I have been heavily researching the tuition break schools in New England and which ones for which majors and how much of a discount because as you may all remember from my other thread, my daughter wants to leave Maine and our budget is low. We got some disappointing news today. Some schools that offer the tuition break automatically disqualify the student for merit aid. Extremely frustrating because that almost makes it possible for her to pay more at the tuition break schools than she would at some of the private schools. And I almost imagine that some of these schools would offer her more merit aid than the tuition break provides. I don’t know for which schools this applies but at the very least Fitchburg state in Massachusetts. Room board plus tuition with the tuition break and it currently would be about 27,000 a year. Seems like a pretty high price for that school. I will have to send an email to the financial aid offices for the other schools because that’s pretty sucky and for some of them, that will make the cost still too high.
I guess this is just kind of a forewarning to those of you looking at New England tuition break schools.
D22 is at Fitchburg if you have any questions. Feel free to PM me. Also, whenever I’ve had a question about anything at Fitchburg, I’ve been able to get in touch with someone and they’ve walked me through it. It’s definitely not the big bureaucracy of the larger schools.
Mass college of liberal arts, a.k.a. North Adams state, allows merit aid to be added on top of tuition break. And actually that school looks like one of the most promising for her. The community is great, I lived in Western mass for 20 years when I was young. And the school looks to be something she might actually like the vibe of. She’s 17 so vibe is huge.
Just adding this so that everyone knows that it is apparently not a blanket thing with all of the schools. Each school has their own policies.
I hope it works. Only one school will be attended :). Farmington too. State borders in some sense are artificial. I’m guessing she’s not spent much time in Farmington. It will be new.
Of note, Massachusets College of Liberal Arts also belongs to National Student Exchange. NSE allows a student to study at any of the other ~200 participating schools paying no more for tuition than what the student is paying at the home institution. You can study at more than one institution.
