College list assistance!

aquapt
Tue, 09 Jul 2024 01:10:21 +0000

If you don’t want to live at home and commute to college, then it appears to me that you need a college with very low cost of living, plus automatic merit for your stats.

Most of the schools on USNews’ top 10 “cheap room and board” list are fairly obscure, but #10 is Utah State, which is both a WUE reciprocity school and a Yellow Ribbon school. On-campus room and board at the Logan main campus (25K undergrads) is only $9,076 for the entire year. (Contrast this with Syracuse, where average room and board is over 19K/year, not to mention how expensive it is to get to from Oregon.) If your unweighted GPA is a 3.6, your GPA+SAT would qualify you for $15K/year in merit money (per this calculator), which could potentially cover all of your post-yellow-ribbon costs without even taking loans; but the loan option is there if you need more financial buffer for costs that aren’t billed directly by the school. The university has programs in many of your areas of interest, and it’s an attractive campus (the oldest in Utah, so parts of it have older architecture, while other parts are more modern) in a small city (less than 90 minutes from a large city - SLC) with fabulous nearby “nature” and outdoor recreation.

This, in my opinion, is the kind of school you need to be looking for. It probably isn’t the only one where your auto-merit would exceed your costs after yellow ribbon covers tuition, but it’s good proof of concept.