<p>I understand you must feel awful and I’m sorry for you. But remember, this is HER responsibility too. If she can get the SAT scores and if she’s got the grades to cut it, she’s going to get great scholarships. There are TONS of scholarships offered by all kinds of people and companies. Try to search for scholarships online. If she’s goot good enough grades / SAT’s she might not even need outside scholarships. Look for the full ride. Invest in SAT prep classes. And wherever she ultimately ends up, remember it was her doing. Although that’s probably hard to envision as a parent, since you feel so responsible.
But best of luck!</p>
<p>That’s true, this isn’t that common, but I heard a Dad was telling someone at work, he thought he didn’t have enough money, and now he might take a vacation…his son or daughter got a great merit package and he only had to pay R&B. I didn’t want to pop his vacation plans though by saying to wait and see, depending on criteria, how they did, but it was a pleasant surprise. You never really know.</p>
<p>It’s the colleges that have failed us, not that the parents have necessarily failed their kids. My parents - both on civil service salaries- sent me to a private college for approximately $5K per year in the mid-1970s. While it’s true that my parents were paying off a low-interest mortgage with very inflated dollars and that real estate taxes for private home owners in the outer reaches of NYC were insanely low, college tuition, as we all know, has increased much faster than the rate of inflation.</p>
<p>Back then, my alma mater had a broken sink in the library that went unrepaired for the duration of my college experience. The grounds got very muddy after rains. The heating systems in the dorms was ancient. Today, the college boasts a brand new fitness center and many amenities that did not exist in my day, as well as very hefty fees.</p>
<p>Colleges raise tuition in lock step with each other in a pattern that smells of something illegal. </p>
<p>While I don’t understand how many people I have known who travel a lot and go out to dinner regularly can feel entitled to financial aid, I also believe the colleges are guilty of far worse. It’s time for colleges to start finding ways to keep prices down.</p>
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<p>I haven’t attempted any of the individual college NPC’s yet, but after DS graduated from an independent middle school, my husband and I had to swallow our pride and apply for FA if we wanted him to attend an independent school for high school. There was a HUGE price jump for HS and, due an unforseen job loss and a major health calamity, there was just no way we could afford that tuition. We told our son that, in all likelihood, he was heading to our public high school (not the worst thing in the world but not Blue Ribbon fare either), but we decided to roll the dice and see what kind of FA was available for private schools in our area and not to assume we wouldn’t get any support. </p>
<p>As part of the process, we had to complete the NAIS financial aid forms and they ask very specifically how many vacations you took the past year and how much you spent on each, in addition to how much you spent on camps, etc., for your kids. I gotta think the more sophisticated college NPCs ask very detailed questions too. Of course, this is an area where parents could lie or fudge if they were so inclined, but we reported honestly. And honestly, we’ve taken exactly TWO family vacations in the past 10 years! </p>
<p>One lesson I learned from this entire exhausting process is that once you’ve got the official EFC, you can apply to three very similar schools on paper – in our case all three DS applied to were in the Friends’ (Quaker) League – and get widely different FA offers. In our case everything from $0 to 2/3 total tuition. I’m expecting the college application process to be a similar crap-shoot.</p>
<p>Which actually brings me to a question I’ve had for a while: Does anybody know how similar the EFC one derives from NAIS is to the typical private college NPC? Here’s a link to the NAIS FA calculator:</p>
<p>[SSS</a> and PFS for Families - School and Student Services by NAIS](<a href=“http://sss.nais.org/Parents/Pages/default.aspx]SSS”>http://sss.nais.org/Parents/Pages/default.aspx)</p>
<p>Our experience is that independent school financial aid is significantly more generous than private college financial aid (i.e., the EFC is a lot lower). There are two reasons for this: 1) independent schools know that you still need to pay for college after high school and take it into account 2) most colleges do not consider independent school tuition a necessary expense and don’t consider it (or only consider a fraction of it). If you only have one kid, the second factor won’t apply and perhaps the EFCs will be closer together.</p>
