Our daughter will be entering her senior year in high school next week. She’s taking all the steps on trying to learn everything she can about scholarships, financial aid, etc to help her pay her way through college. She’s on track to graduate in the top 5% of her class of almost 500 students. She’s currently ranked #10 and doing everything she can to stay there or move up if possible. She currently has a 4.8 GPA. She will be graduating with some college credits from a local accredited community college. We live in Corpus Christi, TX. As of now she plans on going to a college here in our state but has no issues with going out of state.
She is so busy with her schoolwork, school programs and clubs, volunteering at different places, etc. She has been working part time but plans on not working her senior year to focus on her academics and getting college ready. My wife and I want to do anything we can to try and help her find as many scholarships as possible that are out there. Financial aid is another option as well just not sure if she would qualify for any.
At the moment she still isn’t 100% certain what she wants to study. She’s mentioned finance and accounting to become a CPA, engineering or computer science. Our goal is to get her through college with as little college debt as possible.
This past weekend she competed in a local LULAC event and won which grants her a $2K scholarship and if she attends one of the three colleges in our area, they will match that amount.
I have no idea where to start though. What are some of the first things I should be doing to try and help her get every available dollar? Any advice and guidance would be much appreciated. Thank you.
Can you take the research on financial aid, merit aid and scholarships off her shoulders? She sounds busy and potentially stressed. Every family is different but the financial end of things is the one thing I handled as a parent.
You might want to be aware that at some schools, outside scholarships are deducted from financial aid so you don’t actually gain anything. Check that policy out at the schools she is interested in.
Her academics look fine for many schools so no need for her to ramp up. She sounds like she is already working hard and contributing to her school and local community.
For ideas check out the Colleges that Change Lives website. Does she want big, small, urban, rural, suburban? You can start out by visiting one of each to get an idea of what she wants. For her career interests, academic offerings are important but always check out “vibe.” And cost comes first of course. Have you run the net price calculators?
The vast majority of merit scholarships come from the colleges themselves, my kids got some from the high school from local scholarships, and even that was a ton of work. I’d focus on grades and college applications.
I would be more than willing to take the research on financial aid, merit aid and scholarships off her shoulders. I’ll do anything I possibly can to help her.
I want to stress this to the OP. Most colleges will not stack outside scholarships so they will deduct that amount from the financial aid package.
Your best bet for scholarship money is directly from the colleges themselves. IMO, build the list of colleges with generous merit first.
I had a friend whose daughter spent countless hours applying for small outside scholarships and in the end, her college just reduced the financial aid they were already going to give her. Total waste of time.
So you already know she is an auto-admit to the UT public universities. Why not start there? Are they affordable; does she like UT Austin or more of a Texas A&M vibe?
We didn’t qualify for financial aid. I spent many hours searching for automatic merit in the Midwest to bring cost to about $15K. It seems that the small directional publics, especially the ones in the middle of nowhere, have the best deals as they try to attract higher academic kids. Our search was around Iowa and surrounding states, but one closer to you that had great merit at least back in 2019 was Central Arkansas. Beautiful campus, we liked it.
Besides choosing a school where she got top merit, I made her do their competitive scholarship interview day, and also apply for every local scholarship she qualified for. The GC had a list and I did searches for other state-wide or major-related ones. (The wide open national ones are generally not worth her time.) The $7200 she won helped pay for the more expensive freshman year on campus. Worth it for us since she wasn’t getting any FA to be offset.
Each year I was able to claim the American Opportunity Tax Credit, another $2500 off. Once at school, each year she applied for the department/foundation scholarships for continuing students of the school. She moved off campus sophomore year which saved a few thousand as well. She worked to cover rent.
Our high school guidance office had someone who maintained a list of local scholarships and posted them somewhere with deadlines. My husband researched them and picked out ones that seemed worth the time/effort that my daughter was eligible for and helped keep the information organized. There were a lot that were a TON of effort for like very small amounts of money that we passed on. But she did get some decently sized ones as well. But we knew we would not be eligible for need based aid so these scholarships were helpful. It was a lot of work though. Check with her guidance office to see what information they might have.
