You ask a good question. There is indeed a type of kid that is not what is called an institutional priority (IP) at Ivy+ and other elite schools. This type of kid has excellent grades and SAT/ACT scores but is not a recruited athlete, not a legacy, not a donor, not a faculty kid, not someone who will boost a school’s reported Pell Grant %, not from an expensive private feeder school, not from a top 1% income family, not from a rural sparsely populated state, not a celebrity or the kid of a celebrity, and has not cured cancer. Kids like this, especially if they can’t afford to risk applying ED, have a vanishingly small chance of admission. Less than 1% at the tippy top schools, I would guess.
So what are the options for kids like this?
I agree with many of the ideas posted above. Each have possible downsides, but many families consider:
Honors programs at your state flagship
OOS flagships that give merit (often South)
Lower tier privates (big and small) that give merit
Schools in Canada and the UK or rarely in continental Europe
Starting at one school and attempting to transfer
Planning on someplace elite for grad school
My piece of advice to families that have a kid who tests maybe at the 95th %ile or above, is to prep for the PSAT in the hopes that your kid makes National Merit. I do think the big merit NMSF/NMF schools can bring together a critical mass of high performing kids. And these types of full rides are prestigious in themselves. Schools like UT-Dallas, University of Tulsa, UCF, Alabama, Maine etc really do value NMSF/NMF kids.
I can assure you that despite being gifted the “full boat” award, NJ is HCOL and paying full price does not come without borrowing against my home.
And I am being fatalistic; I could tell my kids “you can go anywhere your heart desires!” but that doesn’t make it so.
And I can tell you what I’m seeing in my high school in NJ. High performing kids chasing merit in the South. or staying in state. Or even free community college. I think we had one Colgate, and one UMich. A couple of Virginia Techs. By and large, people seem to be eschewing the high cost of a pedigree.
So ultimately I want to identify: which colleges reward merit aid to high achieving students, irrespective of need; and which ones are trending upward in terms of reputation/ranking, as this would be the most prudent of my college dollars.
If cost is not a concern, UMich and UCLA can absolutely be considered. But if family is truly middle class as the thread title states, the 70K+ OOS price tag is probably too much.
It sounds like the OP is asking, “which schools that are ‘buyers’ are doing such a good job of buying high stats/performance kids that a few years from now their reputation will be significantly higher than it is today?“
I think if somebody asked this question 10 years ago, and you were prescient, you would’ve answered Northeastern. I know people say there are shenanigans with the way Northeastern has improved its reputation, but also 10 years ago they gave significantly more merit aid than they do today, because they don’t have to anymore to get a high stats kids they want.
So, which schools today are where Northeastern was 10 years ago, I think the OP wants to know. (personally, I have a lot of reservations with that whole paradigm, but I think that’s where the OP is coming from.)
I agree that University of Chicago is the last Ivy+ that has any realistic admit chances for the type of unhooked student I describe above. But you pretty much MUST apply ED.
Both. I guess a better answer would “the unicorn”: the best school reputationally that offers the most merit aid. Since everyone is pursuing this same goal, i guess, as someone said above, the schools that are “buying students”. The schools probably have the most upside and the least cost.
University of New Mexico is often left off of these lists. The university provides pretty decent guaranteed merit aid, and is a great often not mentioned college.
Yes. Something along those lines. Like based on my own research, if I had to identify schools on the uptrend that give merit aid, I’ve come up with:
Purdue
Florida State
University of South Carolina
Alabama
Trying to find that combination of tolerable cost/reputation.
Conversely, trying to avoid institutions that are “prestige” institutions that expect full boat but are not worth it (or are trending down). Without naming names, I can think of one LAC outside NYC that used to breath the rarefied air but now when i look it up, it ranks behind colleges I never heard of.
Yeah, I think that puts a household right about top 5%.
Looking at the charts I linked before, even controlling for high test scores, at privates relative attendance for the 95-96 percentile was clustered around 1. So that is neither lower nor higher than expected–and again, this is controlling for test scores.
At publics, in-state or out-of-state, they were clustered well above 1. This probably has more to do with self-selection than admittance, of course.
Really? if you see my example above of the dad whose kid went to University of Galway (Ireland), they didnt offer him a thing. At that time (5 years ago), it was going to cost him $240k.
I know 3 kids over the past 4 years whose COA was reduced by a third to half by Stevens.
All fine schools but IMO Purdue is not in the same league as the others there. And I don’t think they give that much aid anymore. @momofboiler1 will know better.
Regardless, at $42k without any aid they’re a great deal.