As a rule of thumb, he thinks only the top 5% of freshman applicants at public schools can expect to receive some sort of merit-based aid. Private schools often award it to a broader range of applicants. “It’s not a cliff, it’s a slope,” he says. He suggests contacting admissions departments for information.

Return On Investment
Families should look at college as an investment and ensure they are getting the proper return, says Jordan Goldman, founder of Unigo.com, a website that has helped millions of high school students find, get into and pay for college. “For a while, it’s been a right of passage that you’re going to send your kids to college, but increasingly it’s becoming something you really need to study,” says Goldman, who created a series of college guidebooks 15 years ago as a college freshman.

Unigo was acquired last year by Portland, Ore.-based Aequitas Capital, which since 2012 has acquired several college-matching platforms that aim to optimize a student’s return on education. Aequitas has rebranded these platforms under the name Unigo Group.

Goldman, vice president of business development for this group, says high school students should start researching colleges during their sophomore or junior years. Unigo.com, which provides all content for free to families except one-on-one video chats with admissions or financial aid counselors, offers quantitative and qualitative info. Data on a school’s majors and departments, such as class size, graduation rates and average salaries, can be good indicators of return on investment, he says.

Users of Unigo.com can filter college reviews created by more than 600,000 students. The portal also provides financial aid information and can match students to 3.6 million scholarships and 90,000 internships, he says.

Students should only use free databases to obtain scholarship information, says Mark Kantrowitz, a 20-year industry veteran and publisher of Edvisors.com, a website focused on planning and paying for college. Although many families wait until the spring of their child’s senior year in high school to look for financial aid, he says, some scholarships are open to children under age 13. A list can be found at Edvisors.com/age13.

He encourages students to treat the scholarship search like a part-time job and apply to every one they are eligible for. Material can often be recycled for multiple scholarships and admissions essays, he says.

As for shrinking admissions rates, the impetus isn’t a flood of more talented candidates, says Kantrowitz, who notes that academic performance has remained largely unchanged for decades. Instead, he attributes it to the surge in applications. “Schools are encouraging it,” he says, “and people are treating it like a lottery.”

A more reasonable approach, he says, is for students to compare their grade point averages and test scores to admissions statistics posted on colleges’ websites. He suggests applying to two “safety” schools (where they rank above the 75th percentile of admitted students), two or three “match” schools (in the 25th to 75th range) and two “reach” schools (below the 25th percentile). One safety should be a financial aid safety school that a family can afford even if they don’t receive aid, he says.

“Parents have the tendency to overestimate a child’s eligibility for merit-based aid and underestimate eligibility for needs-based aid,” he says. Students are more likely to be offered a merit scholarship at second- and third-tier schools if their academic profile is above the 75% percentile, he says.

Long-Term Thinking
Getting into school is one challenge; staying there is another. Nearly one-third of students transfer, and finances are the top reason, says Fred Amrein, founding principal of Wynnewood, Pa.-based Amrein Financial, a fee-only financial planning firm (he also founded College Affordability LLC, a college funding information website). But transferring can be costly because of the lost credits, notes Amrein, a featured speaker at NAPFA’s Midwest Region’s College Planning Symposium in June.

To help families find a good match from the get-go, he helps them calculate their four-year cash flows, understand costs and financing options and compare details of college award letters received.