Welcome to the forum. You are in a state that has great college opportunities, so be sure to know what is available to you in terms of state schools and benefits. Your son’s school counselor’s will be excellent sources for that information.
Some important issues to take into account when you are embarking on looking for college dollars:
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Your FAFSA EFC is likely to be the least you will be expected to pay and is often just a theoretical number. The most generous schools in terms of giving financial aid tend to use their own fin aid calculators, usually requiring a CSS PROFILE to be completed. There are only a handful of schools that guarantee to meet need as defined by the FAFSA. PROFILE includes a lot of other things that are not on FAFSA. Schools that are the most generous in meeting financial need tend to define that need themselves.
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As a corollary to 1), if you have equity in your principle residence, a non custodial parent in existance , have your own business, your expected contribution from schools that use additional financial information, may be quite different
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As a very general rule, the more selective schools tend to be the most generous in giving financial aid. Those are the schools that guarantee to meet full need. Many of these schools tend to give very few if any merit money, and getting a sizeable piece of that is uber competitive
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Sometimes getting a full merit award, or close to it, is more likely than getting as much money through financial aid.The way schools define need have shocked many people. Getting those is highly competitive, however, and your student has to be in the upper echelons of the class they are taking, in order to be likely for these awards.
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A good way to get some quick appraisel of the likelihood at any given school is to look at the financial aid and merit info on the Common Data sets. You can see the % of need met for the % of students qualifying for aid, as well as average dollar amounts. You can also see the % of students getting merit money, the % getting what amounts. You can get some idea as to what % of the stats your student should be at a given school in order to be getting considerable merit. A school that is only giving out scholarships to 2% of the students at an average of $5K a scholarship is not a likely source of substantial money If it’s an average of $40K per award, you want to see if your kid falls close to that 2% upper threshold.
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Look at what awards are available to students at the various schools. If your student falls into a group that the school is actively seeking, whether its STEM women, URMs, first generation to college, this can give you an indicator how much of the big money is available to your particular student
The most important schools, IMO, to get onto your list are the ones that are very likely to take your son and that you are very likely to afford. Those are the soldiers to make sure that your son has safe place to go The ones to provide some security and solace if and when “dream” schools don’t work out. Many are dream school, in themselves. They are the most difficult to list in a college search for most people, because they are too often looking to cherry pick. The schools with high name recognition are easy to find. These schools often are not, and require the work and research.
Your son’s test scores, unweighted gpa, class rank, rigor of classes taken will be the important factors in getting into selective schools. If he has some features on his resume that make him particularly desirable to certain colleges, that also comes into play. Legacy, Athletic recruit, URM status, development, celebrity are some such “hooks”. Smaller things like geographical diversity, undersubscribed major, gender, can come into play too.
What are your son’s numbers, in terms of the above, so we can get some ideas as to what schools to target? Even as schools where your son’s stats place him at the top may give more money, there is also the issue of the fact that there are those schools who tend to give generous financial aid. Both issues should be addressed to come up with a complete list.