have a VERY top heavy list of schools…and many don’t give a dime of merit aid. I’m putting my comments after each school.

ASU…good choice and likely going to be affordable…but not guaranteed affordable.
Stanford (REA)…how are you going to pay? No merit aid at this school.

Strongly Considering:
Caltech…no merit aid

Georgia Tech…very Competitive merit aid

Penn…no merit aid

USC…merit aid but competitive.

Yale…no merit aid

Duke…merit aid but competitive.

UWashington…competitive merit aid.

MIT…no merit aid

Berkeley…no aid at all for OOS students. Really…plan to pay the full $65,000 a year cost of attendance.

UCLA…no aid for OOS students. Plan to be full pay.

Vanderbilt…competitive merit aid.

Considering:
Brown…no merit aid

Carnegie Mellon…very competitive merit aid

Columbia…no merit aid

Princeton…no merit aid

UMichigan…very VERY limited merit aid to OOS students.

So…how are you planning to pay for these colleges where NO…and I mean NO merit aid is offered? If your EFC is $40,000 a year, these schools are going to expect you to pay $40,000 a year. The OOS publics on your list will likely expect you to pay more.

You need to be a little more realistic innterms of vetting your list. You have the stats to be a competitive applicant for admission…but schools that don’t give merit aid are not going to give it to you. And they are going to expect your family to pay their family contrition.

Remember also, the private schools on your list require the Profile in addition to the FAFSA (except Princeton which uses its own form). Have you run the net price calculators for these colleges? Are they affordable? You may find that they expect you to pay MORE ore year than $40,000.

You asked why you should apply to Alabama? I’ll answer that…because it’s nice to have a couple of affordable choices from which to choose. And you would hear back very quickly in terms of acceptance as well as scholarship money. Wouldn’t it be nice to have an affordable acceptance in the bag?

26

for all the reasons that @CourtneyThurston mentioned is why my very high stats ds18 picked UT Dallas over UT Austin and other top ranked schools for CS.

27
  1. Remember that MIT denied a kid who built a nuclear reactor in his garage. Your list – even schools like UCLA and USC, which you may not consider as competitive, but are EXTREMELY competitive for engineering – is comprised 100% of schools that are hard to get into, even for kids with perfect stats (minus ASU).

Recommendation: You need to apply to less selective schools. Either in combination with your current list or in place of some schools on the current list. Do I have recommendations on which schools to rule out? No; shoot a dart at your list and cut it. These schools are basically all equally good.

  1. The much bigger problem here is that you cannot afford any of these schools (except ASU). That’s just the honest truth based on the financial info you’ve given. No, to directly answer your question, none of these OOS publics will make it 10k a year or less for you. And no, these privates will not shell out huge financial aid to a high EFC family (not enough to bring it to 10k a year or less – or even, I would bet, anywhere near that). Not even the Ivies.

I very much expect that with this current list, you’re going to get to the spring with maybe a few acceptances (who knows how many: could be 0, could be all of them, whatever) but 0 affordable schools (other than ASU).

Recommendation: This means you need to apply to schools that are affordable. This means (a) in-state schools AND (to have a safe plan) (b) schools where your stats are well into the tippy top percentiles and will guarantee you merit. This is why everyone is furiously recommending Alabama.

  1. I’m trying to be compassionate here because statistics is a 300 or 400 level mathematics course at most universities for a reason (at least, the legitimate statistics class is). Statistics are hard to understand and interpret correctly, especially for a panicking high school senior (I was once you). I get that.

HOWEVER.

I highly suspect you know as well as I do that your use of those graduation salary statistics is (a) wildly misinformed and (b) wildly misinterpreted.

Let me dissolve the idea that I think is at the core of your misunderstanding here: the idea that the college makes the person.

It doesn’t.

A student that would truly be successful at the schools on your list will be successful ANYWHERE, and I will die on that hill.

That’s the first statistical error here: I think you think that people get those high salaries because they went to school X. They don’t. They get them because they, as a person, developed and cultivated the skills and attitude to get job Y. These are likely the very same reasons the person got into school X in the first place, hence the correlation.

That’s it: a correlation. Not causation.

You have the true order of things reversed.

