So hear me out here, I am not trying to say your child should go to a school where she does not feel comfortable or welcome, AT ALL. But in chasing merit, one of the factors that can yield a high merit award is whether she is the type of student the school needs and wants more of. Many LACs have a reputation for being LGBT and social justice (or public policy, if you prefer) friendly, and so attract many applicants with those interests. On the other hand, an LAC which is perceived as not having as many students with those interests will not attract as many applicants with those interests, and will have to offer more merit to attract such students to their school and diversify the campus. Some of those schools are excellent for pre-law and public policy.
That said, I don’t think you need to go that route to achieve the stated goals. Her stats are so high I think one of the great schools mentioned will get you to or close to the $30,000 a year benchmark. One of those may be USC. While true that USC does not accept every NMF applicant, if accepted she would have a good shot at the full tuition Trustee award; and even if she received “just” the half tuition Presidential, USC usually also awards an additional University scholarship to the NMF Presidential recipients that will get you to about $35,000 a year.
Many of the schools on the original list will NOT get the OP down to $30k/year. See posts above. And the few full tuition scholarships at the higher ranked schools on the list (like a Richmond or Davidson) are VERY hard to come by. USC also a big longshot even with high stats. Lots of kids have high stats. The OP needs options that are more likely admits.
Looks like Oxy maxes out at $25k/year merit.
The OP needs to not only find schools that give full tuition scholarships but then see if she can find out how many of those are granted. One can always call financial aid offices and find out.
Just a note that with Mount Holyoke, showing demonstrated interest is super important for merit offers. If she’s interested and you can afford a visit, I’d get out there this Spring. Ask for an interview and keep the connection going…
My high stats kid got a 1/2 tuition merit offer there. She didn’t visit, but she reached out when she saw admissions officer was in the area but not coming to her school. Met her at a coffee shop and they talked for an hour!
Another vote for Goucher - with the top merit award, it’s our most affordable option, and it’s great for LGBTQ students. I disagree that it’s not challenging enough. It’s not the big name, but they have good stats for getting into grad schools.
Forgot about Fordham. Cool campus. Short train ride to Manhatten. Very good academics and they have a very small and well regarded honors program that she might get into. It’s Catholic (Jesuit) but I suspect the atmosphere is still diverse and tolerant.
Denison used to have a full tuition NMF scholarship. I don’t think that exists any longer but they still have very good merit aid. Lewis and Clark has competitive merit up to full tuition.
Ok, let’s say we could figure out how to make $40k work. What options are better then? In principle, I think $120k is plenty to pay for an undergraduate degree (especially in English!), but depending on the school her transfer credits could eliminate a semester or two, which might make that somewhat more feasible.
It looks like I need to start going down her list and calling financial aid offices to see for sure what the maximum amount of aid could be before we start flying all over the place for visits.
Also, a quick thank you for all these suggestions! I am reading them and taking notes for further research.
If she’d consider a different type of LAC, St. John’s College of Annapolis…all-seminar-style classes, “Great Books” curriculum, original texts read in Greek and Latin… I think it’s geared for students who want to ask the “big questions”. I believe the school recently began a new initiative that greatly reduces the cost of tuition.
We had U of Richmond on our list but then I talked to a few people who expressed concerns about it being too conservative. One specifically mentioned seeing fliers on campus about how to stay in the closet during your time in college. (This seems really weird to me, but what do I know??)
@realmmom We also had similar concerns about the environment for LGBTQ kids at Fordham after seeing several news stories that gave me pause.
MHC is by far her favorite school. We visited in the fall and will likely go back in the spring, if we can. We hadn’t visited Smith, so we will go back to MHC and also tour Smith, even though it is a big reach financially. We are already working our summer schedule around availablility for interviews. If you have any other ideas about how to show interest at MHC beyond reaching out to her admissions officer and following social media, we would love to know. I wish I had gone to MHC myself!