@Trixy34 , yes, I know Temple is still giving out merit awards, but they are no longer guaranteed as they were when my son was looking at colleges. It was a great boon to have two strong schools like Alabama and Temple that were full rides right out front when he started his college search. No more.
My oldest child is in his mid 30s now so I’ve been looking at schools for a while on a personal basis. Back in his day, getting a Chancellor’s scholarship at Pitt and accepted to the Honors College there was a matter of numbers. Now it’s a highly selective process and the numbers that got you both back then don’ t even get you under consideration today. For one of my kids, Pitt was a reach school; his first choice and a school for which there really wasn’t much one could do to up the chances. Things have really gotten tighter these days in terms of selectivity and merit money at the more competitive schools.
I had gone through so many college searches with our kids, being the old woman who lived in shoe, that by the time our youngest was applying to colleges, I avoided a lot of the foibles that I saw many fall into. The thing is, you can’t really tell anyone in a way that gets through their heads. I tried with a close friend who was applying alongside my son and just this year, tried with an old friend from nearly a half a century of connections. It’s so very difficult to ignore the luster of the big name schools when you have a kid up there in the stats, who has gotten all of the awards and accolades all of these years. I don’t think one should ignore them. Sure, apply to HPYMSC et al. Line them all up and apply to them. Pick one as a SCEA or ED if you can, and get the apps rolling on them.
But first order of business is to get that list cranking on what you know you can afford among schools that you KNOW will take your child. That’s why it’s a big loss when those guaranteed free rides for threshholds of merit disappear. More and more becomes a game of chance. Each year there are more twists to the rules (?) or really outcomes as you throw the dice. For my son’s year it was UMICH EA decisions. For some crazy reason, kids who were accepted to top schools were deferred. Which threw a likely EA choice that could have smoothed some waters into a turbulence. Just this year, happened again. Kid deferred at both UMICH and MIT. Denied at MIT in the end. It was a miserable 4-5 months before he got his acceptances along with those denials. He did get into UMICH which I think would have been his choice school but that kick in the solar plexus back in November gives it a bad taste to him. I know my son and several others were so done with the process by year end that they were looking hungrily at EA and rolling schools that accepted them and not interested in doing another round of the applications and admissions roulette. My son out and out told us he was going to one of the EA schools if his ED choice did not pan out. Whether it’s ego or the will to just move on in life, I saw a lot of that.
Sample too small to generalize, but this year I’ve heard and read more cases where kids are going to do a do-over. They did not get accepted to anything that they wanted and they felt they made enough critical mistakes that they want to go through the process again, hoping to do better with the results. I don’t think I knew anyone personally who did that. Now I know of three, heard of a few others, and read a couple of the sort here on the boards. The only reason I would suggest something like that is if the student is absolutely sure that the results are not what was wanted and, of course in the case where all of the choices are unaffordable and the applicant simply did not do the application process in a way to get the aid and scholarships, he probably would have gotten.