1290 SAT, 3.53 GPA<<<<<<<<
You have to factor in weed out from engineering period, wherever you go to school. To pay big bucks for this is risky. Are you a URM/first gen? Are you getting good college advice from anyone? Do you have AP scores? Sat2s?
OP: don’t start another thread with the same question.
You cannot afford either school and, unfortunately, you either didn’t research costs, or didn’t think you needed to because your EFC was zero.
All of the prior advice is from a number of posters who have experience with something similar, or are familiar with your two choices.
Everything costs money; you aren’t going to get a free education. If you didn’t apply to your instates, attend a CC and transfer, or, take a gap year and work to earn some savings, then apply to some affordable schools.
No disagreement here.
I also suggested he follow up on a CC transfer program and look into coop programs.
When universities do not have enough funds to meet the needs of ALL admitted students (i.e., most universities) they have the choice of either rejecting the applicant or of admitting the student without institutional FA. If you were on the committee, which course of action would you select? I would vote NOT to reject a student because you could not afford them. To me, that seems the lesser of two bad choices.
This seemingly “heartless” approach is actually the more ethical option. Believe me, it bothers me a lot to see this repeated year after year! This is why :
1. Applicants need to focus on realistic backup options. Backup includes financial concerns;
2. When a student applies into a very competitive pool, they need accurate research on the pool.
In this case the OP thought that colleges would meet his need because he had the demonstrated need and he believed his profile would be very attractive to the universities. The publicly available College Data Set (CDS) should have assisted in better planning, but many students are hurt by freely distributed, generalized opinions and acceptance rates. We need less passing of opinion and more looking at the data to do better informed planning. Better information on the university profiles could have saved this student from this dilemma. Having said this, “generally speaking,” only a very limited number wealthy schools have the resources to meet the needs of all accepted students. Those very well endowed universities and colleges tend to be schools with single digit admissions rates.
In WPI’s case, for 2016-17 they spent $54,746,490 in institutional funds on NEED BASED undergraduate scholarships and grants. The addition of federal, state and external sources only raised the grand total to $62,143,136. BU’s numbers are bigger as they are a much larger university, but I suspect they are facing a like problem. Universities don’t like to talk about this in public and WPI’s $466,700,000 endowment seems like a lot of money for a small university. The costs, particularly for STEM programs, are very high. They do not want students who need FA to be discouraged from applying. If such students were rejected because they ran out of money, it would be a bad development all around.
Less opinions, more research data. With a rapidly changing picture in many university application pools, we need up-to-date information.
Sorry, it sucks but the reality is, you can’t afford BU. If your Efc is 0, your options are limited. You could go to community college and transfer. A low cost local university, live at home, federal student loan and working could be do-able. There are schools that meet full demonstrated need but they are few and highly competitive. Enough Merit aid is also very competitive.
You are making multiple posts because you are hoping for some sort of miracle that makes BU possible and I feel for you but you just can’t afford BU. My kids couldn’t either and when I was applying to college almost 30 years ago, my family couldn’t afford it either. It’s an expensive school that doesn’t promise not is capable of totally funding every low to middle income student they accept.
In a week the nacac list of colleges that miscalculated yield will be published. You may have better luck there. At least it’s worth trying.
MODERATOR’S NOTE: The OP’s first thread was already closed. Closing this one, also.