<p>Midwestpop - My son did consider other schools with large NMF scholarships and that was really his primary focus. At the time he planned to go to med school and his goal was to pay as little out of pocket (our pockets, actually, not his!) for undergraduate to be able to put that money towards med school tuition. In the meantime, the opportunities that he has gotten for doing research at ASU have been fantastic and he now wants to go the PhD route in biomedical engineering instead of med school. I think it’s a better fit for him anyway. He ended up picking ASU over the others because Barrett Honors College is really unique among schools - it is just a whole different environment. He is a kid who never quite fit in in high school, although he did well and had a pretty good time. But at Barrett he is really thriving. One small example - at one of the fall football games all the NMF go down on the field at halftime and are introduced as ASU’s academic recruits. What a great message this sends to the kids that scholarship is valued when generally athletics is the only thing recognized at sports events.</p>
<p>I think it really is a good strategy for these kids to pay as little for undergraduate as possible when they know that their future plans will include grad school. </p>
<p>One other recommendation for your ASU campus visit is for your daughter to do an overnight with a Barrett ambassador. It really gave my son a great idea what it was like to live and study there. He was pretty much sold on ASU after that.</p>
<p>Good luck to your daughter in her college search - it is wonderful how many opportunities these kids have and I’m sure that she will find a perfect fit!</p>