My father recently found and showed me a tuition bill he had saved from when I went to college. At that time (30 years ago) the tuition, room and board for a selective private school was a little over $12,000. This year, the same college costs $73,836!!
This isn't new news if you're a parent with a high school student in the college admissions process. It also isn't new news that most families are in "no man's land" meaning they don't earn enough to pay for college without financial help, but they won't be eligible for needs based aid.
What's the solution? You need to find schools that can offer your student merit aid and are generous in doing so.
This is the approach I took with one of my own kids two years ago. She was accepted into all the schools is applied to, along with merit scholarships from all of them.
It's not a difficult approach, you just need to spend some time and gather all the data.
What's most important is to research a school's financial aid giving history. This will tell you how generous a school has been in the past, what have been the average size of their merit awards, and what percent of students who aren't eligible for need based aid, received merit aid.
In addition, your student needs to be in the top 25% of a school's academic profile to have the best chance of being offered merit money. This doesn’t mean your student has to have straight As and a 34 ACT. It just means relative to the school’s admission quartiles, your student is in the top quartile.
So here are some steps:
- Find out if a school even offers merit aid. It sounds basic, but that’s the first place to start. Some schools only offer aid based on financial need and nothing else. The Ivies are an example of schools that do not offer any merit-based scholarships.
- Look for how many freshmen, without financial need, receive merit aid? This means there are students that do not have financial need (as determined by the college), who are receiving financial aid in the form of merit scholarships. This data comes from the Common Data Set, which reports what percent of freshmen, which don’t demonstrate financial need (meaning their expected family contribution is equal to or higher than tuition) still receive merit aid from the school.
- What is the average amount of merit aid granted? This data again comes from the Common Data Set, where schools report the average dollar amount of merit aid that is offered to freshmen. This ranges anywhere from $1000 to full tuition, but a fair number of schools offer between $10,000 – $20,000.
- How much is the average merit aid as a % of the overall total cost of the college? The dollar amount of merit aid is only good if it makes a dent in the cost of the college. A merit award of $10,000 from a school that costs $30,000 is much more signficiant than from a school that costs $60,000.
- How many non-freshman, undergraduates receive merit aid and how much? Just because a college offers merit aid to freshmen, doesn’t mean they will continue to offer it to sophomores thru seniors. This is important to research since you don’t want to choose a school based on the freshman year offer, only to find out merit aid isn’t offered in subsequent years or it’s significantly decreased.
This isn't too difficult, but what's time consuming is finding all this data in one place so you can filter, sort, and compare the schools in an easy fashion.
You can find this information from desperate, different sources and you can search individual schools for this data, but without having it ALL together, you have no way of knowing if you've found ALL the schools that might offer your student merit scholarship money.
That's why we've gathered ALL the information you need to do this research in one tool - our College Data Spreadsheet. Included is information from IPEDS (the government source on college information) and all publicly available Common Data Set information.
You can use the spreadsheet to answer questions like this:
What is the list of schools where my student, with an ACT of 30, will be in the top 25% percentile, have a 4 year graduation rate of 75% or greater, give merit scholarships to 50% or more of students who do not qualify for need based financial aid, and the average merit scholarship is $20,000 or more.
