<p>You can have a compelling story. In fact, I would lead off one of the essays with “I have raised my brother since I was 12 years old” or whatever the details are; I forget.</p>
<p>I’d choose and apply to both an ED1 and (if rejected by ED1) ED2 school for the better odds.
Because of the likely cost difference (roughly 20K or more over 4 years), I’d choose Lafayette/Lehigh for ED2 over Rochester (assuming you’re going for Tufts in ED1).</p>
<p>You should ask SLU about the merit aid and whether it stacks with tuition reimbursement. Usually, it does not. </p>
<p>I will ask SLU about that.
Also, their fin aid on the calculator didn’t include any potential merit aid.</p>
<p>My advice - forget about grandpa’s millions. Forget about asking him for anything he doesn’t offer. </p>
<p>If he only would contribute 4K per year, maybe, but has a lot more, including him at all in the equation is pretty silly and self-defeating in my opinion.</p>
<p>Your father should release his info for you, whatever it is. If he lives with his dad and his dad pays his expenses, it is not exactly income for him, it’s costs he doesn’t have to pay. There’s really nowhere to put that - “living expenses” never show up. </p>
<p>So: run the NPC, FAFSA, and CSS/PROFILE with your mom’s and dad’s exact finances. If there is an extra box for “special circumstances”, note that your mother is owed 18K in back child support but your father cannot pay (again, leave grandpa out of this). If your mother is entitled to child support but has not received it in a while, make sure you list “0” for child support received (and “0” paid by him). Remember it’s for 2013 tax year at this point.</p>
<p>Make a spreadsheet, which it looks like you have already done. Remember to note which have scholarships/merit awards. We are paying a lot of attention to merit awards right now, because some are based solely on SAT scores and are done deals.</p>
<p>The worry I would have in your situation is that if you count grandpa in at all, it would be a source of income for you, or for your parents. I agree that you can’t just “have him pay the tuition” because that is essentially your income. I also agree if he gifts any money to you or your parents, that will pretty much be flow-through to the college, plus it seems he is not inclined to do that anyway.</p>
<p>If anything, you should ask if grandpa can help you with books and incidentals. If not, fine.</p>
<p>If grandpa’s millions were full access to you, you would not be entitled to penny one of financial aid. You do not want to go there, to assume he can pay something or everything, if it is doubtful he wants to pay anything. However, ethically if he agrees that he will gift you $4,000 per year as long as you are in college, you could list that as “other scholarships” because that’s essentially what it is.</p>
<p>PS - there is a chance that if you are very upfront about your father not paying his child support, he might get some attention as in the court’s attention, if he hasn’t already. That may mess things up quite a bit, so I do suggest using the zeroes and <em>not</em> mentioning that he owes money to your mom. Don’t lie, but don’t add info if you don’t want to deal with possible consequences (same thing on grandpa’s $$$).</p>
<p>PPS - if grandpa changes his mind, and throws a bunch of money your way during college, it’ll go to college. If he changes his mind after your college, you can always donate money back to the school’s scholarship fund to “balance” what you were given before.</p>
<p>Good luck!</p>
<p>Also - you had CoA listed, but really it is your Net Price that you want. Cost of Attending is very misleading because schools vary greatly in how generous they are with aid.</p>
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<p>On my spreadsheet the CoA is referring to the cost after the aid has been applied.</p>
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<p>There has been an ongoing court case for years but my father’s been able to avoid having real action taken against him. Nonetheless my mom received 12.5k yesterday in court and the remainder of which he owed is no longer owed (5.5k)</p>
<p>I was thinking, maybe you’d want to skip ED2 (assuming no Tufts in ED1) so that you can compare fin aid packages. A little riskier, but probably worthwhile.</p>
<p>Hard to say what kind of package you will receive from any school, as any child support your mother receives this year is included in her income. At a number of those schools your father will have to supply his info too, and any money your grandfather gives either of your parents should also be included. when it comes right down to it. the actual tax returns and what’s reported on there will determine much of your financial aid packages. Any money your grandfather gives you is also unearned income and reportable, including if he pays your tuition. </p>
<p>I suggest you NOT apply ED given your situation so that you can compare all offers on the table. Usually when there is a tuition benefit at a college due to employment, that benefit is applied directly to the need figure and fin aid is then calculated on what the net need ends up being. It is not stacked. But your mother can ask SLU what their specific policies are and find out exactly how it works out, as schools can differ widely in how they handle this. </p>
<p>Would my grandfather’s contribution of 3-5k/yr significantly affect financial aid in general? I’ll run the NPCs with a supposed 12.5k + Grandfather contribution as untaxed income and see what it comes out to be. </p>
<p>Yes it could. Though I’ve been told that what I am about to say is bordering on fraud, it is NOT, and a lot of people do this. Your grandfather can give you the money as a loan with official documents drawn up with terms of payment and market interest. That way it is not unearned income. That, to me, is the easiest wa to do this. If you got the contribution, it is unearned income, and how a PROFILE school would look at that gift, I don’t know. For FAFSA schools, total student icome under $6K a year is not hit up for EFC, but anything over it is assessed at 50%. If you have a job and earn enough where it makes that difference, yes, it could affect aid.</p>
<p>I don’t think I’ll be making 6k this year. I downgraded my hours / week and I should only be expecting roughly 16 hours a week. That may come out to be around 5.5k.</p>
<p>Ill have to see about the loan thing. That might not go down well with my mom because she does not trust him.</p>
<p>@cptofthehouse:</p>
<p>The preference that many schools give ED over RD (2-3 times the RD admit rate for ED) is so huge these days that I believe that advising someone to not apply ED for fin aid reasons is bad advice.</p>
<p>At worst, if the fin aid package is unacceptable, they can just go RD with the rest.
