Try Johns Hopkins. They are a meets full need school (I think). Plus their swim program is excellent. Great coach! I’d recommend making several trips Junior year, taking college tours and setting up coach meetings for the same visit.
Alabama would be great financially but takes swimming off the table as she is below c finals for sure in the SEC.
OP- try to shift your thinking on the value of your husband’s work right now even if it raises your EFC.
First of all- because you are looking at a college landscape a few years out, and nobody knows what will happen longer term with financial aid. But the basic mechanics of financial planning- there are VERY few scenarios where more income is a bad thing- are not likely to change.
Second- because right now your assumption seems to be that you are going to find that magic matrix where merit, need, and athletics are going to spit out the right answer AND not be in a location which your D doesn’t like OR have too much rah rah OR too big or not enough interesting people… or whatever. And I can pretty much promise you that this fantasy world doesn’t exist. So even if your husband just takes his current earnings and stuffs them in the bank, having a cash cushion can only help you guys down the road.
I would encourage your D to rank order her requirements- and then decide which ones to let go. The engineering piece is easy- there are lots of places where your D can thrive intellectually. But once you get to location and the other “soft” criteria, it starts to get either difficult or impossible (financially). So the fewer qualifiers on the list, the happier she is going to be. Lots of kids rule out Case for example- they don’t like the location on paper. But if they can be persuaded to visit, many of those kids end up with Case at the top of their list. And the money is just the icing on the cake (or the main event, depending on the family situation).
I agree with Thumper’s comments on MIT but want to add as a caveat- MIT is somewhat unusual in that even Freshman are eligible for research opportunities, and most of them give the student the choice of credit or payment (i.e. you can get course credit for an independent study with a professor for the research project, or get paid, but usually not both). These jobs can become pretty lucrative by sophomore year (once a kid has actual relevant skills and experience) and are typically convenient- on campus, no need for transportation, and make for interesting interview discussions for summer jobs and then the permanent job down the road.
One reason why financial aid is not as generous as Harvard’s (among other things)- they make it easy for the students to fulfill their student contribution.
It is tough to say, “We can’t afford for you to swim in college” when it is her passion and she is quite talented at it. I never expected it to pay for college but I also didn’t expect it to feel like a hardship for college.
Also, suggest the OP head over to the Athletic Recruits forum, now nested under the Forum Home, Specialty topics. There are many experienced parents who have been through recruiting process, for various sports including swimming, at different types of schools.
Case Western is another good suggestion, as noted above.
Have to agree here. The college search must start by prioritizing affordability and academic suitability. Everything else is secondary, and it does no good for her to get picky on location, rah rah, size, etc. before making a list of affordable schools with suitable academics to choose between.
If $10000 is the actual EFC, google the list of meets full need colleges and then look at their swim teams. Just finishing 12 years of college payments at a 10k to 15k EFC for “average excellent” students and those colleges were by far the lowest cost for us. We did not look at huge state schools who have large guaranteed merit, however. MIT is great for swimming even if D3. They’ve had kids go to the Olympic trials in recent years but my kid was able to swim and improve at a much slower level too. My grad had her loans paid off in the first year out. The problem with MIT is getting in.
“Meet full need” schools do not necessarily use the same EFC calculation as the FAFSA or each other. Running the net price calculator on each school of interest is necessary.
I’m going to suggest looking at Illinois Institute of Technology. They are or soon will be D3 for athletics-I believe it’s in process and not far from being complete. My D’s roommate is a swimmer there and studying engineering. She’s doing well.
It’s a tech school, with all the pros and cons of that. Your D would want to be pretty sure about engineering.
They offer a number of full tuition and a few full ride academic scholarships and it sounds like your D would be in the range to be competitive for those.
My D has had plenty of opportunities at IIT. She’s had several internships, research opportunities, great project-based (IPRO) classes which really added to her soft skills and helped her resume. She’ll be graduating in 4.5 years total with a B.S. and M.S. and the co-terminal degree and extra year are covered by her scholarship. She also has enjoyed being in the city of Chicago. PM me if you have any questions.
@Parentof2014grad I just looked at their times. She is second only to Katherine Lydon in her events…and not far off from that. I don’t know if that is where we want to aim or not. Not sure that is fun. I guess you would call that a swim safety. RPI is similar.
It is most definitely NOT too early to start targeting schools if she wants to swim. We have been told by multiple coaches that they start following kids in their junior years. If you are not a natural target for a school, i.e., you are not in the state or a surrounding state, you can get yourself on their radar by contacting the school in your sophomore or early in your junior year. I would make heavy use of the “where do I fit” feature on collegeswimming.com (where it sounds like your daughter is registered already). Girls can and do make big drops in their junior years (mine did, and we have a friend who made big drops her senior year), but they also can go backwards. Unfortunately, my observation is that it is pretty common for girls to slack off and get slower their junior and senior years if they are not fully committed to swimming in college. To me, this means that if your daughter wants to swim, she actually DOES need to decide that now! One tip for swim recruiting: colleges are not looking for someone who swims every event; the coaches we’ve talked to want three-event swimmers, preferably one/day at their conference meet. If you can swim a 50 or 100 free to contribute to relays, great, but coaches look for someone whose three individual events are spread nicely across the three-day conference format. If she can present herself as a solid three-event swimmer, she should focus on those events even if it means dropping some others from her current repertoire.
