To answer title question, yes there are scholarships - for merit. If your child has stats/scores that would get him/her into an Ivy, Notre Dame or heck even into UNC-CH as OOS student, then they likely would qualify for merit scholarship somewhere that would offset cost of school. Like your in-state publics for a start. So if you don’t have the assets freed up to fully pay for college even at that income, that’s where to start.
My H has health issues that made us reluctant to pay as much as we otherwise could, and Ds chose college accordingly. They both did fine. Things like that happen.
@ParentofA_student So? Hidden tax subsidies are everywhere! Church, for example. They are exempted by the congress because they are deemed to delivering public good. Unless you think universities have done less public good; otherwise, universities should not be singled out.
BTW, if you buy a home with mortgage, you have hidden tax subsidies as well. Also your donations to charities. The list goes on.
You do have my empathy in the sense that your income bracket has the most life-style impacts under the needed-based financial aids policies. With 260K income, the after-tax disposable income may be around 200K. The full pay to Yale is about 70K. So you have a about 33% (70/200) shock. For low household income, like 50K, the shock is about zero. For super high income, 70K is also like nothing.
But you know what, I am very happy to pay close to full price for my kids because I find I am most happy when my kids receive the best possible education even if it means that I would need to cut down on travels and eating out.
The reality is that colleges do not expect you to pay out of your annual income of $260k. They expect you to use your savings, sell some assets and pay it off over the next few years via loans. So 70 out of 200 net is not really what they are thinking.
It’s just something you have to decide. Is it worth it? There is no wrong answer. It’s like whether to buy a car in red. Personal preference. If not, it is perfectly fine and admirable to seek merit scholarships at schools in a “lower tier” bc they differences are not huge in quality.
Not sure if something was deleted from Tom’s post about toning it down. It wasn’t offensive or judgemental. Just a fact. Should he have said you may need to tighten your belt? Or perhaps you are not used to some of the personalities on here yet:)
No one is making the OP’s kid apply to or attend Yale. If you don’t want to pay, go someplace else. It is quite simple. If your kid is an A student as your name implies and has high test scores, there will be cheaper options. Go to town. Others are entitled to feel differently (including making the decision to scale back on some things to pay full price). You do you.
@NashvilletoTexas Yes, a student’s marriage drastically changes the EFC. Suddenly they are considered independent and parent’s income and assets are no longer used in the calculation. But the people that send their kids to college are generally not the kind that would be excited to through rice at a teen age wedding. A spouse carries a lot more liability than the typical student debt load.
^ timing might be an issue. I don’t know exactly how FA works, but isn’t the circumstance being considered the financial status the year prior to application? I imagine holistic admissions, need-blind or not, might be affected by a married 17-year old claiming financial independence. I know that claims of emancipation get scrutiny; I expect such a young marriage would also.
How is the system not fair to you? If your kid doesn’t get into Yale or you don’t want to pay $70k/year, you have other options. Our income is roughly 25% of yours, but nobody’s falling all over themselves to toss money our way either. We’re hovering dangerously close to the upper limit for both federal and state need based grants. Several colleges my son applied to offered him grants of $20k/year, but that only brought the net cost down to ~$25k. That’s roughly 1/3 of our yearly income. We just don’t have that kind of money (x 2 kids), so our son commutes.
Most students from low income families don’t get into the schools that give great need based aid. They start at cc or or attend a commuter school. You have the opportunity to pay for a wide range of schools. If you don’t want to pay $70k/year or you don’t like the policies of the colleges that charge that, find schools in a price range you will pay. I’m sure you’ll have plenty of great options.
My son wanted to take a gap year no matter what the results were for his college applications. Unfortunately, we had a very atypical and unusual financial circumstances in the year 2015 (colleges look at financial record of two years prior), so our income, just for that year, spiked up to about the same level as the OP’s. But knowing that when my son returns to school after a gap year, we’d have to reapply for a FA based on our usual and typical income, which 2016’s income would demonstrate, we decided to apply for it along with the rest of applications. My hope was so that we can “guess” as to which colleges would offer us the most generous FA packages that could help us make our final decision as to which school to commit to.
I was very surprised by the results. Based on the high income of 2015, albeit atypical, the results were all over. Of the seven OOS private schools that my son was admitted to, about four required that we pay either full or offered us a minor, token amount. That’s exactly what I was expecting the results to be. Of the remaining three, one offered in excess of $10,000 per year, another about $20,000 a year, and the most generous and surprising, one Ivy school (not HYP with a good reputation for FA generosity), only $5,000 a year more than our in-state public university.
I’m not interested in getting into a moral debate about whether you should or shouldn’t apply for a need-based FA given the OP’s income level. I think that’s an individual choice and I’m sure the results would vary wildly. Perhaps that one Ivy school gave us the most FA because I attached a little note explaining how the 2015 year income wasn’t our typical income.
@prof2dad “But you know what, I am very happy to pay close to full price for my kids because I find I am most happy when my kids receive the best possible education even if it means that I would need to cut down on travels and eating out.”
You sound like a wonderful human being and parent!
Colleges are not going through this analysis at all. As long as they are getting the quality of kids they want with the mix of full pay versus aid kids that works, they do not care how anyone is funding their portion of the cost of attendance. Saying they have these expectations would mean they owe something to people who apply but they don’t. And they shouldn’t. Assuming they are getting the kids they want with the amount of aid that works for the institution, whether they deal a family with $x amount of income or $y amount of assets as being able to afford full freight with current income, loans, selling assets, savings or a combination of all of the above won’t change how they approach aid.
How many people spend more than $65k/year on trips and eating out?
Everyone has to do what’s right for their circumstances. As a family we faced this decision a few years ago. The financial elements of this had me terrified. We are full pay and very fortunate in that it hasn’t hurt nearly as much as I thought it might. We were prepared to sell our home if it were necessary to give our daughter this opportunity.
She has flourished and has had an experience beyond anything we could have ever imagined.
Our baby girl, Harvard class of 2018. Not one ounce of regret.
I like the idea of that kind of shotgun wedding. I can picture Pa on the front porch, shotgun laid over his arm saying “You will save my retirement account if you know what’s good for you boy!”
As @TiggerDad so clearly posted, some people’s income can spike just in the last 2 years. We have the same circumstance because of , finally after 7 years, our business succeeding. We did save for at least 2 full years of college prior to the income spike. Our child is our only and he is aware of his fortunate ability to attend a really good, albeit, expensive university. If he was a high school senior several years ago , he might have received some need based tuition assistance. I wish that certain posters would understand that not every parent understands the Financial aid facts. Hopefully the OP will not marry off their kid just to skirt the financial responsibilities of sending their kid to College. I meant the last sentence as a joke because I’m sure the OP was joking.
At one point, arranged marriages for financial reasons were common. That is all this would be. And I would expect that the students would get married in a civil ceremony, wouldn’t live together (I know some married couples with kids who essentially do not live together) and would get a divorce after graduation. I don’t know if anyone who has done it but with the money involved, I would guess that it has happened.
@saillakeerie , I suppose this could have happened. Come on , I doubt the OP is serious unless they are incredibly cheap and void of common decency. I doubt it.