184,000 in student debt???

So far my D has been accepted to Virginia, Maryland, Pitt, Swarthmore, Temple and Penn St. I asked her yesterday to take money out of the equation and tell me her two favorites. She said Pitt and Maryland. She was very impressed by both engineering schools.

@tpike12 : ) Maybe they will go to school together!

@Mom2aphysicsgeek Yes, as I said I agree she is not screwed. Yes, I am now aware that I had very little clue about financial aid and merit aid. This has been a lesson learned. My pain point is how it effected my daughter. I do not think I am in the minority of parents who think they know about college but don’t. . I am discussing this entire process with my neighbor who has a junior and told her about the federal loan amounts and she was like “how can anyone afford to go to school”. Other parents are totally uninvolved and don’t know where there children are applying. My husbands family didn’t go to college. He was the first one and they did not help him with the process at all and he was surprised when I helped our daughter. All kinds of people out there! I am grateful to have found this site now so I do not make the mistake…the bigger mistake of allowing her to go to a school that is not affordable.

It is unfortunate that she applied to schools she now can’t afford. Parents make mistakes too. She should have paid more attention to the money part too but better to realized you can’t afford it now than after she’s borrowed $100k.

When we were looking at colleges, I really was ‘learn as you go’ too. I didn’t know how much merit aid they’d get or how much I could afford. It worked out but I was still learning as the first year went on. Which scholarships were renewable? How did the taxes work?

I didn’t feel guilty that I couldn’t send my kids to a college without a thought about the cost. My kids always knew that cost was a factor in our lives, from sports equipment to prom dresses to the car I drove (they couldn’t drive it), we always looked at the price. College was no different.

@mom517 I am curious if either you or your dd spent time on individual college websites reading about their COA, FA policies, merit scholarships, and their CDS. While it is definitely as @twoinanddone states, “learn as you go,” the process is not unknowable. It is shameful that school GCs don’t provide at least some minimal guidance toward helping families know where and how to start researching costs. The CDS provides a lot of insight into student profiles and FA when merit info isn’t clearly articulated on a school’s website.

How was the list of schools your dd applied to selected? Unfortunately, when cost limits options, creating an affordable list, nothing else, has to take precedence. Your dd’s profile is a good one for larger merit awards at lower ranked schools. She would have been guaranteed to receive full-tuition scholarships at schools like UAH and Ole Miss, close but not quite full-tuition at schools like Bama. (With those scholarships, your total cost would have been around $10-12,000/yr.) She might have been competitive for merit at schools like USCarolina.

When you go up in ranking to schools like Case and Pitt, the larger awards are typically awarded to students with stronger profiles than your dd’s. Scholarships go to students they are trying to entice to attend vs going to a different school bc by attending there, they improve the school’s profile.

@twoinanddone’s advice is spot on in that those mistakes were made but better to realize now that you can prevent additional ones from being made by taking on more debt than is doable and that will impact your other children as well. (We have 8 kids, so juggling the educational and financial needs of all of them means always keeping our eyes on the long distance picture.) You still have young kids, so making sure to don’t impact your family’s real financial needs is far more important than unnecessary wants.

I wouldn’t beat up on yourself @mom517! It’s really hard trying to figure these things out.

Guidance counselors in my experience are not up on FA at all. In fact from a recent experience a relative of mine had this year, at even the best schools with a low student/GC ratio, the GC can still be uninformed.

The good news is that she does have acceptances and she will be going to college next year. And hopefully all of this angst will be a distant memory.

@Mom2aphysicsgeek, I really think that GC’s are not informed as to the ins and outs and I wouldn’t expect a parent to think that they are going to get much financial advice from them. The only reason and the only reason my kids had a good experience in the financial aid department is because of the posters here and that I stalked this forum for a few years when my kid was applying.

I have tried and tried to get my relative to listen but they are resistant to my advice, relying on their guidance counselor. Personally I think it didn’t go that well either time. But the kids are going to college and it always has a way of working out. Not as successfully as my kids path but that’s ok with me.

Financial aid when your other kids are in college will be based on your situation at that point. FA for our third factored in tuition for the other two. And the other two considered the impact of a third.

Another issue is the extent to which some people have considerably more assets than they think because they don’t include things like their equity in their home or they don’t want to liquidate stocks. FA for need blind schools is based on need not want. But some schools are providing FA covering half the tuition for families with incomes up to 200K. Then there are those who make much more than 200K a year but who also don’t want to part with their stocks and reluctant to take out mortgages but have millions $$ of equity in their homes. In those cases, FA isn’t going to cover much.

If your kid is certain to graduate with an engineering degree, the upside is that offers fresh out of college are at the 100K mark so a student with that degree can pay off loans very quickly.

