Should I Apply?

Answered

Hi @izeah,

Thanks for your question. I'm certain many HS applicants are unsure how to cull their college lists down or add more schools they haven't thought about.

If the cost to attend is your priority and you already know that the college you are unsure about has a poor track record of scholarships, then you have your answer already. You should cut that one loose.

I highly recommend researching more colleges for affordability by using College Boards Big Future NPC net price calculators. There are a lot of colleges that offer merit scholarships or a combination of merit/need-based scholarships or just need-based scholarships. Depending on what you are looking for you can create quick and fast proforma tests by entering basic info into these NPC calculators to help you determine which schools offer the most scholarships given your GPA and test scores.

Every college has its own priorities. So it's hard to tell based on the name of the college whether you are going to get a lot of merit aid or not. Typically the T25 colleges are not known for giving much merit aid. So I think the best Merit aid is with T25-T100 schools. Why? Because they have to attract as many smart kids as possible to offset all the full-pay students they admit might not have the best grades and test scores. So a lot of good liberal arts colleges have great merit aid because they attract a ton of very average applicants from the private day and private boarding schools that are full pay but aren't particularly clever. So these students have lower GPAs and Test Scores. So if you have say a 3.9GPA and a 1400 SAT and the middle 50% is like a 3.7 GPA and 1280, you help the schools stats on the higher end.

It's important to visit as many colleges as possible in person. Sometimes just looking at photos or videos is not enough. Case in point. When I went to look at colleges I was very disappointed with NYU, Harvard, MIT, Amherst, Wesleyan, and UPenn. Their campuses were very meh! to me. On the other hand Mount Holyoke, Vassar, Wellesley, Smith, Brown, Princeton, Columbia, and Yale were beautiful and awesome. You are going to spend 4 years there so you should love your surroundings and want to live there.

Good luck.