<p>It can indeed be frustrating but we have done our best to help our kids get a good education while refusing to take out loans. Our oldest D did choose to follow up her state school BA with a masters at a private school. Most employers do not care where you started out but only where you finish. Our youngest is a senior and has great stats. He has been accepted to some very good schools but unless he gets some great scholarships will not be able to attend. He has backups with in-state publics. I think he will be very disappointed initially but he knew from the start what our budget is. I do have some fleeting moments of guilt for not being to send him to an elite program, but then I remember we are sending him off to a loan-free education. I think he can count himself very lucky! I think you have to remember that the majority of kids in the US get little to no help with their college costs from their parents. I don’t think CC users represent the over-all population of the US and it is sometimes hard to remember while reading these threads!</p>
<p>I can relate. My oldest of 3 is a 10th grader and I have recently taken a crash course in college 101. The up side is that I made my discoveries now, rather than after his applications were submitted. I am just not sure how to proceed…he has a narrow focus on Cornell at this point, and certainly there are no admittance guarantees, but I wonder, do I tell him point blank to get it out of his head because they offer no merit aid, and we are just not willing to foot that type of bill? Just plain cross it off his list? I really see no way around it. “So…I know we have really encouraged you to excel, but now you need to take it down a notch and find a nice average school, how about SUNY?”</p>
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<p>Thanks for the insight, photodad. We only have one child in private school. As I said, the whole process of applying for financial aid (whether for secondary school or college) is a crapshoot, so we’ll just see where we end up when the time comes.</p>
<p>Vikingprime, luckily for you, your parents didn’t opt to go childless.</p>
<p>OP, I feel your pain. In fact, I’ve been feeling it for a long time, and I’ve come to three conclusions. #1. You go to war with the army that you have, not the army you wish you had. #2. The kids need as much lead time as possible, to understand where all this may be headed and think about what their own part of the decisionmaking and the compromising will be. They particularly need time to digest what debt will mean to them, and make sober decisions about it. #3. Part of my pain was rooted in my own unquestioned Northeastern private school assumptions, memories, and beliefs about wanting to do for my kids at least what was done for me. But see #1. And, finally, investigating and facing facts – #4 – there is a ton of partying and nonsense going on at even the “best” schools. And there are some gifted, sensitive, motivated kids at state directionals and county colleges. Kids who will be going places.</p>
<p>My kids need to be grateful for the resources that are available to them, own their own educational outcomes, find a few positive friends, and be excited by the opportunities that await them. It’s harder for them to do that when Mom is crying in the corner about how she won’t be attending Parents Weekend at Lafayette. So I had to stop that.</p>
<p>There’s a ton of good advice on this website about how to stretch the dollars that are available. Be open to the possibility that her options may look and sound a little different that what you had expected, and yet they can still be good options.</p>
<p>planner,
Some of Cornell’s schools cost significantly less. If your student is talented enough to get into one of the “land grant” colleges which are a part of Cornell, you would pay the lower tuition and he would be at Cornell. Those schools at Cornell are Agriculture and LIfe Sciences, Human Ecology and Industrial and Labor Relations.</p>
<p>momof3–actually it is the life sciences school that he is interested in and despite the $16000 tuition reduction it really doesn’t help in our case. Our EFC is close to the $40,000 mark and the cost is $43,000. With cost of the regular schools at $59,000 the gap would be filled with some aid!</p>
<p>If she can get the SAT scores and if she’s got the grades to cut it, she’s going to get great scholarships. There are TONS of scholarships offered by all kinds of people and companies. Try to search for scholarships online. If she’s goot good enough grades / SAT’s she might not even need outside scholarships. Look</p>
<p>Outside scholarships are not going to help in this case. The few that are mult-year and for significant amounts usually have a high need component (Gates) or require god-like stats…and all of those are HIGHLY competitive - like winning the lottery. </p>
<p>Other outside scholarships are usually for small amounts and only for ONE year…frosh year. So, not a help. Plus, the school will just apply the money towards need and reduce grants.</p>
<p>That’s what happened to my daughter, except for one small scholarship that was given directly to her for books, etc.
