Looking for Matches/Safeties

veryindecisive
Sun, 13 Jun 2010 16:19:05 +0000

Financial Aid-wise: For reference, we checked out financial aid from Yale and Princeton a few months ago, and would receive between 20-30K from them.
My brother is looking at entering college a few years behind me, and my parents are nearing retirement age, so we really can’t afford to pay 50k a year, would need some type of aid to top schools.
On the other hand, we do have a decent amount of savings specifically set aside for my education (my father planned well), so I don’t need a full ride or anything. My parents want me to have a good education - my mom has promised that she would pay for an 20-30k Ivy education should I get accepted, for example. That is, however, about the upper limit of what we can afford.
Will look into Collegeboard’s EFC, thanks for the link.

Your suggestions:
CMU, Mudd, MIT, Caltech are definitely on my list for possible reaches. I’m also looking at Ivies, Ivy-levels like Stanford, etc.
UW is certainly going to be one of my safeties.
I really don’t want to go to Texas or Georgia, which is the only thing keeping me from seriously considering Rice.
I’ve noticed that OOS publics are going to be difficult for me to pay for, and that has already affected my search.
Case Western and Bucknell sound interesting, thanks.
Are there any top-level schools that I can consider to be high match or low reach? I have plenty of top schools on my potential list, but I’m having trouble figuring out which ones (besides Ivies/Stanford) are true reaches and which ones are lower reaches.