<p>my son is a junior interested in majoring in mech or civil engineering.</p>
<p>we are going to visit the following schools</p>
<p>rowan (saw already and liked, felt it would be a good fit)
TCNJ
York college of Pa
univ of rochester
loyola Maryland</p>
<p>we live in NJ. looking to be no farther than about 6 hours away. </p>
<p>SATs, M 720/CR 540 /essay 580. taking sats in oct for 3rd time with private tutoring planned to increase the cr scores. </p>
<p>3.5 uw/5 weighted. college adviosr put our efc at 11k, but i know that private schools do their own… cost is a huge thing for us and total coa needs to be below 20k…</p>
<p>so from the above school list i provided, anybody have recent examples of financial aid packages awarded? thanks so much in advance…</p>
<p>You can read about York College of PA’s merit aid offers on their website. Their top merit aid is $8,500 a year for an on-campus student, which is great considering their tuition and fees are only $16.5 a year, and room and board is less than 9.5K a year. My daughter received that aid for an ACT of 27 (superscore around 28) and top 2% of her public high school class. York College also has great very modern quality upper class housing, which is also very reasonably priced.</p>
<p>Run the Net Price Calculators at each institution’s website. That will give you a ball-park figure for financial aid.</p>
<p>My D applied to TCNJ and was accepted with Honors and $32,000 ($8,000 per year) Merit Scholarship. Considering it is a State school…not bad. She has declined the offer because is deciding between BU, NYU and NEU.</p>
<p>GPA 3.9
SAT: 2000</p>
<p>happymom of 1, how accurate do you think those net price calculators are? the reason i ask is because i have done a few of them and the coa still seems very high.</p>
<p>i keep hearing dont look at the price tag of the school, alot of schools give aid, blah blah blah. however, when i run the net price calculator for a school like say Syracuse where the coa is around 55k, even with a 25k award, we are still at 30… which is an amount we cant afford…i really dont want to run around this summer to visit places that we will never be able to afford. So far Rowan, TCNJ, and York are on our def visit list.</p>
<p>i guess i need to look more into Loyola and Univ of Rochester. Both say they meet 100% of need</p>
<p>If you don’t own more than your own home, and if you aren’t self-employed, and if you don’t own a business, the general consensus is that the NPCs are reasonably accurate (with some being dead-on accurate, and others being only in the ball park). If your income and property situation isn’t simple, then the general consensus is that the NPCs are nearly useless. The other point of consensus is that the more questions the NPCs ask, the more likely they are to approach accuracy. If you check the threads with titles like “how good are the NPCs?” in this forum and in the Parents Forum, or if you ask in the individual college and university forums, you might be able to collect information about the accuracy of these specific NPCs.</p>
<p>Since the NPCs that you have run so far leave your family with an unaffordable cost, sit down and determine what it is that you can afford. For many families, what is affordable is a fraction of what the colleges and universities expect - our EFC was nearly four times what we can pay. Get straight, absolutely straight about that number. Make sure your kid knows that number. Then it will be really easy to hold the line next April: If the institution comes in at or under that number, it stays on the list, if it doesn’t, oh well.</p>
<p>I do understand that you aren’t excited about dragging yourself around to umpteen colleges and universities over the summer just to have them all prove unaffordable next spring. So start with the dead-on safeties. Identify one or two where your child is absolutely guaranteed admissions based on stats (and yes, for most students this ends up being their hometown community college), that you know your family can afford with nothing more than federally determined aid (and yes, for many students this means the $5,500 in Stafford loans), that offers the likely major(s), and where your kid can be happy if all else goes wrong. Build your list upwards from there. Apply to the safeties early on to get access to any goodies that are on offer (priority housing, priority registration, guaranteed merit-based aid, etc.), and it will be much easier to determine whether the match/reach institutions are still worth considering when the acceptances and aid packages roll in.</p>
<p>happymomof1: thanks for such a detailed reply.</p>
<p>Yes, our numbers are straightforward so the NPC’s should probably be accurate. I did a fafsa estimate and it is coming out at about 12k efc.</p>
<p>Luckily my son is aware of the financial constraints, and is on board. He’s not so much into the prestige of the school, but looking for a good fit, and the least possible student loans.</p>
<p>So right now based on numbers, the schools we have to look at are: Rowan, TCNJ, and York. Loyola MD is an hour from York so it will not be a big deal to swing by there and do a tour. Univ of Rochester is 6 hours away and the NPC calc is at the top of our budget. That one may not be worth visiting. QUESTION: Is it worth sending an application to Univ of Rochester without visiting, and then based on if he is accepted and tuition is doable, should we THEN try and visit? </p>
<p>Also, he is retaking his SAT’s in October, if he can bring his 1860 up to a 2000 would that change much as far as what schools to look at and what merit awards he gets?</p>
<p>His math + CR score is what’s important for merit scholarships. Try for a 1400 and take ACT as well.</p>
<p>Loyola gave us the worst financial aid package. It depends on alot of factors…but it is also very expensive. I know people who have done well at U of R as far as merit aid.</p>
<p>We visited several schools only after admittance and aid packages were in. Some schools like to see the demonstrated interest of a visit, but many didn’t seem to care. Admitted student overnights were the best way to envision what being a student at that school would be like.</p>