<p>Hello all,</p>
<p>I’m inexpert at this and so will post the following question here and in Parents, hoping that the community will help us with suggestions and/or directions to related older threads.</p>
<p>I’m a single parent of a rising sophomore at Columbia whos receiving full financial aid. She’s planning on finishing the next year but is considering transferring after that for reasons that I feel are good ones. </p>
<p>Columbia was willing to forgo documenting her father’s income (which is unknown to us) but other peer schools were not and as a result she received no financial aid offers from them. However, Columbia was her clear top choice (at the time) anyway. </p>
<p>What a difference a year can make, though, in a student’s maturity, direction, and goals!</p>
<p>She’s doing lots of research on her own, but as a financial partner in this, I need to prepare for the possible second round in the financial aid challenge. Can anyone share their recommendations and experiences with schools that only ask for FAFSA? In the first round, she received nice offers from NYU and Berkeley (even though OOS), but she’s now looking for a smaller university or college. Location less important than: non “pressure cooker” environment, strength in linguistics and languages, healthy women’s community (possibly women’s school?), opportunities to participate in music and drama. </p>
<p>Also. She finished the year with a 4.07 gpa. Should she think about looking for merit aid, or is that not generally available for transfers?</p>
<p>I apologize for the dual forum posting. Thanks for any suggestions.</p>
<p>Merit aid is generally not available for transfers. With her GPA, she would be a good candidate, however, getting accepted as a transfer at a comparable quality college is going to be much harder in most cases than being accepted as a freshman. Most private colleges have openings for transfers based on how many students decide to leave. Another factor that determines the # of openings is the yield for the incoming freshman class- Stanford for instance this year accepted only 20/1400 students applying to transfer- far less than their usual 5%, because more accepted freshman decided to go there than the admissions office had anticipated.</p>
<p>You may want to have her look at Dartmouth, which usually is generous with financial aid [ she’ll have to check if it is offered to trasfers], and has a very strong language and music programs [ don’t know about drama].</p>
<p>Look at Carleton. I happened to notice that they have a linguistics major. I remember previous strand on this, so I can’t honestly say how good the program is. You could check into this and call financial aid office. They might really want her. </p>
<p>Didn’t you say she was working with Berkeley professor on another post? Perhaps Berkeley might renew its offer. That’s an impressive GPA. </p>
<p>If finances don’t work out anywhere but Columbia, perhaps your daughter could arrange to live on Barnard’s campus. Believe me, it’s quieter and more woman centered on west side of Broadway. I know if she stayed at Columbia she would be disappointed with linguistics offerings, but she could probably spend junior year at another institution on Columbia’s dime, giving her more linguistics opportunities, and then she could do graduate work in linguistics. </p>
<p>Smith or Mt. Holyoke would give her access to linguistics dept. at UMass Amherst. I know Mt. Holyoke gives some merit aid. I think they might be excited to have her. I don’t know about Smith.</p>
<p>Bethievt has mentioned merit money at Grinnell. I don’t know about linguistics there. </p>
<p>I sent you a PM when you mentioned that we might be neighbors. Hi! Good luck!</p>