One thing you will find is that each college will have a different policy on what percentage of students are awarded merit and how much. As noted above if you look at a college’s common data set it will clearly show what percentage of students are awarded merit aid and on average how much. I’ve seen examples of schools where fully 30% of incoming freshman are awarded merit aid, the very top LAC’s and Ivy League schools offer no merit aid, and schools like Notre Dame offer great financial aid but only a very limited number of extremely competitive merit aid scholarships. If merit aid is an important part of making college affordable, your child has the 3.9 uw GPA which would normally be good enough provided the course rigor is there. The test scores required might vary from an SAT as low as 1800 to as high as 2300 depending upon the school. My opinion is that colleges will award the most generous merit scholarships to students who have demonstrated interest, this can be the difference between a $15k/year or a $25k/year scholarship but I have nothing to substantiate this
Your are asking the right kind of questions. A friend’s son is studying engineering at Colorado State. This friend raves about his experience (she has other kids in college but she loves Colorado State).
Your D might look at Trinity in San Antonio. Trinity has engineering but is more on the scale of a LAC. Parents I know with kids there love it. The merit aid is generous but she will need to bring up her CR. Have her try the ACT.
I think the fear of an 800 student lecture hall is unfounded. My daughter did have two classes with 125 and 200 students (classes that meet core requirements, so everyone takes them), but each had a discussion group with 30-40, so knew the TA, could approach the professor. She actually knew a lot of kids in the class even though she’d only been at the school a week so formed a little study group with no problem. She happened to get A’s in both, where she didn’t do that well in some of her smaller classes. My engineering daughter goes to a much smaller school, but since it is all engineering, many students are at the same level for math. There might be 10 Calc I classes, and they do all take exams at the same time because they are run sort of as one big class. I don’t think there is a classroom that holds more than 50 or so students, so they are split into many classrooms for the exams.
When I was in school many moons ago, I did have a few courses that had several hundred kids in them. I could have avoided them if I really wanted to, but they didn’t bother me.
Yes, look at some of the automatic merit schools. I think with more prep she could make it to 1400 CR & M range.
Ohio State has the Buckeye scholarship that takes off about $11,000 off OOS tuition and can be combined with smaller merit and engineering scholarships.That should bring the price down to under $20k.
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Even though D wants to major in engineering, she is leery of really big universities. I’m not sure I can imagine her in an 800-student lecture as she gets a bit freaked out by crowds and also she enjoys getting to know her teachers. She has a strong interest in renewable energy (within electrical engineering).
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800 student lecture? We’re not talking UCs…lol.
My kids went to a large flagship (Alabama) and their largest class had 60 students…most of their classes were much smaller. Their Honors College classes were limited to 15 students each.
My daughter goes to a large flagship as well, and she has one class with 200. She sits front and center and has gotten to know the professor very well. All of her other classes have 30 or less. One class has 18.
I think the answer to your question depends on the school.
Totally depends on the school, the type of merit and how competitive it is. In my own recent experience, my son got a decent chunk of merit aid from a couple of schools and was nowhere near the top 25%. His largest came from a private LAC where he was exactly in the dead middle of the middle 50% of their stat ranges. A couple of non-flagship OOS schools from a neighboring state came up with several thousand in merit each, enough to make them contenders/affordable. Other schools he applied to he was in the top 15% of admitted students and got offered nothing.
People here will repeat the CW – that you have to be at the top of the stat range to expect anything – like it’s gospel. But the real answer is “it depends.”
Also have a daughter intending STEM. We sent her to a tutor after her first SAT hoping to improve the math scores. It worked.
Our search strategy used a g*gl spreadsheet where we could put down data about schools - schools she found, and schools I would ask her to take a look at. I think we had 50 or so rows by the time we were done. We didn’t delete the rejected schools, but moved them to the bottom so we’d remember not to look again. Since either of us could - and did- update the spreadsheet, this worked well for us.