Like I said… I think you know as well as I do that your 40k statistic is not true, either. I suspect you googled an overall ASU salaries statistic and not the one for computer science. That would be like googling school rankings, seeing that Yale is higher than Stanford, and assuming it’s better for CS. It’s not. You need to look by field.

(A very quick cursory Google search tells me the cs graduating salaries at ASU are actually above the 70 range).

I’m trying very hard not to be obnoxious by filling this post with personal anecdotes (again), but you seem to really not believe me that a tippy top school is really just A Nice Thing To Have and not a Critical CS Life Thing To Have (it is the former, and not the latter).

I’ll say this: on my team alone, at my future company (I also interned there), there are graduates from three schools on your list, among other top schools from around the world. Those three people gave me salary negotiation advice. I know now, after the fact, that my initial offer is significantly more than theirs.

Me. The kid from the unranked school. U N R A N K E D. Not at the top of the list, not at the middle of the list, not even at the bottom of the list. So unremarkable in computer science that we AREN’T ON THE LIST AT ALL.

You might think “Well, you’re the exception.”

No: I’m a kid like you. I would have been successful anywhere. At MIT, at an unranked school, wherever. Nothing about the school I went to was ever going to change that. I simply wouldn’t let it.

I recommend you do the same, and continue being great somewhere you can afford.

28

@3scoutsmom A random fun-fact that no one cares about: my first internship team was made up on interns from Harvard, UMich, and UT Dallas (and me). So I know what you’re saying is true. I hung with the top dogs from the top schools, and so did the girl from UT Dallas. It affected us in no discernable way, and all four of us (the three of them were 1 year older than me) have all gone on to wildly successful careers that financially differ in no discernable way in terms of salary.

29

@CourtneyThurston @thumper1
I totally read your posts, and I apologize if it appeared that I didn’t understand. I’ve just grown up with the ideology that getting into better universities is better for your future, so I’ve been stressing out about that forever. It’s hard for me to accept what you’re saying - that the university you attend doesn’t make a huge difference - because I’ve put in so much to get to where I am. From where I am, ASU is the college for the mediocre; anyone can and will get in, it has a reputation for just being a party school where people don’t really learn or further themselves as individuals. I’m also not a very big fan of Arizona itself, and was looking out of state in the first place.

I’ve spent all of high school pushing myself… so hard… and it just feels like going for the schools with high acceptance rates was sort of a waste. Obviously, I’ve learned far more than my peers along the way and will be more prepared for college, but something kept telling me that I had to get into these top-dog schools. The voice in the back of my head keeps telling me to find something affordable for undergrad and take up those top-dogs for grad school, but I’m still not sure.

How do the tens of thousands of people at these top universities afford it? Certainly, they can’t all be poor enough for full-rides, and they can’t all be wealthy enough for it to be “affordable”. Doesn’t there have to be a middle-class student body, with people like myself? Are they just all in hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt?

I COMPLETELY understand what you’re saying, I’m asking these questions to extract as much info as possible, and I seriously appreciate everything that you’re informing me of. College is a big decision to make, and I just want to make the right one.

30

There are plenty of other options with competitive merit scholarships that don’t require NMF. Utah is just one of the options if you want to get out of Arizona and offers 30 full ride scholarships per year.

As @CourtneyThurston points out, the top students in less well known schools go on to great things, and actually receive more support and find it easier to stand out. So for example the top math student at Utah has won a Churchill scholarship (only 15 are awarded in the whole US) in 3 of the last 4 years (https://unews.utah.edu/university-of-utah-student-awarded-prestigious-churchill-scholarship-3/)

31

I suppose, to summarize, this is the ultimate-super-grand question I have:

I worked extremely hard. I got the 4.737 GPA, the top rank, the almost perfect SAT score, the AP tests, the hardest schedules possible, all of the clubs, everything.

What is the absolute best way for me to actually utilize what I did? I feel like if I go to ASU, it all went down the drain. But maybe that’s my best bet. I have no idea, I’m just a high school student in a school where no one applies anywhere except the in-states, so I really know nothing. I want the best, affordable education for CS/Engineering that I can possibly get. If you truly think that ASU or something like BAMA are my best options, I’d love to know. If there are some other good options, I’m open to hearing those too.

