<p>Ok so hear me out. It’s great that I got a full ride at all, but what happens if it’s a college that was, oh I dunno, your very last choice?</p>
<p>The college is newbury college btw and even though they are going to give me almost everything, I feel like I shouldn’t go because it is not a well known school. However, I do think that there internships will be outstanding because they are in Boston, which is a great city to find many opportunities. </p>
<p>I know this economy sucks so that’s why I am even posting this thread.</p>
<p>Not for congrats or for recognition. Just advice</p>
<p>Congratulations. There must have been positives to this school, since you did decide to apply. If I were you, I would relax until you see where you stand with all the schools you have applied to, and then sit down with your parents and figure out which one makes the most sense. You will be fine.</p>
<p>Lots of students who are looking for large merit awards find themselves in this quandary.</p>
<p>Many of the really famous and selective colleges and universities don’t give merit aid. The Ivies don’t; MIT doesn’t; Tufts doesn’t. They don’t have to. They can fill their entering classes with students they really want, without giving them merit scholarships. </p>
<p>In order to get really big merit awards (and congratulations on yours, by the way), you have to be at the very top of a college’s applicant pool. Usually, this means you could have been admitted–indeed, maybe you even were admitted–someplace more selective, more famous. So the not-quite-so-selective colleges will try to woo the students they’d really like to get–the top of the applicant pool–with generous merit scholarships, places in honors programs, etc. But very often, in order to land the really big scholarship bucks, you do have to trade away some prestige. (I hate the way that word gets bandied about on CC, but it’s quicker to say prestige than it is to find some way around saying it.)</p>
<p>The obvious question then is, when is the trade worth it? When are you better off taking piles of money instead of a famous name? I think the answer is very personal. I think every family has to look hard at its own finances and answer that question for itself. I certainly can’t tell you whether this particular trade would be worth it to you. But I can tell you this. A very generous merit award did make my daughter take a very serious look at a university that we’d always considered her safety, and that very serious look made her notice a lot of really great things about that school. She decided she really liked the university a lot. If she’d had to pay full price for the safety, she still might have chosen the university that had always been her first choice. But the safety plus the money plus some other perqs seemed like a better package to her than paying full price for the university that we’d all kind of assumed she’d attend if she got in.</p>
<p>Which is a long way of saying, after all the final decisions come in, take a good, long look at Newbury College, and then decide whether they’ve done enough to buy your love. </p>
<p>First off, congratulations on that full ride! Woo hoo! Now, no matter what the rest of your admissions offers are like, you have at least one place that you know you can pay for. That’s huge!</p>