"Bryn Mawr told us that at least 50% of outside scholarships, maybe it was more, would be used to reduce grants. Not much incentive to get them. This was on their site:
Since Bryn Mawr meets full demonstrated need, any additional grant or scholarship aid the student receives will replace a portion of the Bryn Mawr award. The College applies the following formula to outside scholarships: All received outside scholarships are added together. $500 is subtracted from the total. The resulting total is divided in half. Half of the remainder replaces the same amount of Bryn Mawr Grant or Federal Supplemental Educational Opportunity Grant (SEOG) dollar for dollar. Example: two outside scholarships for $1,000 each will reduce Bryn Mawr Grant by $750. In the event that a student’s full demonstrated need is met entirely by grant assistance, any additional outside scholarship assistance will replace Bryn Mawr College Grant and/or FSEOG funds dollar for dollar. College policy does not allow Student Financial Services to use outside grant assistance, including employer tuition benefits, to replace the parent or student expected family contribution.</p>
<p>Please note that College policy requires federal and state grants, tuition benefits and entitlements to replace an equal amount of Bryn Mawr Grant and/or FSEO"</p>
<p>Not all schools treat scholarships the same way, another time consuming effort to ask them all, just like finding out who treated grad school students as part of the family. It takes effort, but sometimes the benefits are worth it. My daughters were lucky to have theirs apply to their funding.</p>
<p>I agree, outside scholarships sound good, but are hard to get. Added to that, many do not apply the scholarship to the family’s EFC, but some do. It’s always worthwhile to talk to the people in Financial Aid when you visit the college, and ask how they handle this. I did stumble into one school that D is dying to go to that would ‘stack’ the outside scholarship and apply to the family’s EFC. So use those college visits to probe the financial aid situation, too.</p>
<p>OP - The landscape has changed so much and so fast. When we sat down in D’s freshman year of high school we thought state u would be totally affordable. If everything had stayed the same, it would’ve been. Then state and college funding dried up, and tuition went up. We had to add a couple of financial safeties in case we can’t afford flagship state u’s.</p>
<p>We promised D. we could do state u. Then last year we realized that it was going to be a stretch. It’s conceivable we won’t be able to afford it at all. That’s what is making me miserable.</p>
<p>Debruns - just read your post. At least Bryn Mawr gives some benefit to the family. The way many colleges grab the scholarship benefit to reduce aid is going to backfire, I think. It seems unfair to me that D’s work reduces the college’s grant. We took colleges off our list because of the way they handle scholarships.</p>
<p>Your daughter can take a gap year between hs and college and work during that year. </p>
<p>The money that she earns during that year could cover 2 to 3 years at a state school if she lives at home.</p>
<p>Some of the aid has to be reduced by federal rules. SEOG,Perkins, subsidized Staffords, and work study can be given only when there is need, so any such award would have to be reduced. Where the school has discretion is with their own money, as to whether they will reduce that aid by outside scholarships. From what I have seen most schools go pretty far in terms of applying outside money to whatever they can and hitting the self help first, some of which they have to do.</p>
<p>A gap year can work, but do remember that 1/2 of what a student earns over a threshhold amount goes right onto the FAFSA EFC. Also any assets in the student’s name on the date the FAFSA is completed is hit 20 cents for each dollar for the EFC, so perhaps the student should pay parents the expenses who keep it in fund with parental SSN and name first on the account. Also, how much are you thinking an 18-19 year old is going to be able to make? My kids are barely making it as college grads and they live so frugally, mooching off of us whenever they can. Even if they lived at home, you are talking about $12-15K a year in savings. Unless the parent is going to heavily subsidize too. </p>
<p>Our state schools are reasonable, but some of the state flagships are running over $35K a year in their official COAs and that was for this year, and rising at a 3-5% increase each year. So the cost can be near the $40K mark if next year is skipped. Not gonna save that kind of money in a gap year, not a teenager, anyways.</p>
<p>While parents may not often discuss finances with their younger children, by the time they start to think about college, it does make sense to have a discussion with them about the funds available to pay for college. Some colleges are beyond the financial means of some people, that is nothing to be upset or frustrated about that is just reality. Creating a list of colleges to apply to must also consider the costs. </p>
<p>Many colleges through clever marketing and other means tend to imply that a more expensive college is somehow ‘better’. You need to help your child look past the clever marketing and hype that goes with this. Also, if they do attend a college beyond your means, will they fit in with the other students? College is about more then what tuition costs or how much aid you might be able to get.</p>
<p>Lizzie, I hadn’t even thought much about the scholarships until I read an article in a newspaper about a young woman who worked so hard to get a 5,000 scholarship, only to have it go to the school…that was unthinkable to me. But you learn as you go.
I found many colleges that don’t do that want you to know, but it doesn’t hurt to ask.
Mount Holyoke is a little different:
“Student Financial Services encourages financial aid recipients to apply for outside scholarships each year. Outside scholarships can be used to reduce the student’s debt, or, if the student wishes to keep her Stafford loan, the student can use the loan to help manage the family contribution.”</p>
<p>I know state schools are usually more affordable (although not in all areas) but I have seen some parents get similar packages at private. Marist gave a friend a package that made it the same as UConn and her son decided to go there.</p>
<p>You are not a failure, the institutions have failed you and your children. A serious overhaul of higher education is long overdue, starting by lowering tuition by reallocating financial aid effectively to all attendees. I favor federal legislation that would strip universities of their non-profit status if they continue to practice defacto price discrimination effectively shutting-out the increasingly underrepresented middle to upper middle class.</p>