<p>You might check out [Home</a> - Barclay College](<a href=“http://www.barclaycollege.edu/]Home”>http://www.barclaycollege.edu/) looks like it is a Quaker college.
<a href=“http://www.barclaycollege.edu/undergraduate/tuition[/url]”>http://www.barclaycollege.edu/undergraduate/tuition</a></p>
<p>Look at more cost efficient schools.</p>
<p>For example, University of Minnesota has reasonable out of state tuition.</p>
<p>So do the SUNYs, like SUNY Binghampton</p>
<p>Also, take a look at Davidson College, which has good financial aid.</p>
<p>Also, consider applying to McGill and University of Toronto, which have reasonable tuition.</p>
<p>If your kid has good SAT scores, University of Miami and Tulane may give you a lower tuition.</p>
<p>Same thing, I think, for University of Iowa.</p>
<p>Not being able to Pay $36K/year for a kid in a 3-kid family is the norm (~$450K total). If you call that a failure, most parents on CC including me would be a failure. This is a good time to do the college search based upon the suggestions and plan for college visits during the Spring Break. If you are willing to pay ~$25K/yr, it is in the striking distance to find a good college she likes.</p>
<p>Has the OP come back?</p>
<p>OP back-- testing as I drafted a long reply and lost it! Groan!</p>
<p><---- check out my name.</p>
<p>My badge of shame… I had to pull 4 top-50 schools off the table for DS because they all decided we were full-pay. Yeah.</p>
<p>Fortunately he loves where he is.</p>
<p>So you are not alone. And there’s lots of good advice here.</p>
<p>I should dig out my Seven Stages of Financial Aid…</p>
<p>OP back-- testing as I drafted a long reply and lost it! Groan!</p>
<p>You may have taken so long to write your post that the page needed refreshing (something about expired tokens). </p>
<p>Either write it in Word and then copy/paste…or before you hit “post reply” do a “select all” and Copy…then if your post goes “poof” you can “paste” and try again.</p>
<p>If it is low enough for you to get pell grant, your daughter is eligible for Bill Gates Millennium Scholarship; the grand daddy of them all. Look into it.</p>
<p>Or</p>
<p>Have her attend a more prestigious school like USC Stanford or etc that pledge to meet 100% of need.</p>
<p>Hi, all—OP back.</p>
<p>I appreciate all your generous responses. I think the Earlham thing just blew me out of the water. It has that sweet Quaker vibe, two of our dearest friends are alums, and they’re not as stiff to get into as some other options. It never occurred to me that the net cost would be three times say, Haverford’s. As for D’s daughters stats—I struggle with that term, even though I know it’s important! I find myself wanting to say, “5’9” and 36-26-37, with an earned run average of 1.19”—anyway, her PSAT was 98th percentile, though she did score an atta-girl 800 on the reading section. Her class rank is somewhere in the 93-95% range. Club president since sophomore year, viola not beyond county level. She’s kind and intellectually eager with a heart of service, and I know they would love the stuffing out of her at some place like Haverford, but with their great endowment & stiff competition, I’m afraid she won’t make the paper cut. </p>
<p>I suspect part of the problem is I’m having flashbacks. I had to take an unplanned gap year and graduate Bryn Mawr in three years because my dad refused to go into hock—for which I don’t blame him one bit, especially in hind sight. I’d forgotten this but my parents actually separated for a while over it. </p>
<p>We’re not separating, ken ahora as my Earlham-educated rabbi friend would say, but I am looking at antidepressants for the first time in my life. We’re still paying back the last of my husband’s grad school debt and since we bought our house in 2006, every penny of equity has been sucked out by falling values. I’m upping my work hours which means no milk, yucky house, no exercise for me, and not much time or energy for my incredibly sweet fifth grader. I’m worried that the extra 1500 a month I can clear after daycare expenses will simply be moving the EFC target back that much or more.</p>
<p>I have two incompatible values to reconcile—financial peace and the sane life and work schedule that go with it, and a good LAC for my lovely kid. Not sure how this is going to play out. The advice and experience I found here has helped feel a little less like a miserable feckless worm. Miserable maybe, but not a worm. At least not a feckless worm.</p>
<p>The game plan—</p>
<ol>
<li>Wellbutrin for momma</li>
