Reply to What kind of colleges can an ~80th percentile kid get merit aid at versus where she'd get in but get none?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]

2). What kinds of colleges would she likely be able to get into without any merit aid?

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If you're talking about LACs (which is my area of knowledge) the interesting thing is that the answer to your question No. 2 is "very few."  The LACs beyond the top 30 or so offer merit aid to essentially everyone, and most of the LACs in the top 30 offer merit aid to no one.  And a kid like you're describing is unlikely to be able to get into those LACs that don't offer merit aid, because they're very selective.  Essentially, everyone is trying to get into the same 20 or so LACs, and those LACs can afford not to offer merit aid, and every other LAC is fighting for people and handing out substantial merit aid to kids like yours.

We found this with my kid, who sounds similar to your 80th percentile kid (though his SAT score was 1460.).  He wound up EDing to Conn College, which gave him a substantial merit scholarship.  But I'm not sure he could have "done better" if we'd been willing to do full-pay.  Maybe he could have gotten into, say, Bates, ED.  But WASP, Bowdoin, Wesleyan, Vassar, Hamilton, Carleton?  I don't think he would have.

Also, I would add that in terms of getting the COA down to $40,000 with merit aid, that would be very hard at any top 50-60 LAC for a kid with those stats.  The schools in the 40-60 range will liberally hand out aid that gets the cost down to $50,000 or $55,000, but they know what their break-even line is.  It is maybe possible at schools in very low cost of living areas.[/quote]

This is the answer. With regard to the last paragraph, from the experience, another way of saying it is that the top 50-100 schools will only offer merit aid that will get the cost down to $50k a year or so even to students with higher stats, with the exception of a handful of very competitive scholarships. The scholarship offers that my kid got from the schools in that range were very consistent. The cheaper options (other than in-state) were OOS flagships that basically offered in-state tuition. But that leads back to the fact that a kid with lower stats might not even get in to the OOS flagship in the first place. [/quote]

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