This thread has been so helpful to me & I’m excited to finally add to it:
S25, public urban exam school in the northeast
3.9 UW, 1510 SAT, NMF, 9 APs in all core subjects, likely social science major
Solid but not extraordinary ECs (debate, theater, music, community service)
Summer camp counselor job, youth coach job during the school year
Good writer with thoughtful essays
He wanted a small liberal arts school close to home, but we needed to keep the cost below $45k & hopefully lower (parents are both teachers–he received financial aid at about half of these schools, & amounts varied wildly).
Accepted & Affordable:
UMass Amherst (no merit, accepted off waitlist for honors college)
UMaine ($30k merit, honors college)
UVM ($25k merit, accepted off waitlist for honors college)
Wheaton College (MA) ($46k merit, honors program)
Clark University ($36k merit after appeal, honors program)
St. Olaf ($35k merit)
Dickinson ($45k merit)
Skidmore (affordable after financial aid appeal)
Colby (initially waitlisted, accepted on May 2)
Bowdoin ($1000 for NMF, affordable after financial aid appeal)–ATTENDING
Accepted but Unaffordable:
Fordham ($12k merit)
Bates
Conn College ($38k merit)
Oberlin
Vassar
Waitlisted:
Haverford
Wesleyan
Williams
Rejected:
Amherst
Takeaways:
Since cost was a driving factor, applying to so many schools turned out to be the right call for him. The merit aid landscape changes VERY quickly & it was good to have a range of options in the end. If we’d done more pre-acceptance visiting, we could have shortened this list, though.
NPCs & merit estimators were mostly accurate, but not entirely! He applied to several schools where we knew the NPC was $5-7k too high for us–this was good, since some of the prices turned out to be soft. He got $5k more than UVM’s calculator predicted. Oberlin offered less aid than their NPC. Bates offered a little more than NPC & Colby offered a lot more. Skidmore & Bowdoin both gave him game-changing $ on appeal; Vassar denied his aid appeal completely. In the end, the difference between his best need-based package (Colby) and his worst (Vassar) was $25k.
He applied to a lot of reaches, which also feels worth it in hindsight. When all the results were in, he had schools that felt like social fits, schools that were academic fits, schools that were financial fits, but they weren’t the same school. Of his reach schools, the ones that felt like the best social fits for him (Vassar, Wesleyan, Haverford) weren’t viable choices in the end. If we were full pay we could have cut his list way down, but applying to more reaches was worth the extra essay-writing for him.
He’s very excited about Bowdoin, as are we. Thanks so much to this community for all your help!