Worth it to apply if I can't attend without merit aid, given limited # of schools I can apply to?

College Search & Selection
1

Hey,

I’m a rising senior who’s still in the process of making a solid college list, but I have run into a slight dilemma that I hope you guys can help me with. I come from a low-income family so I really want to avoid applying to schools (or falling in love with any) that my family will not be able to afford. I understand from my online research that it’s best to apply to lots of schools in my situation and to compare FA packages afterwards, but I cannot afford to do that because my school limits me to applying to 7 private colleges maximum. Since I will be applying to some schools that I understand I have a huge chance of getting rejected from, I want to make sure that every private college I apply to is one that I can definitely afford if accepted.

So my problem is that there are some schools I’m interested in that I would not be able to afford based on the NPC outputs, but which offer large merit scholarships. Since these scholarships are only offered to a small number of students, I cannot really deduce my chances of getting them. Most of the webpages say that they are offered to the top applicants to the school. Score-wise, I believe I would be in the top 25th percentile of applicants, but beyond that I do not really know how I would fall.

Do you have any advice on whether it would be worth it for me to apply to these schools with the hope that I will be offered a merit scholarship, or should I just avoid applying to these schools in the first place because of the likely unaffordable price?

Thanks in advance!

2

Have you checked out the following site?:
http://automaticfulltuition.yolasite.com/

Are your stats high enough to qualify for any of the listed automatic full tuition / full ride scholarships?
If so, do any of them appeal to you?

If you qualify for an adequate amount of merit aid at any of these colleges, then one or two of them can be your safety schools. Once you’ve identified an admission and financial safety you’d be happy to attend, you can afford to take a little more risk on your match and reach applications.

If you are a low income student with stats high enough for a guaranteed full tuition / full ride scholarship, then you may also have a shot at one of the colleges that claim to cover 100% of demonstrated financial need:
http://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/paying-for-college/articles/2014/09/15/colleges-and-universities-that-claim-to-meet-full-financial-need

Try running the online net price calculators on some of the less selective schools on this list (e.g. Holy Cross or Trinity), if they have the programs you want.

3

@tk21769 I have! I’m only looking at colleges in the Northeast region because I’d like to stay relatively close to home so Temple is the only one that fits my needs. I think I qualify for a full tuition scholarship there, but it is much larger than what my ideal school would be so unfortunately I’m not sure if it’s right for me.

As for the 100% need met schools, I am already considering a bunch of them as potential reach/target schools. Do you think I should only consider these types of definitely-affordable schools in my search? Would considering private schools with not-so-great need based aid but large merit scholarships that I may or may not get be unwise given my limit of 7 private schools (a portion of which will be high reaches)?

4

This is a tough situation, but it is what it is. If the Temple scholarship is automatic based on your stats, then you should apply there as your safety. I suspect you are in NYC, because some the exam schools have long traditions of limiting the number of applications because it is the teachers who write the secondary school reports and there really aren’t guidance counselors to do that. If that’s the case, can you afford, a CUNY or a SUNY as your safety?

I was in your exact situation more than 30 years ago and I used RPI as my safety. We were told that we could only apply to 7 schools BEFORE APRIL 1. If we got skunked, we could apply to more. Back then CCNY really didn’t have a deadline, so I just used that as my real safety for after April 1, though I was pretty sure I’d get into RPI, which I did. That’s probably not a safety anymore, but there may be a reliable school that is that meets full need. The teacher who acted as my guidance counselor told me not to waste an application on MIT, but I did anyway and got in, probably because I was first generation college student. We didn’t know that was a factor back then, and I thought they had made a clerical error.

One option is to find an affordable safety that you could afford that accepts applications after April 1. Then you can take a little more risk. Otherwise, you really need one of your 7 to be a financial safety if such a thing even exists.

I think for you it’s vital to make your selections carefully. I have an algorithm for such a situation. If you have access to Naviance, I would try to

  1. estimate your probability of acceptance at each of the full need schools to 1 significant figure
  2. rank your selections
  3. calculate your probability of attendance at that school by multiplying the probability of acceptance by the probability of rejection (1- probability of acceptance) for each of the more desirable schools.

If you find you have a school that isn’t your first or second choice that has a probability of attendance of less than 5%, drop it and recalculate.

You also may want to adjust that 5% number to make sure the probability of getting into at least one of your 6 choices is very high.

I think competitive merit scholarships are just too risky because you can’t estimate your chances.

Good luck.

5

@ClassicRockerDad Yes, I am in NYC! And I probably will apply to a SUNY as a safety. I have not heard of the rule at my school not applying after 4/1 though.

