Reply to Do I nudge DS towards safe school and better chance of Merit Aid

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]One of the appropriate ways for parents to help is to research financial aid & merit scholarships at schools under consideration. It’s time consuming and may change from year to year but can help focus the list. Check the school websites and college confidential specific school forums. [/quote]
This
I saw this as my main role as the parent 
OP we had a decent amount saved for ds but not enough for $80k a year. 
DS had good stats (1560 SAT and 4.0 UW) but focused more on schools outside the top 20 where he was more likely to get merit aid. 
With lower stats you would need to focus outside the top 30 or even lower. 
I started with the Fiske guide.
I focused on geographic regions - Northeast and MidAtlantic
Ruled out places with a big Greek culture and ruled out big OOS schools 
With the remaining schools I looked up the Common Data Set for each and looked at how many students they gave merit aid to and how much and for these schools I looked at the SAT scores for the 75th percentile to see if ds had a shot
This took a long time but at the end I had a list of maybe 20 schools for ds to research to see if the schools were a match given his personal preferences . He identified 3 schools from this list that offered merit aid and received aid from all three. 
In the end though he decided to attend UMD honors college which was much cheaper. The stock market gods willing his 529 will remain largely intact to pay for graduate school 
I was very honest with him all through high school  about how much he had in the 529 and how much we could afford to pay out of pocket each year. He also knew we were unlikely to get much financial aid   
This is the first adult decision they make but they don’t have all the relevant information about the financial aspect - we need to help them with that. 
We did not tell him where to apply (except we did insist on him applying to UMD) but we did insist on no loans. [/quote]

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