Four year public schools, broadly, cost about $10K (there are a few states that are dramatically more, but most are like $8k-12K) for tuition. If you can live at home and commute, and you can take the Federal Loans of $5K, so that takes tuition down to $5ish. That’s a pretty reasonable number to meet through a combination of part time work, parent contribution, and possibly some additional loans. If you can secure a summer internship through the school, you can make significantly more during the last two summers. That puts a person in a position to graduate with $20-30K in debt, which isn’t great, but is manageable (especially if the bulk of it is very low interest/deferable).
Now, if you have to pay for your living expenses (no school in commuting distance), it does get much more complicated. However, if your SAT is over 1250 and you have a 3.5 (As and Bs), there are likely to be some options. They won’t always be great options, but they will be there. Though you do need to know where to look.
ETA: if your household income is under 50K, you’ll be getting some money through a Pell Grant, as well.
Ok, I’m a Medical Librarian and work with docs all day (including ME’s.)
(Also associated with a med school but don’t work for them, but get to work for the students.) I’m also a first-gen college student who pulled off a massive miracle - four years tuition-free with a scholarship. (Then paid for grad school and actually paid off my loans!) So I’ll give my three cents…
Doctors are obviously smart folks, but they don’t necessarily have any inherent skills beyond that. They’re just really well-educated.
How are the grades/test scores? She’ll want to keep them strong, especially the sciences. It’s ok if some subjects are difficult, but mastery of the sciences is pretty much mandatory. A “C” in gym or civics isn’t the end of the world.
Guidance counselors can be useless, I got into a program at my state-school college at 15 where I took free classes for simultaneous HS/college credit. Without a shred of help from my HS. They also did not assist in my scholarship prep and were kind of hostile about it. Dweebs.
It’s not wrong to pick a good 4-year school now.
Nothing stopping you from researching med schools now.
Med school is expensive, but schools are set up to make the students succeed (they coddle their students, but maybe in a good way?)
There are med schools for students with less-stellar grades, and they are awesome at what they do. We still call their grads “Doctor” and they get into residencies.
Get her into something that has her talking with her future colleagues. Even right now if it’s just following them online or sending an email.
In my experience, if a student has good grades and test scores relative to the school’s average, then schools will tend to give them scholarships to attract them. I mentioned upthread that my son got a scholarship offer from every public school he applied to, ranging from $10K-$12K/year for four years for out-of-state schools (which were priced higher for out-of-state students), $5K/year for four years to our state’s flagship public school, and $2K-$3K/ year for four years for the in-state state universities. My son didn’t even have to apply for these; the only requirement was to get your application in by a certain date (earlier than the regular admission application deadline).
For private schools, my son got much more generous scholarships (upwards of $20K/year). While supposedly merit-based, I’m positive they also looked at family income. Despite these generous scholarships, the costs of private schools were so high relative to the public schools that even with these scholarships, they were still more than twice as expensive as the public schools.
It’s best to think of all of the scholarships as discounts off the sticker price. Schools use these discounts/scholarships as tools to attract students. An average student with high family income may get admitted to a good private school, but be asked to pay full price. An above-average student with upper middle class income may get some decent scholarships that shave off 20-30%, while a stellar student with relatively low family income may get a full scholarship that pays for nearly everything.
It all comes down to a applicant’s grades, scores, and extracurricular activities compared to the school’s average and who they are trying to attract.
BTW, the “reach” private school that my son was wait-listed at didn’t offer him any scholarships/merit aid at all. My son was basically average there, not above-average, so it’s evident they weren’t trying to attract him to go there (also evident in the fact that they wait-listed him).
Finally, I think the private schools pay a little closer attention to family income when making all these calculations and scholarship offers than the public schools. They typically require the much more in-depth CSS Profile in addition to the FAFSA.
For my nephew, who considered the University of Connecticut but ended up going to Connecticut College (small, private liberal arts college in New London, Connecticut), UConn would have cost more than Connecticut College did after the scholarships he received.
I agree completely, along with your observation earlier in the thread about how much things have changed in recent years.
The outdated advice given to students and parents back when I went to college in the 1980s was not to bother saving for college, because it would held against you when you applied for financial aid.
My wife and I went to an eye-opening seminar in my son’s junior year in high school in which the speaker asked the audience who thought that advice was still valid. A good portion of parents raised their hands, including me.
The speaker then told us that if our family income was over $50K/year, we almost certainly wouldn’t be getting any need-based financial aid, so it’s too bad that we hadn’t saved anything for our son’s college expenses.
A week later we met with a financial advisor, set up a 529 savings plan, and started aggressive putting money into a college fund for our son. We continued paying into this for the next five years. Fortunately, he chose a good public school (UConn) and got a small scholarship, so it all worked out. My son only had to take some federal student loans. If he had decided to go to a private school, we likely would have had to take out significant private loans as well.
My nephew wound up in a very similar situation – he was accepted at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, but was offered very little in the way of financial aid; he was also accepted at Valparaiso University, a small private school in northwestern Indiana. Even though he would have been paying in-state rates at U of I, it would have cost him more to go there than it would at Valparaiso, as Valpo offered him a ton of aid.
This is wrong. Looking down the road from where he ended up, Yale doesn’t even start expecting a family contribution until ~$75k gross family income. And they offer aid to students from families with income over a quarter million. Obviously that’s an extreme example and YMMV.
Sorry if I wasn’t clear, but I was referring to need-based federal financial aid obtained via filling out the FAFSA.
Things are completely different with private schools. They can and do offer whatever they want depending on how they want to shape their incoming class. They use the CSS Profile and a much more holistic look at the student’s academic achievements, extracurriculars, and family income to determine what they want to offer a given student. Also, in recent years many private schools have been guaranteeing financial aid to all admitted students with family income under a certain amount.