As an example, say that your ED is Tufts. Either their fin aid package is acceptable or unacceptable. If it’s unacceptable, applying RD to all schools would have yielded the same result: Tufts is unacceptable and you need to go elsewhere. If it’s acceptable, then you got in to Tufts when you might not have by applying RD everywhere. You do give up the possibility of a school that is equal in your mind to Tufts but with a better fin aid package. However, with MUST as both a financial and admissions safety (make sure of that), you can decide what would be an acceptable package from Tufts. </p>
<p>BTW, a school that accepts someone ED <em>wants</em> to admit a kid in order to have a high yield rate. They have little interest in taking someone and then offer them a fin aid package that is far from the NPC, causing the admit to decline the offer.</p>
<p>To the OP: You can run a NPC with the worst possible scenario put in, including your dad’s hundreds of dollars of income, etc.</p>
<p>Purple Titan, you and others with your argument have valid points. That is something to take into account. However, in my experience, the emotion, momentum that goes with ED really puts the pressure on to take the offer. Most families I know do not have a firm cut off number. I have seen time and again, that it takes other opportunities, other offers on the table to give a fin aid package perspective. I know many families over 15 years of this sort of thing who regretted going ED for one of their kids and each year when competing offers sneak through, I see people reneging. It’s very difficult for a parent to say “no” when the acceptance for ED comes, the fin aid is inadequate but not by a whole lot, and those puppy dog eyes are looking at you, begging, beseeching, and you want the whole process over. </p>
<p>Someone I well know went through this with an ED acceptance to Holy Cross. Oh, how we celebrated her acceptance, and though the cost was still steep, the family was going to make it happen. That the family accountant told the Dad , that he was crazy to take this on, that several big ticket things happened that they unexpectedly had to address, all made the acceptance to a state school honors program at a greatly reduced price suddenly look much better than what it would have seemed in the fall when the ED press was on. Though they had notified all of the school of the ED acceptance, some of the bigger schools have no mechanism to stop the process and so the young woman got an accept on that app unexpectedly. With peers going there, and an opportunity to go on some great trip with her classmates coming up (not doable with every cent having to go towards Holy Cross costs), she changed her mind and asked to be released from the ED commitment, was and ended up going to the state school from which she graduated, very happily. The other thing that came up was that some other schools that were on the DD’s lists accepted peers RD with fin aid packages far more generous that Holy Cross’s. Kind of disheartening to know that a peer kid applied to 5 schools, got into them all includiing Holy Cross and their aid offer was the lowest. </p>
<p>I see variations on this a lot. These days with info, the NPCs, and full disclosures of the risks, ED even with fin aid an issue can be a calculated move. But without everyone, especially the parents, not understanding all of this, it can result in an emotional move rather than one with all factors considered. You don’t want to lose the bird in hand, but is it truly worth any more than those in the bush that may truly be possible to have?</p>
<p>Whatever decision anyone makes about ED, they should be apprised of the risks as well as the advantages. It’s not all that simple as “just say no” it never is. You want to discuss the package at a bad time of the year–when every one, including families are gearing up for the holidays, and you can end up in lmbo in a while when making an appeal, and you also have to worry that the RD apps might auto flush you if you accidently end up on the accept list–yes, I’ve seen that happen. THen it 's yet another pain to address. IF a student has an active, informed adult helping or is really on the ball him/her self, that 's one thing. But the way it usually works, is that many of these thing that need constant follow up get dropped somewhere. Once ED accepts are sent out, the attention is given to the main event of admissions which is the onslaught of the RD apps,and it’s difficult gettting a lot of attention to ones plight.</p>
<p>@cptofthehouse :</p>
<p>@Ctesiphon is a rational level-headed kid with a mature head on his shoulders. I’m positive that he can handle this strategy well.</p>
<p>Thought this was interesting. On Naviance, 15 kids from my school applied to Tufts, and 3 got in. Average weighted GPA of those admitted is 3.77 and ACT was 32. My WGPA is 3.79; Since I am in the 20% class rank, I would have an expected a higher average GPA of those admitted. </p>
<p>Can you see who applied ED from the data? </p>
<p>I can’t from naviance, I’d have to ask my counselor, hopefully they keep info on that kind of stuff.</p>
<p>Well, my mom’s concerns of me going far for college seem to have been dispelled. I showed her my spreadsheet and she seems more open to the idea of me going away for college, so it helps knowing I’d have her backing regardless of where I am to apply. </p>
<p>I know this is an old thread, but I want to comment on @PurpleTitan statistic of 2-3x admit rate for ED. I have been in a meeting where EA is discussed, and the admissions officer stated that the EA pool is self-selected to be much (2-3x?) more qualified than the RD pool. I can only imagine that is even more true for ED. RD allows a couple more months of accomplishments to be garnered, and allows financial aid to be compared. It may be a more even playing field than it appears, since RD is “diluted” with applicants with less commitment and self-selected poorer match.</p>