<li>Give D a copy of the tax return and tell her look up some net price calculators on a wide range of schools that appeal to her.</li>
<li>Advise D that scores unfortunately do matter both to admission and cost, and she’d do well to bring her math up for the SAT if she can.</li>
<li>Widen the net to look for other kindly, honorable, and intellectually lively colleges that aren’t 37K a year out of pocket.</li>
</ol>
<p>Thank you all, so much. I’ll keep you posted.</p>
<p>PS—to the poster that recommended York College. I know them well—I teach adjunct there 
They do well by their students & keep a stern eye on the bottom line.</p>
<p>Don’t wait until spring of junior year to begin college visits. </p>
<p>Don’t limit these visits to what your kid thinks he/she wants or doesn’t want (no matter how bright/“absolutely sure”/insistent) because they are too young to know what they want…or where…or what they want to study, or be, or do… and this will change and evolve. As it should.</p>
<p>Don’t fall victim to the powerful pull of the one-and-done syndrome. Mine applied August 1 (day the application opened) to a flagship for engineering. Both are now in our rearview mirror.</p>
<p>Don’t try to be frugal or logical when you’re scrambling to make up for lost time late in the game after a change in plans or preferences. Every weekend get that kid somewhere to see a college.</p>
<p>Don’t think for a minute that all those emails and all the letters and brochures in the mail mean anything. Even wonderful adcoms interviewing in your city have one goal: to get your kid to apply. No one but you and maybe your kid’s GC will consider whether it’s a safety, match , reach, or fantasy - nevermind a good fit.</p>
<p>Don’t limit the EA applications! Fall weekends are for essays, no matter what you hear otherwise. Don’t weaken, don’t falter; it’s important.</p>
<p>And for heaven’s sake don’t let your kid fall in love with one school, even a low reach (which just so happens to have an increasingly selective admission rate AND is “need sensitive” for its admission process - and you have need.) And if you allow this to happen, then whatever you do, do not fall prey to the “ED bump” mind game and permit an ED application, and if you stumble THAT badly, then do not allow the other applications to be put on hold. When the rejection/deferral/waitlist decision comes, it will be too late for anything other than RD, or whatever applications you can scramble in December.</p>
<p>Don’t wait until the last possible moment to discover that all those FA details you meant to get around to understanding a bit better really are important. This results in realizing too late that what you SHOULD have done (put your kid’s UGMA in a parent’s name or a 529 plan) would have lowered your EFC just enough to qualify for need-based FA.</p>
<p>Don’t skip the time it requires to really understand a particular college’s merit/scholarship award. Of course, the obvious: minimum requirement (GPA, course load), grace period for one bad semester, 8 semesters, or 10? But do not skip the important part about whether it applies to study abroad.</p>
<p>And don’t for one minute feel complacent, no matter how much you think you’ve prepared for college expenses. Just because you started when your kid was 2 years old and - even as a single parent with no child support - managed to have in place a pre-paid tuition program covering 128 semester hours, that’s no guarantee that it will be anywhere near enough.</p>
<p>But also don’t forget that we do the best we can, and our kids are still watching, so this is when we carry on.</p>
<p>The Seven Stages of Financial Aid, along the lines of the 7 stages of grief:</p>
<p>1) Shock and disbelief: “They expect me to pay half of my after tax income?!?! WHAAAATTTT!”</p>
<p>2) Denial: “No way, that can’t be right, college can’t cost that much, my kid worked so hard, they deserve to go to that school, they said it would be affordable.”</p>
<p>3) Anger: “It’s just WRONG that they expect me to give them everything I own. I have other kids and a mortgage! This is so unfair, those damn low income kids are getting a free ride.”</p>
<p>4) Bargaining: “How do I appeal my kid’s FA award?”</p>
<p>5) Guilt: “I should have saved more, I should have paid more attention to how expensive schools were getting, I should have made him apply to some financial safeties, I should have gotten a career that paid better.”</p>
<p>6) Depression: “All my kid’s hard work wasted, I can’t even think about this right now.”</p>
