If you read my initial post, I noted a ton of schools in it. So that should be more than a starting point - and they meet what you requested size, major, budget, and geographically. Not all hyperlink (in blue for some reason) so if you read close.
Your post indicates that your kid is at a prep school. You are going to get MUCH better guidance/advice from the college counselor than you will from strangers on the internet who don’t know the school (so we can’t put the academics in context) and don’t know the kid!!! What was the list your kid got from the counselor? Start there.
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One of your previous posts indicated a $40,000 a year budget, but here it says $60,000 a year, would like to keep it under, and that you need merit. Can you please clarify?
BC was mentioned. Have you used the school’s NPC?
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We can go up to 60k. Have done NPC for a few.
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In the end, tons of schools meet - the 30 ACT could be problematic for higher end schools as could your need profile.
When you run NPCs, does it give you need aid?
Do any schools above resonate? You say smaller to mid size but then throw in $18K Bing which I’d say is large - but you might not. Other schools similar size - someone mentioned Miami Ohio. How about Pitt? You can get a double major or double degree.
I’m not convinced Honors Colleges make a school smaller per se. They make part of the coursework and even some experience smaller but depending on the college, not all so if the student wants a small - mid size school, I don’t think Honors at a large is necessarily the answer.
A school like Kalamazoo is small and would allow you to do both. Other similar - Susquehanna, or even a UVM, UNH, or SUNY Geneseo.
What about an Organizational Behavior major? It’s the psych of business!! It’s often linked with HR. Miami Ohio has an Org Leadership major. or Human Capital and Management. Clark, Scranton (Jesuit), Pitt, Elon, URI, Quinnipiac.
But a plain vanilla psych major is perfectly fine for anything HR/Org related.
The “business specific” elements of organizational behavior, design, etc. can fit in a teacup. Psych- with a rigorous stats sequence- will serve her well. Everything in HR is moving quickly towards analytics, data, etc. so folks who have worked with large datasets, can use R, SAS, SPSS or similar are at a huge advantage vs. someone with an HR adjacent major who has focused more on the counseling side of things.
Even Employee Relations- probably the most “counseling” of the HR disciplines- has become much more analytical in the last ten years. Someone in senior management forwards you a massive spreadsheet and says “Can you tell us the three drivers of employee turnover over the last ten years?”. Or “Here’s the raw data on the last employee satisfaction survey (50,000 employees). What does it tell us?”
So any social science training with a rigorous analytical component is going to be key!
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As previously mentioned, Binghamton is making a push to attract out of state students. Here are the numbers for 2025:
In State Acceptance Rate ——- 31%
Out of State Acceptance Rate - 79%
That difference is stark! Half of the successful applicants did not submit any standardized test scores at all. 60% of the successful applicants had a gpa of 4.0 or better, BUT we don’t know what that number was for out of state applicants. I would think that 3.8 is close enough that he would have an excellent chance, given the high out of state acceptance rate. With the expected decline of international applicants and of high school applicants in general, I don’t expect the difficulty of acceptance to get any greater and could in fact ease up.
Everyone has a different definition of small/medium/large. For me, small is anything under 5000, medium is 5000-15000, and large is over 15000. I’ve toured Binghamton and the campus is a manageable size. Definitely not overwhelming. The full time undergraduate enrollment is 14,300, so it’s a medium size school in my view.
SUNY Albany is another mid size college (12,000 full time undergrads). It has a strong reputation in both business and psychology. It has the added benefit of being a financial bargain because out of state students at Albany only pay tuition & fees equivalent to the in state cost of the flag ship university in their home state. 18 other SUNY campuses have the same program - including Geneseo, which was recommended above. Albany has a 69% acceptance rate. A 3.8 gpa would put him at about the 50th %ile of admitted students.
Another well respected state school which is medium size is University of Vermont with a full time undergraduate enrollment of 11,500. Tuition, fees, room & board is currently right around $60,000, so it will probably be higher in 2 years, but only 19% of this year’s freshman class was in state. With such a high percent of their students coming from out of state, they operate more like a private college in dispensing their financial packages. You wouldn’t need much to keep it under $60,000.
At Vermont, 2/3 of the applicants do not even submit standardized test scores. They have a 65% acceptance rate, so I would expect your son to be a strong applicant there. Burlington regularly shows up on lists of best college towns.
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Definitely seconding SUNY Bing and Albany, Clark and Marist 
As an example (not a suggestion, because it may not make budget, it’s 56k as of now)
Penn State has various possibilities through the College of Liberal Arts - Psychology, Organizational Leadership, Human Resources&Labor Relations. These can be mixed and matched as major/minor(s) depending on career goals.
HLR (often with women’s studies or marketing AND IST minors) is the most preprofessional.
Psychology has 2 degree tracks, one where calculus is required in addition to 2 statistics courses and one where the 3rd math choice is left to the student but they do need to reach the equivalent of AP-level in one foreign language. In addition, there’s a Business concentration or a Quantitative concentration for those in the stats+calc track.
HLR has a dedicated Information Technology minor and there’s a general IST certificate for other majors.
So, anyone with business/psychology interests would have lots of options.
I assume that it you look at universities and dig into their options, tracks, and concentrations, you’ll find plenty of places that offer combinations relevant to your son’s interests. The ability to pursue these tracks, where offered, and whether to combine them with something else, may help you select some places.
It’s been a while since @juillet has been around but she may be able to give you more info. She worked for a famous West Coast tech company and its videogames.
@KPK, can you let us know your thoughts on the schools that were suggested in your original thread? Letting folks know what resonated and what repelled (and why) can help posters to give better-targeted suggestions. Help me decide what schools fit me best [NJ resident, 3.8 UW, 1450 SAT, business/psychology]
I ask because I was starting to write out a more detailed post and then realized that most of the schools I was going to suggest were already mentioned in the previous thread. But I will give Lake Forest another bump.
- Lake Forest (IL): About 1800 undergrads at this college in a Chicago suburb. Unlike many smaller colleges, it has business and finance majors as well as regular fields like data science, economics, and psychology (the school has more of a pre-professional reputation than other liberal arts colleges). And he could also customize a major to be exactly what he ends up wanting, which may change as he’s exposed to new topics in college: Self-Designed Major | Lake Forest College
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