<p>OP, your child sounds a lot like mine. I don’t know a lot about what gets major aid at USC, Rice, or Occidental. USC just gets soooo many damn applications these days, and while they are generous I haven’t been able to figure out why some 4.0/2300s get it and others get a quarter tuition. USC has 10 Monk Family awards of full tuition plus; 5 Stamps; 100 Trustee full tuition; 200 Presidential half-tuition awards; and a bunch of smaller ones of no use to us. Swat gives aid to the people they want, and they usually want them for something like a patent they developed or a significant charity they created. Rochester has a reputation on CC for generosity; it was completely unfounded in our case, but perhaps you will do better. Rochester offered a number of Rochester Scholarships offering from 2K to full tuition; there was also the Renaissance and Global Scholarship for full tuition but I don’t know how many; all the other merit awards were 2-20K, which did us no good. Claremont McKenna is a lot like Swat, from what I hear. It may be that all the schools in this paragraph are too hinky to make predictions about aid.</p>
<p>The same hinkiness has been said about Pitt, but that was not our experience. They pretty much came in where we expected, based on stats from the last couple years that you can find with a little online searching of CC. Disappointment was not the experience of many of the people I knew who were searching this year with their children for Pitt aid. There were 8-12 full rides by invitation only of about 70 students. The losers of this competition rec’d full tuition in most cases. Then there were a bunch more full tuitions; how many I don’t know. Pitt places a lot of emphasis on SATs and rank: two years ago the average for the winners of full tuition was about 1513 CR+M and 1478 for 10K in merit. I don’t know about Miami, Davidson, or Denver. When I was studying at UDenver thirty years ago, they didn’t have a reputation for generosity, but they didn’t have a national rep then. Miami’s rep is for generosity, but I don’t know how much generosity that means. We looked at Richmond. They had 45 competitive full tuition to full tuition plus r&b scholarships; after that they had some 15K Presidential scholarships and 25 Bonner scholarships of 5K. The competition attracts a lot of attention to Richmond, but you can rest assured that the best students in the land are getting the full tuition/ride, just as they are at Pitt. Interviews are terribly important at both schools for the full tuition scholarships. Pitt has the advantage for people of my income because their COA is so much lower than most of these schools you’ve listed; with Pitt, the non-tuition scholarships count for something when the COA is 43K.</p>
<p>For what it’s worth, I hope you make a ton of money this year, OP. He’s going to do well wherever he goes. You have to have something for retirement. He needs to learn the difference.</p>