Aid Offer Help!

Paying for College
1

<p>I am currently deciding between Dartmouth, Cornell, Northwestern and Vanderbilt, with Northwestern or Dartmouth most likely being my top choice. </p>

<p>My FAFSA EFC is roughly 2000 (due to parent's unemployment) and we have roughly 100k in savings. I haven't received an aid offer from Cornell or Dartmouth yet, but Vanderbilt gave me $52k in need based aid (a mix of grants and work study) while Northwestern gave me $13k (of which $6k is in loans)? I'm pretty surprised with the NU package, and since NU is one of my top choices, it is particularly troublesome. Should I call NU's FinAid office?</p>

2

<p>Bump, can anyone help?</p>

3

<p>Do you also have home equity?</p>

<p>Do you have a non-custodial parent whose income was considered?</p>

<p>Definitely call and ask how they arrived at your “family contribution.”</p>

<p>Side advice…since money is an issue…I would go with the schools that are “no loan”.</p>

4

<p>What do you mean by home equity?</p>

<p>And no non-custodial parents.</p>

5

<p>Do you own your home? If so, is the mortgage lower than what the house is worth?</p>

6

<p>Yes we own the home. Do you mean the amount left to pay on the mortgage?</p>

7

<p>Value of the home - amount left on mortgage = home equity.</p>

<p>If your schools required the CSS Profile as well as the FAFSA form, they may have included home equity when they determined how much your family could afford. (FAFSA doesn’t include it.) Schools that use the information from Profile have varying formulas for determining need.</p>

8

<p>I think my family’s home equity is around $350k then. How exactly are you supposed to use home equity to pay for college though? And Vanderbilt asked for both the CSS and FAFSA too, but gave me ~$40k more in need based aid.</p>

9

<p>Vanderbilt is known to be extremly generous.<br>
So, it’s probably not a fair comparison to the offer from NU. Just saying…</p>