By the way, I question whether she is fast enough for Ga Tech. It’s local to me, we’ve known many kids who swam there, and they’re all ranked pretty highly in GA, which is a fast swim state. On the other hand, her club coach knows a lot more about her potential than I do!
Case Western is similar…she is top time right now in her events and she is only a sophomore. That seems kind of bleh… especially for a school that didn’t come with athletic money. Itight be worth bring big fish like that if it came with a full ride somewhere.
@planit I agree she doesn’t seem fast enough for Georgia Tech. Who knows why her coach thinks so. One reason might be she is on a significant up swing. For a girl that didn’t see her first AA time until 14 (after 5 years of club swimming), she is getting a good number of AAA times now and working on closing in on those AAAA times. So it is recent that she has become “good”. I’m guessing that makes him think she can become even better. Or he is just talking big…who knows.
However, looking at their recruit stats she is much closer to that range than Rice class of 2017.
Depending on the stats, Case can be VERY generous with merit aid (which is why I suggested it- I know nothing about collegiate athletics). It has gone from “I’ll apply there if you make me” to top of the list for many kids I know once the dust settles on the financial aid. It has terrific academics for a kid whose only other affordable options end up being a state directional with a few second tier offerings in the sciences. Excellent track record getting kids into competitive PhD programs in the sciences (with full funding).
My niece swims for University of Vermont. D1 but not crazy fast. They combined a nice package for her for athletic award, and academic award. You might try meeting with that coach.
http://www.psacsports.org/news/2017/2/24/MSWIM_0224171527.aspx
If you were looking at the 1650 free, these WCU girls are well under 17 minutes, DII school, but maybe not an academic match??
Run the numbers for UVM. It’s what they call a faux Ivy so it’s very likeable with good engineering. However run the NPC to see if that works for you because you need larger aid.
The schools that are said to provide the best need-based aid are:
Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, Yale
She probably is not going to swim varsity at Stanford, but at the other three she might.
Other universities that claim to meet full need, but are usually not quite as generous as HYPS, are:
MIT, Columbia, UChicago, Penn, Caltech, Brown, Cornell, Dartmouth, Duke, Northwestern, Johns Hopkins, Notre Dame, WUSTL, Rice, *Emory, Georgetown, Vanderbilt, USC, Tufts, Wake Forest, Boston College, University of Rochester, Lehigh, UVA, *UNC
*Emory’s Engineering is a dual degree with Georgia Tech. UNC only offers Biomedical Engineering.
These LACs also claim to meet full need and offer Engineering:
Swarthmore, Harvey Mudd, Smith, Lafayette, Bucknell, Union
Figure out which of these meet your Swimming, Small-Med School Size, and Not Urban fit variables. Then run NPC on those schools to get an idea of which would be affordable. You’ll then have a list of schools at which merit won’t be necessary. (although some of those schools do offer merit…)
Since there is not a safety among those schools, you might consider your flagship (KU) or KSU or other public schools that offer a lot of merit aid.
You might find some private match schools that offer a lot of merit too – like private universities and LACs ranked about 30 and lower – but those will be competitive.
I wouldn’t dismiss the swim money so quickly. Friend at Fordham went from a small scholarship freshman year to full tuition by senior year in swimming. Make the spreadsheet. Make it a column. Not all schools allow stacking of merit and athletic, but the NCAA allows it if the student qualifies (and this one would) so many schools do allow it. My daughter’s merit stays the same all 4 years, but her athletic $$ just went up for her final year. It was really important to her as it shows the coach appreciates her work (it really isn’t all that much money).
My daughter picked a Tech school because we knew that even if she changed her major from engineering, she’d end up in STEM, probably chem or math. Her school has very limited humanities courses but she doesn’t care and wouldn’t take Russian Literature or Greek Art History even if offered. My other daughter is happy at a small flagship and has bounced all over the Arts and Science college. Both agree that they could have made almost any school work.
In our search (and I’m fine using ‘we’ and ‘our’ because it is a family effort), we looked at all kinds of schools, from tiny D1 to bigger D3. Some came off the list very quickly either because of money or they were just too small or no STEM. Others were happy surprises. We’d never heard of the school she ended up attending, it added her sport and I saw it on a webpage for the sport. She also considered the level of play. Many of the teams who wanted her weren’t very good and I knew she’d be frustrated playing at a level that was similar to a high school team. She ended up at a D2 because it was the best fit academically and for her sport, she liked the size and location, and (this was her crazy requirement) the buildings are uniform and not ‘all old and messy.’ It has turned out better than we could have imagined for both. Plenty of challenge academically. She’s been a big fish athletically and she likes that.
@prezbucky thank you. These are most of the schools on our collegeswimming.com tracker. I’ll keep working from this list. KSU doesn’t have a swim team and KU is pretty fast though rowing could be an option there if that would fulfill her.