Texas State, Montclair State, Florida State and Wright State have been historically known to provide great tuition for non-residents who are accepted to their MT program. Overall, we found East Coast schools to be the most expensive for us. University of Utah offers in state tuition after your freshman year, I believe by establishing residency if you are willing to stay for the summer and take a class and/or work there…this makes it a very affordable option. Northern Colorado (small rural) and ASU (big school) are also known to be an affordable option for out of state residents. Interestingly, our actual bottom line best offers came from two private schools: TCU and Viterbo…Often, we found that if you are accepted by a school that does not have a waitlist or a very small waitlist, they really wanted you and they were willing to come back and make more generous offers, sometimes even without asking but before we had a made a decision. We had this happen to us by three different schools and I think occurs especially if you make a visit after acceptance which confirms you are serious (this is the only time you are in the driver’s seat). Overall, there were surprisingly a majority of schools that ended up being in our original target NET $20-$30k range, after financial aid (not counting any student loans), mostly because we ruled out the schools that we knew did not give out great aid so we wouldn’t have to say no later. As far as I know, California UC’s and CSU’s have very limited scholarships and they are for CA residents only with tippy-top grades (no department talent money). Depending on the school, MT programs play with department talent money, EFC financial need and merit aid to get who they want. Private schools seem to have more flexibility with this, but I’m sure big name programs have some pull with their FA department too.