<p>7) Acceptance and hope: “State school here we come! And I’m much better prepared for kid no. 2.”</p>
<p>Originally from this thread, which may be worth a look to help you get to stage 7:</p>
<p><a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/financial-aid-scholarships/1121952-fafsa-efc-47k.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/financial-aid-scholarships/1121952-fafsa-efc-47k.html</a></p>
<p>:cool:</p>
<p>“We haven’t managed to save more than 15K for her.”</p>
<p>With your incomes, this figure is not that high. To be fair and honest, if you were saving for the last 16/17 years…well, you get where I am going. Should you feel like a failure? No way! As has been mentioned previously, you’re no different than the majority of families. Based on the stats you listed for your DD, I’d say you are a success. It sounds like you have done a great job raising her!</p>
<p>BTW…I’m a Shippensburg University finance grad. As mom2collegekids mentioned, you will find partiers at every college! The opposite is also the case. SU is a great school, and it will provide the opportunity for any student to get a tremendous education if approached with the correct mind-set.</p>
<p>Good luck to your family!</p>
<p>Notrichenough, thanks for the smile, I needed it.</p>
<p>It seems to me there is no really good way to do this, other than per be born independently wealthy, which many of us appear to have omitted to do. If you save more, you unquestionably pay more, which must make the savers hopping mad. If you don’t save, you’re in my position.</p>
<p>I feel like we’re always fighting the last battle. My brilliant mother had to go to a college that billed itself in the '60s as the place for the executive wife-- because she took a test and got a full ride, and her father wouldn’t give her any money. That set the stage for me to go to BMC, where she’d always wanted to go.</p>
<p>When I went away, my parents made the equivalent of about 180,000 a year and little debt, although not much savings as my dad spent much of the 70s caught in the aerospace lay offs. He was a Depression kid and terrified of debt. At the time BMC was I think the equivalent of $36K or so a year and I believe with my NMF scholarship they only paid the equivalent of about $20-- not so bad with their income and $300 mortgage. </p>
<p>I graduated with about 6 or 8K in debt. My DH had a total of almost 80K by the time he was done with graduate school. I thought we started out snowed under until I meet today’s undergrads, graduating with $40k in debt to a fairly scary economy. It has been a slow haul digging out from our debt and I just can’t face seeing DD in that position.</p>
<p>I was thinking I was in my parents’ position-- strong economy, pensions, paid-for health care-- and I’m not. I did a lot of self-service as a kid because my mom was working full time and nobody was home much to deal with laundry or bullies or balanced meals. I wanted my own kids to have more of me and structured our lives accordingly. But there isn’t much saved. See? Always fighting the last battle.</p>
<p>The main reason I want D to go to a good LAC is not because she’ll make more money-- I sure didn’t-- but because I felt that the community shaped my character, I made lifelong friends, and met my kindly, even-keeled, hardworking 'Ford husband. But I didn’t do a good job of predicting the financial forces at work. My big plan all along was to go back to work full-time when she went to college. Not sure that’s going to work out the way I’d hoped.</p>
<p>Demeron2 -</p>
<p>My big plan was to go back to work full-time when Happykid hit HS, and she’s a junior now in college, and I’m still very part-time so you can see how well that went! Life happens.</p>
<p>You need to let your daughter lead this process. I totally understand why you’d like the cozy LAC experience for your daughter, however, the LACs of your dreams, may not be what she wants or needs. Happykid’s major would have been impossible at most LACs, and very badly served at the few that claim to offer it. She is thriving at her mid-sized, mid-level public U and absolutely does not feel that she has missed out by not getting the LAC experience.</p>
<p>There are many good liberal arts schools that will offer a 50% merit scholarship off tuition to a student in the top 10 to 15% of their applicant pool. </p>