I’m still going to apply to MIT and Caltech, cause they’re my dreams, and I wouldn’t mind paying my EFC for them. Odds tell me I won’t get in, so doesn’t really matter anyways.

I think I’ll still apply to at least Carnegie Mellon, UIUC, GT, Vandy, and USC.

Also, I have a friend from last year that attends UCLA and is (only) paying 30k/y. Her sister also would’ve (only) needed to pay 30k/y for UCSD; they said they are only paying the out-of-state tuition. This confuses me, because their family makes about twice what mine does. If you’re saying the UC schools will expect me to pay full tuition, why don’t they have to?

It’s just a lot of conflicting ideas hitting me right now, and I’m not sure what to think. Your feedback, however, is invaluable and I can’t thank you enough.

32

IMO the absolute best way to take advantage of your achievements and respect the financial constraints you are under would be to spend your efforts on applying to schools with competitive merit scholarships. Some of those are ultra competitive (UVA Jefferson, Duke Robertson, USC Trustee), some just very competitive (e.g. Utah Eccles, NC State Park). Apply to some auto merit schools like Alabama too.

But don’t waste your time and money applying to unaffordable schools, it will detract from the time you could devote to applications for schools you could actually attend. Then you might actually have choices in April rather than frustration and arguments with your parents about money.

33

@Twoin18 Makes sense, thank you.

34

“What is the absolute best way for me to actually utilize what I did? I feel like if I go to ASU, it all went down the drain.”

It may feel like this as a 17 or 18 year old, but it is not the case.

Step 1 of training to be an engineer: make rational decisions based on the evidence, not on your feelings.

35

“and I wouldn’t mind paying my EFC for them. Odds tell me I won’t get in, so doesn’t really matter anyways.”

Problem is, you CAN’T pay your EFC. Your parents said 40k total, and you cannot legally take that much out in loans by yourself.

You would need a qualified adult (them) to co-sign… and it sounds like they will not (and, frankly, they SHOULD NOT).

36

I suppose someone has already mentioned that you can only borrow $5500 your first year. Combined with the $10k/year from your parents, you need to find a school that only costs you about $15k/year.

So those schools that you want to apply to that cost you $30-$40k per year? Just realize that you won’t be borrowing the difference. Unless there is merit available, you won’t be able to attend even if you get in.

We set a budget for our kids. The $ amount of our budget doesn’t matter. In order to go out of state, they had to chase merit. We don’t qualify for financial aid, so merit was important for both of my kids if they wanted to attend school out of state.

The oldest had a perfect GPA, nearly a perfect SAT, NMSF, various 5s on APs, did research for two summers (one summer was his own project at the local university hospital’s research facilities), captain of cross country team, tons of volunteer hours, etc. Oh, and he took college calculus 2-4, differential equations, linear algebra and real analysis at the local university while he was in high school.

He ended up with a full ride back east. He’s prepping for grad school applications and has an offer to conduct research this summer at one of those fine schools on your list. He holds a job at a consulting firm (works remotely as he has time) and is doing ongoing research at his university (which has led to the summer research offer.) Taking a full ride at a lesser ranked college has cleared his path forward. He’s been able to set himself apart because he has so.many.more opportunities to stand out. He will graduate with money in the bank instead of owing $$$$.

Chasing merit is a smart move. Spending tons of $ on undergrad when you’ve worked so hard in high school is just silly.

37

“He will graduate with money in the bank instead of owing $$$$.”

This is hard to appreciate as a 17 or 18 year old with, presumably, no money. We get that. I get that.

However, as an adult (I barely qualify, but whatever), let me tell you: this is a H U G E benefit you can give yourself in life. I cannot overstate that.

38

Okay, when I get some time I’ll do as much research as I can on colleges with good merit-aid, thank you so much for your help. If you come across or think of some other CS schools with a nice merit aid package, feel free to drop it here. Thank you all!

39

Some schools have November or December deadlines to be considered for merit (especially competitive ones) even when applying for regular decision. Emory is November 15. USC and Vanderbilt have a December 1 deadline this year.

40

Have you looked at Rice?