Thank you all! I wass looking for both to see what top-tier schools I may have a chance at as well as places with some merit aid opportunities. All of your advice was really helpful . @aquapt I’m particularly surprised that there are some schools that consider Asians URM, and I’m grateful to know what colleges tend to be a bit more generous with merit aid.
Well, I would doublecheck about Lehigh, because I think the Asian URM bump is something that could disappear at any time, as demographics shift. But they’re in Pennsylvania Dutch country in PA; one Asian friend who lived there decades ago when her spouse was on the faculty told me that she drove around for hours once looking (to no avail) for a store with black bobby pins, because nobody there had black hair! Another Asian friend in San Jose confirmed to me that her Chinese-American daughter was indeed invited to the Diversity Weekend at Lehigh a few years ago. (Clearly Chinese surname, so confusion was unlikely.) I can’t imagine this is going to last forever, but I haven’t heard yet that it has changed. It’s definitely unusual for being Asian to confer an advantage, but Lehigh is still at only 8.5% Asian (8.6% Latino, 3.5% Black) so I guess it’s still plausible. (FWIW, Lafayette College, another very selective school only 15 miles away, is only 4% Asian… and they don’t count Asians as URM as far as I know.)
My own Eurasian daughter was asked by her guidance counselor to apply for a diversity event at Reed College in 2016. I’m still dubious that this wasn’t a mistake, but so they said! (No merit aid there, though, and no business-y majors either, though the math-econ is good.)
Anyway, good luck with your search!
Thank you all!!
If you continue to develop your interest in LACs, then highly placed colleges from this analysis of faculty scholarship in economics might offer you suitable choices: https://ideas.repec.org/top/top.uslacecon.html.
Furman, Centre or Elon might be good fits. You should check them out.