This is the "custodial mom struggles by, noncustodial dad makes beaucoup bucks, likely won't pay" story. I hadn't worried too much about this in the past, because we live near a midwestern state flagship that till recently has been quite good. You could go here, miss very little, and apply to a top graduate program with reasonable odds of success. It's taken a hard dive in the rankings and for excellent reasons, and it's no longer a place I'd recommend any really bright and promising kid attend unless there's really no alternative. Even so, I hadn't been worried about her fin aid chances at SLACs until her dad started making lots more money and it became clear that he didn't mind torpedoing her fin aid chances; he still wasn't likely to pay any more than required by the decree, which amounts to about $7K/yr, and even that will have to be wrung out of him.
She's still years out from applying -- 8th grade -- but it'd be nice to do some realistic planning as she starts high school.
I'm aware of the noncustodial PROFILE issues and the fact that even those few LACs that don't require it usually have their own forms. There's no way here to claim abandonment. I'm lower-middle income -- usually around $35-40K -- so there won't be much if anything from Pell. She's very bright, scores 98th/99th %ile on state standardized tests, seldom anything below an A-, but she's also 1970s-sane about life and not inclined to live like a panicked 45-year-old in order to try to get an admissions edge. Nor will I encourage her to do that. I actually work on the SAT and have a sense of how it goes, and suspect that her percentiles on ACT/SAT will run around 92-95th %ile for language-based things, 80ish %ile for math, and if she has to take subject tests they'll be nice but not stupendous. She'll probably walk out of high school with something like a 3.7 GPA. There are no Westinghouse competitions or state youth orchestra auditions visible on the horizon. Just a normal bright well-read/well-spoken academic-household kid who knows how to work and wants to make something of her life. If I had to choose a school today that fit her temperamentally, I'd say the closest I could think of would be Brandeis. (She actually likes Wellesley hugely, but I'd be a little surprised if she could get in, and even though she's pretty darn sororal she's just not a Wellesley-scale grind, imo. At least not at this point.)
I'm aware that the Brandeises of the world aren't going to give her the kind of aid she'll need without her dad's help. All the huge-endowment schools I see are pretty firm about using the dad's household income, too. Where are the sweet spots, though, for kids in this position?
I really don't want to send her here -- there really are still plenty of good faculty, but when they're responsible for a thousand kids a semester and musical-chairs performance-goal insanity devised by admin trying to drive them off the job, they just don't have the time they used to for the promising undergrads. It's all about herding them through courses with lower and lower standards as they try to avoid driving customers away. And banners about greatness, can't forget about those.
TIA -
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