@lostaccount I think you mean “schools that guarantee to meet full need for all”…not “need blind”.

“Need Blind” is an admissions term. It means that your financial need is not considered when your application for admission is reviewed. Need blind has nothing to do with the awarding of need based financial aid. It’s all about admissions.

OP - I think posting here is a gift to other families coming through the pike. I’m sorry for you and your family that you realized late in the process the financial limitations, and competitiveness for merit money at well regarded/competitive schools (especially for engineering). Hopefully your honesty will help another family.

I can totally understand why your child is upset right now but she’ll get a great education at Pitt and it sounds like she has the work ethic to get through engineering. All her hard work in HS will set her up for success. That kind of tenacity and grit is what she’ll need.

Hugs to you and your family!

We had money for the older kids, but not for the younger ones, but we also had fewer expenses by the time the younger ones went to college. You’ll also be wiser in the way of financial aid and can manage expectations for the younger children. Like the first batch of cookies with a new recipe, that first child really is a test case.

I have no clue what is rated higher as a university overall and in engineering departments–Pitt or MD, but I truly believe it doesn’t make a whit of difference. Both similar enough that it doesn’t matter. I don’t know the upper class housing situation at College Park, but I can tell you that cheap off campus housing is the norm in the Oakland area where there is a huge student “ghetto”. My son lived there and with a part time job, cheap rent, careful budgeting of food and expenses, he was able to bring down the room and board part of the costs significantly. And he did not scrimp. He loved those years at Pitt–he was OOS , and it was his first choice school. He turned down UMD (also OOS) it as well as Penn State, Delaware, and UB in the way of state schools.

I don’t like counting on future job markets to pay off loans that the kid takes, because so much can happen in 4 years. Engineering is a major with a high drop out rate. No guarantee at all that a beginning engineering student is going to be looking at engineering jobs. Also, I know engineers who took jobs in Silicon Valley and other places who are really stretching what looks like a great income in high cost of living environments. These are things that kids have difficulty discussing. It’s even more difficult telling a kid who changes major but loves the school, that in light of the change in career direction, taking on those loans became a lot more ominous and risky. My BIL couldn’t do it with his son, and after swearing the kid was coming home to finish locally if he did not keep up certain grades and course of study, bit the bullet and paid the premium for the kid’s school. I probably would have done the same, but yes, someone has to pay the piper in the end.

I suggest putting on the options on the table clearly with your daughter, and in writing and keep the papers so that if things change in the future, they are right there for the reviewing with her. Yes, this is not ideal. Still, she is much better off than many kids She has a hefty part of her education funded. She’s on the way to going away for college. She’s getting a grounding on the costs, now instead of 4 years later when the loans come due and she has to start paying them. Parents are employed, no one is sick or dead. She’s in the gravy and so are you.

I think that is very optimistic.

$100,000 a year salary for an entry level engineer. I don’t think so…and my husband is an engineer.

Not all merit scholarships require a student to maintain a 3.5 - but they do have a requirement. You need to read the fine print on the scholarships.

OP, Pitt is a great school for engineering and all your D’s hard work in HS is not going to be wasted. Pitt is a very tough engineering school from what I have heard.

Yes, you made some mistakes in making FA and merit assumptions. Bur I also think you need to help your D grow up and realize that she is better off than a lot of her peers who struggled to pay for community college themselves while working full time. I know one kid in our HS (we are also instate with Pitt) whose family has a mansion with upkeep running to cost of a small house ($100k plus), but daughter goes to Villianova on ROTC scholarship. She needs to appreciate what you are doing for her and count her blessings!

If she is doing coop for the 5th year, she will make some money and support herself that year. She can also apply for a bunch of scholarship as a girl in engineering and find good paying internships every summer.

        As the student is looking at biomed eng, the bets for a big immediate eng salary are off, possibly grad school is more likely. I don't believe any of the big eng salaries for mech/ee/chen etc are being bandied around in bio med. Summers might be research work over $$ co ops. And LOLOL at 100K salary for a green engineer. That would do a lot to fix eng drop out.

I thought you all might enjoy the creative FA package per semester we got from Nova last night:
Direct UNSUB loan: 1K
Direct Sub Loan 17.5K
Federal work-study $20t0
Family Financing option 33,716K
Total aid: 36,666 per semester
Total aid for the year: 73,332
Woohoo lol

I think you have a typo…the federal direct subsidized loan would not be $17.5 K. Did you mean $1750?

That’s a very creative way to word your family contribution!

@thumper1 yes lol. I did not have my reading glasses on : )

Not that it will significant’y help…but your kid can take $5500 in Direct Loans for freshman year. Your award only has $2700 of that amount. The additional would be unsubsisized but should be available to her.

That was per semester, so it is $5500.