<p>As noted above, a person also needs to plan ahead for financial aid applications. This mainly means avoiding excessive amounts of cash or investments that are not in an official retirement account or 529 account. (For most families, that is not a problem at all). The formulas typically don’t consider $40 or 50,000 of assets, which are considered emergency money. If you have more cash or investment assets, then before submitting financial aid forms, it may be logical to pay down your mortgage, buy a laptop for your kid, pay off your car loan, or put some money into an IRA or 529. If you have cash, it generally is good to pay down debt, for the purposes of financial aid. Debt does nothing to help you get aid.</p>
<p>One thing your kid could help out now is to get as good of GPA as possible, and study like crazy for all required tests. If she was even considering Haverford, she must be a pretty good students. There are schools that would give her good merit if she has good stats. I would also look at her ECs and profile to find schools where she would have more of an advantage.</p>
<p>One other basic rule in financial aid - don’t put too many assets in your kid’s name. Summer job savings are OK in a kid’s name, but if grandpa gives them a chunk of money, put it into a 529 in the parent’s name with the kid as beneficiary. That also has the added advantage that a kid cannot run out and spend all of their college money on a motorcycle. 529 money can also be used for room, board, books and grad school, and could be transferred by a parent between siblings.</p>
<p>(In many states, contributions to a 529 account are also deductible on your state income tax. In my state of PA, the state also looks very favorably upon 529 accounts held with the state, when you are considered for a state college grant. Unlike federal Pell grants, you don’t have to be low income to be eligible for a PA state grant.) </p>
<p>In PA, you can also link a 529 account with the Sage program, and be eligible for some guaranteed minimum aid from many private colleges, based upon the amount of your 529 account and how long you have had it invested. However, the college must be notified that you are eligible for a Sage scholarship before you send an application into them. </p>
<p>Also, volunteer work can also be helpful in college admissions and in scholarship applications. Some colleges even have special scholarships available for students who have done great volunteer work.</p>
<p>OP, you’ve gotten some excellent advice already. You are SO not alone to find yourself in this situation! </p>
<p>Do check out some of the great PUBLIC liberal arts colleges, schools like New College of Florida and St. Mary’s of Maryland, both stand-alone public honors colleges. While I have no firsthand knowledge of them, we added them to our list of schools for DS to consider based on their excellent reputations for quality and value. (I believe both offer merit awards to OOS students.)</p>
<p>Sounds like you live in the York area, so I just wanted to pass on that the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting is hosting a Quaker College Fair next month if you want to check it out. I wouldn’t be surprised in the least if one of these schools jumped at the chance to have your daughter among their student body. </p>
<p>Here are the details: </p>
<p>Saturday, March 2, 2013
12:00 – 3:00 pm
Arch Street Meeting House
4th & Arch Streets, Philadelphia
(free parking on the site) </p>
<p>PARTICIPATING SCHOOLS:</p>
<p>Barclay College, Bryn Mawr College, Earlham College, Earlham School of Religion, Friends University, George Fox University, Global College of Long Island University, Guilford College, Haverford College, Malone University, Pendle Hill, Swarthmore College, Wilmington College, William Penn University, and Whittier College</p>
<p>[PYM</a> Calendar | 2013 Quaker College Fair](<a href=“http://www.pym.org/calendar/events/quaker-college-fair-2013/]PYM”>http://www.pym.org/calendar/events/quaker-college-fair-2013/)</p>
<p>Good luck!</p>
<p>Can you clarify? Are you saying that your D has or hasn’t taken the SAT (or ACT) yet? If she has, what was her SAT breakdown or ACT composite (have her take BOTH…some kids do MUCH better on one than the other and schools will take the higher one.) </p>
<p>There are many nice LACs that will give you D merit if she ends up with strong stats. </p>
<p>Do you want a religious one? Quaker? Are you Jewish? do you want one with good Jewish representation?</p>
<p>Grinnell College may be a good option. They have a huge endowment…10th in country on size of endowment per student and meet 100% of need. It looks like they give very large grants and small loans.</p>