I asked her to look at some because of automatic merit (UAH, Miss, one or two others - UAH being the one she ended up visiting and liking) or because the male/female ratio raised the possibility there would be some “encouragement” to help balance things. Some of these she did not want to look at (Illinois Tech and Clarkson among them. I’ll always kind of wonder if we should have encouraged her to apply …) some of these she did (Rose and MI Tech, for example). She should hear about non-automatic scholarships in the next couple of weeks, and I anticipate her ultimate decision will be swayed by what we receive.
We also put up a gantt chart showing what tasks she was responsible for (and when) and what tasks we were responsible for (and when) - so the fall of her senior year was pretty low key compared to that of her classmates.
The list of schools that passed both her and our approval was narrowed down to 12 and moved to a new sheet, the rows of which are listed at the bottom. She applied to 8 of these.
As it stands right now, she has one full tuition offer (UAH) and another that comes really close to full tuition (Lake Superior State) and a full year cost equivalent to Purdue in-state NPC at 4 others - all of which are private, out of state, or both.
I realize this doesn’t answer the questions of the OP, but although not all the data are in, we’ve had only two schools invite her to participate in an additional scholarship application to balance representation, if you follow my meaning. My thoughts at the moment is that there is a huge variability between all schools, even schools of similar demographics. It may work out for you, but only if you work it out.
Here are the columns:
Name Tuition/Sem Tuition/yr fees books/tech Room/Board Distance Distance expense Subtotal Grant/schol. adjusted_tot 4 yrs cost Notes
For the short list, we went to rows. Here are the rows for each school.
SAT Mar
ACT Apr
SAT Jun
Tests Good
Visit Date
Subject Test(s)
ACT essay
Common app
letters rec #
Interview
Interview date
Transcripts Sent
Transcripts rec’d
App Fee
Application ready
Application made
Accepted
Middle 50 SAT
Middle 50 ACT
App checklist
Early Admit Deadline
Regular deadline
Enrollment Deadline
m/f ratio
notes
Has Full Ride
Has Full Tuition
Rolling admissions
I should add that since she’s interested in CS, we visited and she applied to Hanover, a small liberal arts college. The merit was strong in that one. Quite strong.
A couple of smaller schools that offered S significant merit aid, and that have accredited engineering programs, are Bradley (IL) and Valparaiso (IN).
Bradley’s scholarships - based on GPA and test, and I don’t recall the exact formula - is 12k merit plus 4k for out of state, leaving about 15000 in tuition uncovered. Resulting cost of attendance is in the 25k range - it’s a nice school, but above the 20k the OP had outlined.
Don’t know about Valparaiso, but have heard good things.
Re the focus on stats: D received significant merit awards from two EA LACs without submitting her test scores (test optional schools.) Presumably they liked her essays, rigor, GPA (good not perfect) and interview. So don’t assume you need high stats at all schools for merit.
What about Colorado School of Mines? The son of a friend got a great scholarship there (he was OOS) and it’s only 4,000 students so not too huge. They seem to be wanting to grow their female enrollment (its about 1/4 right now) so that could provide an extra edge for your daughter.
I know she wants to get out of state but it could be a good match for her.
Montana State is a lovely campus in a nice mountain town but I wonder if it’s not all that different than where you are in CO, depending on which part of the state you’re in. If she wants to “get away” from the mountain west (as well as from her parents), check out U of Alabama. As others have mentioned, if she can bump up her CR score, she could qualify for merit scholarships there.
Also Coloradans here. My son, with very weak high school grades, automatically got a $5,000 per year (for 4 years) scholarship to Montana State, based on his ACT alone. Univ. of Montana offered more. I had the feeling we could have pressed/applied for more.
If money’s a concern, here’s something to keep in mind: the air fares between Denver and Bozeman are not terribly competitive…
I have also heard how generous Wyoming can be.
Another point to consider
Even though tuition for LACs is much higher than for State Univs., many LACs offer much more FA to recruit desirable students resulting in a net price that can be significantly lower than State Univs’ net price. This proved to be true for my son.