Have you run the NPC (net price calculator) for colleges in the state that she thinks she might be interested in? Each college should have one on their website and this will help you get a sense of what need based aid she might be eligible for and what the cost to you might be.
It looks like she’ll be an autoadmit to UT. Is that a school she’s intersted in? Run the NPC for them and see what you think of the cost. That is a GREAT option to have. Also look at the “Rice Investment” (The Rice Investment | Office of Financial Aid | Rice University) and run the NPC there. Rice is an expensive school but covers 100% of demonstrated financial need. So while it’s a reach school for everyone, it could be affordable depending on your income.
Caution please. The net price calculators might not be particularly accurate right now. Some won’t be reset for the next academic year until all of the FAFSA changes being implemented this year can be included. So, please use them with caution.
Local scholarships can be a help. But do keep in mind that the majority are single awards for freshman year and are not renewable…so they won’t help you in subsequent years. You need a plan to fund college for all four years, not just freshman year, in my opinion.
#10 of 500 is top 2%, very impressive!
I’m a high school teacher in texas. As I read your description, I thought of several students of mine. She is qualified auto admit to UT. If the cost of UT Austin is beyond your budget, you may want to take a look at other UT schools. I know for sure these schools offer full-ride or close to it to many students. If she qualifies for national merit semifinalist, UT Dallas awards full ride and some more. UTSA top scholar program awards full ride as well. UT Arlington may have scholarships close to tuition free.
Trinity and Rice both give generous financial aids. Depends on the major, students in both universities have plenty of opportunities for paid work.
The first most obvious question is: What is your budget? What can you afford without taking on any debt? I would try to avoid debt if reasonably possible, and to limit the debt to the federal subsidized loans otherwise, again if possible.
Since you are from Texas, and your daughter is in the top 2% of her class, my understanding is that this might make her auto-admit for UT Austin. This is a very, very good university. If this is affordable for you, then that might be tough to beat.
This was certainly our experience. Both daughters did get merit based aid from the university that they attended (and were offered merit aid at some but not all other universities where they applied). I think that one daughter got a tiny scholarship from a different source, but it was something like $200 if I am remembering correctly.
Both of our daughters attended universities where they needed to maintain some specific GPA in order to keep their merit scholarships beyond the first year. One would have been affordable without the merit scholarship, but the other would not. We never figured out what we would have done had the daughter at the “not otherwise affordable” university had lost her merit aid. This might have been an oversight on our part and it is fortunate that it never came up.
And which universities your daughter applies to and which university your daughter chooses to attend is likely to be the most important consideration wrt financial aid and cost of attendance (other than her continuing to do very well as a high school student). My understanding is that there are some universities in the south and/or southwest that offer very good merit based aid, but I do not know much about them.
Also, we in most cases got larger merit offers from universities that were more expensive, and smaller merit offers from universities that were less expensive. In many cases this brought the cost of attendance to about the same number. Some of the top ranked “famous” universities do not offer any merit aid. In most case we did not apply to these because we knew the cost would be prohibitive.
One of the previous posters mentioned directional public schools as offering good merit money. Here are a couple of schools that fall into that category:
For Texas high school students, top 6% for UT Austin and top 10% for other Texas public universities means automatic admission to the campus, although more competitive majors may not be assured (e.g. CS, engineering, or business majors at UT Austin and Texas A&M – these majors are mentioned in the first post as possibilities).
However, it looks like affordability may be the big question here.
Does the student have an ACT score of at least 26 or SAT score of at least 1260, along with an unweighted GPA of at least 3.50? If so, here is an automatic full ride that could be useful as a safety: University Scholarships - Office of Scholarship Services
How much are mom and dad willing or able to pay toward college per year.
I would go to a net price calculator…Rice for example and fill it out. Why ? I want to see what it would cost - ie based on your financial profile, would colleges provide need based aid ?
They may say you can pay $80k a year but if you’re only wiling to spend $40k, then we know what we have to work with. You said this - “Financial aid is another option as well just not sure if she would qualify for any.” Filling out the NPC will help answer this.