As for the algorithm, how would I estimate my probability of acceptance? Would it be the school’s acceptance rate, or is there a more personalized, but still methodical, way of doing that?

Thank you very much for this advice.

6

There is no reliable mathematical way to estimate your probability of acceptance at schools with holistic admissions. This is particularly true if you are talking about private schools that have big merit aid. The acceptance rate is not your probability of acceptance - that’s a statistical fallacy; your personal probability of acceptance may be higher or lower than the school’s acceptance rate given certain factors. But it’s kind of impossible to tell from the outset; you can only use ballpark guesses based on the school’s typical applicant profile.

It would be great if we could all just plug some numbers in and chug our way to figuring out the mess that is college admissions, but except for the public universities that only use test scores and GPAs in some formula, we really can’t - not easily.

7

@juillet Yes, that is what I thought.

Do you have any advice on whether I should consider applying to schools that I would need merit scholarships for or if I should just avoid those?

8

For schools where you need a merit scholarship to be able to afford to attend, your goal is the merit scholarship, not merely acceptance. Acceptance without the needed scholarship is the same as rejection.

However, there is usually less public information that can be used to estimate reach/match/safety for competitive merit scholarships (i.e. those which are not automatic based on stats or NM status) than for admission to colleges. So most competitive merit scholarships should probably be estimated as reaches, even if admission to the school may be seen as a match or safety.

Of course, those where both admission and the needed merit scholarships are awarded automatically based on criteria that you have (e.g. GPA, test scores, NM status) can be seen as safeties.

9

Each school’s Common Data Set, section H2A, shows the number of merit scholarships awarded and the average amounts. The same information is presented in the Kiplinger’s “Best College Values” tables. Click-sort on columns 9 and 10.
http://www.kiplinger.com/tool/college/T014-S001-kiplinger-s-best-values-in-private-colleges/index.php
Look for schools with average merit scholarships large enough to cover your needs. If N% of students at any of those colleges receive merit scholarships, then presumably you’d want your stats to be well into the top N% at those colleges. This is a fairly crude way to identify schools where you’d have a relatively good shot at adequate *competitive/i merit aid … but it may be about the best you can do. Unfortunately, schools generally don’t publish the average stats of students who get those awards. It’s probably best to assume that the N% who get merit awards are among the top N% for SAT scores and GPA, although ECs etc. must come into play as well.

In my opinion, in your situation, once you’ve identified one or two schools (like Temple, maybe) that guarantee adequate merit aid for your stats, then you’d be better off focusing on schools that provide the best need-based aid for your stats. There just aren’t so many schools in the NE that provide many very generous merit scholarships. If you can find them, you won’t necessarily get a better net price than, or schools you’d prefer over, schools in that region with the best need-based aid. But then, schools with the best n-b aid also tend to be much more selective.

10

The statement is mathematically nonsensical.

Unless there is insufficient data, you can estimate your probability. Different estimates may have different error variances, but if there is data, you can estimate. If you go to one of the NYC exam schools, your school is likely to have Naviance where you can get scattergrams of acceptances from your school given your SAT and GPA, and there is likely to be a huge amount of data for schools within 5 hours of NYC.

For example, for Stuyvesant
http://stuy.enschool.org/apps/pages/index.jsp?uREC_ID=126943&type=d&termREC_ID=&pREC_ID=484165

You can draw a circle around your dot and calculate the number of people who have applied and the number of people admitted. The ratio is an estimate of your probability of admission. If you’re not sure how big a circle, I would say 100 points on the SAT and 0.2 on GPA. If that doesn’t provide enough data, make it a little bigger. Since it’s not a great estimate, but an ok one, round to 1 significant figure, i.e, one of 0, 0.1, 0.2, 0.3, 0.4, 0.5, 0.6, 0.7,0.8, 0.9, 1.0.

Now you rank your preferences. If your first choice is Yale, and your second choice is Princeton both with a probability of getting in at 0.2 for someone with your stats, based on your scattergram, then the probability of attending Yale is 0.2, and the probability of attending Princeton is (1-0.2)0.2 = 0.16, and the probability of not getting into your first two choices are (1-0.2)(1-0.2) = 0.64. Then go to choice 3, and calculate 0.64*prob(choice 3), etc.

You can put this in a spreadsheet to calculate if you want. Do this for 6 schools and calculate your probability of not getting into any of the 6 choices. If it’s still pretty high after the 6 schools, you need to increase your threshold for excluding a school and eliminate choices further down where the probability of attendance is smallest in favor of schools with better odds.

This will give you a pretty good way for formulating a strategy.