Regardless, whether a student goes to Yale or UConn, if family income is much above $50K (and also depending on some other factors like family size and number of students in school), then you won’t likely get any need-based federal financial aid, such as grants or subsidized federal loans.
It’s still worth filling out the FAFSA, though, because everyone is eligible for unsubsidized federal student loans, which are not need-based.
The upshot is the feds have a very different view about needs and the expected family contribution (EFC) than most people tend to think.
I graduated from college in 1988 and I had about $20,000 in loans, or a little under $5,000 per year in loans. As I remember, at the time, the “total cost of attendance” was about $15-17,000 so it covered roughly a third of the cost. (And I got about $5,000 in scholarships from the school. So it worked out that my parents paid a third of my education, I paid a third and the school paid a third.)
From what I heard from my brother as his two kids went through college recently, the maximum allowed in federal student loans is still only about $5,000 annually but now that covers perhaps ten percent of the $50,000 tuition. And total cost of attendance at many schools is upwards of $75,000. So a four-year degree has a sticker price of roughly $300,000, which is astonishing.
Also, FASFA looks primarily at income, not assets. CSS looks much harder at assets. This has lead to some rufe shocks when a family keeps telling us they are middle class but it turns out they have a couple million in real estate. Private schools see that as something you can borrow against.
This is why I keep saying the money is different for everyone. And it leads to weirdness: The kid with the household income of like $200k resents the poor kid, because the poor kid can go to Cornell for free, and the affluent kid is expected to pay $50k–and Cornell is probably not worth $50k, when you can go to your state flagship school for $14k after scholarships (because if you got into Cornell, you probably got a merit scholarship to your state school). But what the affluent kid doesn’t understand is that the poor kid ALSO has to pay $14K for the state flagship, and for a kid with a household income under $20k, $14k might as well be the moon.
Schools also vary in their financial aid. Famously, the UCs have no need-based aid for out of state these day. None. So it’s going to be $70k. It just is. (There are like 5 merit scholarships) But every year, I have students who insist on applying, so that maybe a miracle will occur. None so far.
Those are private school numbers. And, as has been stated many times, many, often most, people don’t pay that much–there is need based and merit based aid. Most of the “good” private schools are around $70k–this holds from SMU to MIT. But the actual price paid varies widely and has as much to do with the size of the schools endowment as anything.
State schools have an average cost of attendance in the $22k-25K range (in state), for the most part. But the financial aid is not nearly so good. Out of state usually bumps them up to private school prices.
I’m well aware that the actual cost of attending college is very different than the sticker prices. (When I was in school back then, we were told that something like 22% of the tuition cost went to scholarships. So those whose parents can afford the full sticker price were subsidizing those of us who needed help.)
It’s a little more than that, but not much: $5,500 for first-year students, $6,500 for second-year students, and $7,500 for third-year students and beyond.
IMHO, anybody whose family is not wealthy who pays full sticker price for a private school is out of their minds. If a student doesn’t have the grades for the school to knock off a significant chunk of that price, then go somewhere else. Paying full sticker price at a private school is for someone with more money than brains.
Even worse are students and parents who take out private loans for the full sticker price of private schools. I’ve read horror stories of parents cashing out their retirement funds and/or students taking out loans for hundreds of thousands of dollars for a student to get a degree in archaeology or film studies.
I’ve heard those horror stories as well. And the laws in this country mean that student loan debt can’t be discharged even in bankruptcy. I’ve heard of people in their 40s or 50s still with hundreds of thousands in student debt.
I was just surprised that the federal student loan max went from covering a substantial percentage of the cost to a much smaller percentage. The answer, I know, is that college costs have way outpaced anything else.
I’m going to cosign the suggestion to go hard for a four-year institution. Having undergrad research experience is hugely important to any STEM major possessing a modicum of ambition. Your daughter will be better positioned to find those opportunities at a four-year institution with faculty researchers than at a community college. And the rat race for those opportunities starts early. I was hired to be a research assistant at the end of my sophomore year. Other cohorts in my class connected with on-campus internships around the same time. A student who transfers over in their junior year and who desires research experience for their med school application will be at a disadvantage over a student who has spent the previous two years being plugged into everything in the department.
I’m going to be wading into these waters in a few years with our only child high school freshman. I haven’t looked into anything so far since he’s really undecided in what kind of direction he wants to go. My wife and I have a combined income of over $200K and while our son is taking all honors/advanced courses and will be taking AP classes when available (his current weighted class ranking is 35 out of 700 students) he’s not exceptional in any sports he plays. Am I right in assuming in our income bracket that tuition assistance will be pretty rare for him?
Not necessarily. Your situation sounds very similar to the one we were in for our son, and he got a variety of merit-based financial aid (scholarship) offers. See my previous posts. The merit-based financial aid offers at most schools he was looking at knocked off about 20-30% of the sticker price (less for public schools, more for private schools).
Even with the more generous scholarships offered by the private schools, they were so much more expensive (typically 3x the sticker price) that after taking everything into consideration they were still about twice as much as the public schools. That’s how the numbers worked out for us…YMMV.
As I’ve noted previously, you won’t be eligible for any need-based federal financial aid. You will be eligible for unsubsidized federal loans.
Right, this is key. The way to get merit-based financial aid from a school is to be attractive to them, and that usually means being above-average in some way.
That’s why I think it’s so important to apply to a variety of schools. See my earlier post about applying to “safe”, “ target,” and “reach” schools. It’s not just about admission. It’s about the financial aid package you get from each school, especially merit-based financial aid. You want to be able to compare multiple offers to get a sense of which is the best way to go.