If your family does not qualify for financial aid, then there will be few choices that will meet everything on your daughter’s list. One school that seems to hit most of the items is:
- SUNY Geneseo: About 4500 undergrads at New York’s premier public liberal arts college. Sticker price was about $33k for SY22-23, and your daughter may well get merit aid to bring this within budget.
If your daughter has to compromise (and prestige will almost certainly need to be one area of compromise), which way would she veer? For instance, if medium-sized isn’t possible, would she rather go bigger or smaller? Is it more important that the climate not be “hot” all the time or that it has a diverse student body? Which factors on her list are the most important to her?
If you could run the Net Price Calculator (NPC) at some schools (say, Case Western, Lehigh, and/or Wesleyan) and let us know if the Expected Family Contribution (EFC) is affordable for your family, that would be really helpful, as we would then have a better sense of what kind of schools we need to be looking for.