It can work a little like flipping a coin… seeing your gut response to whatever answer you get.
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I’ve got @sbinaz ‘s line in my back pocket too! 
Our kids are just so busy wrapping everything up. Mine has this week to “relax” a tiny bit and then next week is a lot of activities, awards ceremony, college housing/orientation sign up, AP Research thing due, so I’m ready and armed to quote @sbinaz when that time comes!
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I am absolutely in LOVE with Kenyon, so much so I want to enroll myself there . The students there are brilliant and so intelligent. They’re somewhat quirky which is who my S is! @LACadvocate , as you know, Kenyon was in my S26’s top 4! It was such a hard decision for him, but he could not get passed the rural setting. @ECCA2026 - My S felt that way about Kenyon too! If only Kenyon was where Oberlin or Denison is!
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We are on pins and needles waiting to see what she decides on!! 
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When my D24 was in the making a decision quagmire, we used this method, too. Worked like a charm because she did compare it to her gut response and then that helped seal the deal further.
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Re: the above, there’s a member of our extended family who, for the entire time I knew them prior to their passing, the person followed this method of decision making.
Almost every. single. time what resulted in something other than what the person actually wanted. There would be a lot of “it’s not fair,” martyrdom and victimhood behavior.
Therefore, in our immediate family, what we’ve tried to teach our 2 kids are a few key nuggets:
- your life is yours to live it as you choose. You have the same opportunities out there available to you as anybody else.
- if you want something bad enough, you CAN do it. You CAN get there. You have to want it bad enough and be willing to work hard for it. Sometimes this will mean being uncomfortable in the short term in order to see long term gains.
- NOT making a decision means that you are willing to end up with whatever life/karma/the universe throws at you. It is an ACTIVE choice to not steer your ship in any particular direction.
- Nobody is going to hand you things on a silver platter in life. Nobody out there in Adulting Land will come proactively to you and say, “Hey, here’s this great internship or job opportunity over here that you should go for.” YOU have to seek it out. YOU have to make it happen.
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I THINK that she will pick from one of her three. She has promised to do her pros/cons list today - so we will see if the decision sorts itself out or if indeed there are last minute adventures to other places.
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Also I am no longer making guesses about where she will pick. I am TRYING really hard to stand back and offer zero advice at this point – it is very hard. Haha! I did give her the final COA and freshman retention rates/graduation rates for each school she has left. I figure those are facts and she can use them/not use them in her decision.
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Has anyone had any private schools bump up the “general” merit aid for them this year? Not the competitive scholarships, just the “discount” that sometimes comes with an admission offer? My older kids were all public school admits, where we understood that the “merit aid” was just getting admitted and state tuition, but these $70k+ private schools that do give merit aid, I am curious, do they lead with the best merit offer?
No change yet – but we have a combination of merit and need based so maybe that alters things?
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There’s a thread discussing it here. D26 saw an increase from RPI.
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I’m pretty sure dd26 got one of the lower rungs at her first choice, the school has a great endowment, if it had just been 10K a year higher, that would make a huge, huge, difference to us, and we would still be paying significantly more than full pay state school, and happy to do it, just makes things uncomfortably tight. A family can hold out hope.
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That was my situation as well had to sit S26 down and do it together, I was worried it was first come first serve and the longer he waits the less choices he would have. There is a long list of to dos after he accepted his offer, housing, counselor webinar, class picking webinar, actually classes etc etc.
Maybe mention to D26 that the longer she waits the less housing choices she would have ?
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Not sure which school this is- but many private institutions are able to give more aid/merit if asked. (Many also will not 
)
If $10k would really make or break your D26 from accepting the offer or not- it does not hurt to ask. There are sample letters out there that I am sure a google search could help find.
Good luck
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University of Tulsa contacted D26 a couple of weeks ago offering an additional $3k in merit scholarship money. She didn’t submit a FAFSA for them because: (a) we’d only qualify for the standard $5500 federal student loan; and (b) with the merit scholarship she was originally awarded, although it took a nice chunk out of the tuition, the remaining COA was too high for us to afford.
Even with the additional $3k off, it was still too expensive. Plus, D26 is already all in and committed at Univ of Arizona.
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I do get the feeling that if it was going to happen, it probably would have already. I know for some people, 5-10K is just a drop in the bucket, but for those of us who are having to weigh breaking what we told ourselves would be the max we could spend, it makes a huge, huge, difference. I am starting to consider pulling all our charitable contributions for the next four years, and then moving that budget over to this school tuition, then feeling no need to be a donor of this school in the future. Kind of like we front loaded our support. Our student is the kind who will contribute in and out of the classroom at the extreme end, that is just her nature. And she is a sweet, joyful person with not one “emo” bone in her body. We have a lot to think about and I want to send my empathy out to all of you who may be doing the same. Side note: her big brother was awarded a hugely generous scholarship to a flyover school where he attends. The next year, two kids from his school decided to attend same school, and this year, three kids decided to attend. It was almost like they got his and our family’s “endorsement” and it carried some weight. So yielding one more kid can make future, greater, yield in some of these cases.
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Oh, after that drawn out deferral process with finally an admit I think late Feb, UMN awarded C26 $5k a year earlier this month. It just annoyed them after the lengthy wait for a decision, during which they had already written the school off.
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I THINK the options might be going from 3 to 2! Pro/Con list MAY have eliminated one! (fingers crossed) For the last 2: One has the most cons but also the most pros, the other has the least cons but also the least pros. I am keeping my opinion out of it -either of those 2 would be good options -so I’m hoping that 3rd one is really off the list because at least that is one less to consider.
ETA: I’m sorry for the play-by-play. I find this really stressful..and it helps to put info here where you can understand and I don’t pester my kid while SHE is stressed!
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Not joking - I use this all the time to reassure myself!
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If this is your daughter’s first-choice school, and she will 100% accept with $10K more merit, then I would absolutely contact the school and tell them that. Explain that she very much wants to attend, but it is just too financially tight – and that she would accept the offer tomorrow if they could offer $10K per year more merit. (Or $15K, or whatever number you feel comfortable suggesting to them.)
See what they say. Worst it can be is a no. But maybe they’ll come back with “We can offer an additional $7,500” – or something.
Fingers crossed that this works out in your kiddo’s favor!
(I think you’re right that automatically more merit would have come already if it was going to – I think at this point, you have to ask.)
The only two private schools that offer merit that were on my D26’s list were RIT and WPI. She got the maximum amount at RIT plus stacked a couple of smaller scholarships on top of that (National Merit, performing arts, alumni referral) – so we knew there wasn’t even room to negotiate. WPI’s merit was good, but not THAT good – if my kid had wanted to pursue the school, I would have asked for more.
(She ended up choosing an in-state public that is less than half the cost of RIT, even after all that merit.)
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