<p>Okay I know that all of the Ivy-Leagues claim to offer no merit-based aid, but I was wondering if there were any instances that anyone knew of where people somehow had received some? </p>
<p>I'm asking as a big-dreaming, good student from California who comes from a upper/middle-income family where I don't qualify for aid yet can't pay 55k a year :/ Thanks!</p>
<p>hey, the case for columbia is pretty set, it doesn’t offer merit aid. it may offer enhanced aid to scholars (research on here or elsewhere), but that usually comes in the form of summer funding that doesn’t quite reduce overall contribution necessary.</p>
<p>you can of course apply to merit scholarships and use that to help pay off your columbia tuition.</p>
<p>lastly i will clarify something here regarding your statement and certainly with less tact than perhaps how the financial aid folks would use. it isn’t that you ‘cant’ pay 55/year, it is that your family has different financial priorities. in fact by virtue of the fact that your parents combined income puts you in this category means you could indeed pay if you wanted to. so this is a misnomer. financial aid folks don’t exist to tell your rents don’t buy your kid a car or don’t move into the more exclusive neighborhood or take that trip to europe. all choices that may make it seem like you ‘can’t’ afford a private education, but they are in fact alternative choices that made affording a top flight private education difficult.</p>
<p>in the end i am not here to say anything about how those other choices are better or worse because they are not. in the end you’re gonna go to college - and probably a rockin’ either public school that is affordable or great private that offers merit aid - and graduate with a degree and go on to make money and make your own choices. it is just that a lot of families on here don’t see college as buying a house, but it is the equivalent.</p>
<p>No. The top tier schools, including all those in the Ivy League, exclusively offer need-based aid. If you make $150K/year, then you can afford to pay $30K for a Columbia education, difficult as it may be. The kid from South-Central whose family has a household income of $60K can hardly afford to pay anything for a Columbia education, but that fact in and of itself does not mean he is any less entitled to one if he is otherwise admitted by the admissions committee. I know, perched precariously in the shrinking Upper Middle Class in an area with a high cost of living, it may seem unfair, but it really isn’t once you look at the bigger picture. That said, there is a point where you’re most screwed, around $180K/year, where you get virtually no financial aid yet you don’t make enough to make it anywhere near painless, but still: it’s better the money goes to someone who truly needs it than someone who could really use it.</p>
<p>At least, that’s the rationale used by the top schools. And why wouldn’t they try to do this? They get tens of thousands of applications from students all over the country and world, and they admit less than 20% of them (in Columbia’s case, less than 10%). They truly have the pick of the litter, and can pick whatever students they would like, so it makes sense that they would do whatever they could to ensure that all the students they pick could attend, regardless of income, which means offering lots of aid to truly poor students who are admitted and less aid to more affluent admitted students. Offering merit aid may attract more talented upper-middle-class students, but really, they have more talented upper-middle-class applicants than they can possibly admit! From their perspective, it simply doesn’t make sense to offer merit aid instead of need-based aid.</p>
<p>As adgeek notes, though, you’re not Columbia, just an applicant. Even though it’s in Columbia’s best interests to offer exclusively need-based aid, it may not be in your best interests to attend a school, like Columbia, that only offers need-based aid. There are alternatives, such as a great LAC or private college that’s not quite an Ivy peer or even a phenomenal public college, that are much more affordable and could offer as great an educational experience. If you want to attend an Ivy, though, you’ll have to accept that you’ll only receive need-based aid.</p>