<p>I am a white, male high school senior from Massachusetts.
My school is quite competitive and doesn’t do class rank.
My weighted GPA is around a 4.18 / 5
I am the founder of a stock market club at my school with over 100 students
I am part of National Honor Society
On the ACT i got a composite 33 (34 math, 33 reading and writing, 30 science, 9 on the essay)
SATs were not as good: 750 math, 650 writing, 620 reading</p>
<p>What is the cheapest college that I can go to after financial and merit aid?</p>
<p>I am not low income. Just thinking about my options. My family makes about 170k a year. I know that I won’t get too much financial aid. They will contribute about 12k per year. </p>
<p>I’ve thought about the expensive colleges I could maybe get in and already applied EA (bc, northeastern, etc). Now thinking about cheap colleges. Going to compare quality vs price and decide if cheap colleges are worth the lesser education and lesser debt. </p>
<p>The numbers don’t add up. Do you have a trust fund or college savings? You will not get any financial aid. How will you pay if they only give 12k?</p>
<p>I am a finance major. I will apply to Alabama in the morning and sit back and wait for acceptances and aid after that. Thank you for the help on both threads</p>
<p>If your family income is 170K, then schools will likely expect your family to pay a good deal more than 12K. That means YOU could end up paying between 20K and 50K each year. You are limited to borrowing $5500 your first year and $27K for four years total. Obviously, YOU are not going to be borrowing 20-50K each year.</p>
<p>Since need-based aid is going to be minimal because of your family income, you need to find merit aid. Most merit aid first goes to pay off student loans and need-based aid and only then affects the Expected Family Contribution. So you probably need merit in the amount of full tuition. There are very few colleges where this is likely for someone with your resumé. Alabama is one of the automatic ones; I don’t know if your 4.18 will translate into a full tuition at 'Bama. Take a look at the threads at the top of the “Financial Aid and Scholarship” forum for the few automatic scholarships and for the competitive tuition scholarships at the likes of Vandy, WashU, etc. </p>
<p>With your SAT-CR score (620), a big merit scholarship is very unlikely from schools as selective as WashU or Vanderbilt. With your family income, you won’t get nearly enough need based aid (if you get any at all) to get the net price down to $12K. So you have two realistic options: get a full tuition scholarship (or full ride) from a less selective college, or else commute to a nearby low-cost school.</p>