<p>Please keep us updated.</p>
<p>I’m glad to hear that they will release her from NLI. </p>
<p>Best wishes for a positive outcome! :)</p>
<p>I hope some good options pop up.</p>
<p>Just curious, though: why send a deposit into a school you can’t afford? Either she comes up with a late admission at one of the other schools she’s interested in, or she could take a gap year. I’m not seeing any advantage to starting at an unaffordable school, particularly given the financial situation.</p>
<p>And good for the coach in releasing her from her NLI.</p>
<p>I would strongly consider a gap year if the second school does not come back with a good package. Seems silly to let her start at a school you can’t afford for 4 years, especially as an athlete. Good luck with school 2!</p>
<p>Op, my oldest was a recruited athlete, as were many of his teammates and friends. So we went through this process. First of all, it is not at all unusual for an athlete to decide to stick with club training and take a gap year, reapply the following year. That way he does not lose a year of eligibility, keeps up his skills, and goes into the college process older and wiser. One swimmer who had his heart set on a number of schools just did not have the numbers to get accepted, so he went to a local college, did not swim for the team but swam on the club level, and was able to get accepted the following year at BC when his grades were transfer level and the impact of the low SAT was mitigated. I also know of others who did not understand the dog eat dog process of athletic admissions and how unless your kid is in the very top echelons in a sport that a college or colleges covets with an influential, aggressive coach and AD on the ball, you have to work for admissions and money. Not the gravy train many expected it to be.</p>
<p>First of all, you need to be clear if a college is going to give your child an athletic scholarship. That is money that the AD/coach is able to distribute and guarantee. If you are depending on financial aid or merit money that is not athletic money, your child is competing with everyone else for those funds. A school that averages need met at a certain % is virtually meaningless because 1) You need to know how that need is defined 2) you need to know how much of that money is in the form of self help like loans and work study. Friends of ours who had a $20K EFC according to FAFSA found out the hard way that under PROFILE which many of the private schools use came up with a zero need. So all that student could get at this school that guarantees 100% of need met were unsubsidized Staffords, parents had a shot at the PLUS, and possibly private loans. </p>
<p>I am sick and dismayed that this happened to you, and I am working with an old friend from far away who is in a similar situation. Financial aid is tricky and the colleges are often deceptively cavalier about it. We just came back from college tours and there were a few schools that really made it sound like finances were not an issue at those schools. Ha. </p>
<p>I hope you come up with a good solution here.</p>
<p>What sport is the D? Is it crew?</p>
<p>wow, cptofthehouse - you are chock full of info, and yes, I found out about the little financial aid % details the hard way too. yuck.</p>
<p>My oldest was an excellent athlete, but because he parlayed his sport towards getting into schools that were reaches for him, the only school that offered him anything was his safety school, and he probably would have gotten a heavy merit package from them even without the sport due to his other stats. Other than a $100 award that was given by some campus group, he did not get any offers from the other schools on his list. He went on his Family Scholarship Plan. Which really hit us hard and we’re still reeling from the impact. We so wanted for him to go where he wanted to go and to a top school. Sigh. Yes, we paid for that one.</p>
<p>My second son was also a college level athlete but he chose to take the performing arts route. Fortunately, he went to one of our state schools and even got a scholarship (which he lost after the first year) there. I don’t know what we would have if we had borrowed for his college as we did for the first. We got hit with some terrible situations that put our home and whole familly at risk. Those were really rough years for us. That son got a number of merit awards, but none greater than $5K and most in the $2.5K level which is a drop in the bucket towards most private college costs. </p>
<p>Third son had exceptionally high test scores. Got some nice merit money offers at schools where he was an outlier with those scores. We were in a financial situation by then that we had to put $ limits and insisted that he cast a wide net with a variety of scenarios when he applied. Still, his choice,which has been wonderful for him, stretched us to the very limit. The school doubled its merit award to him, and he won an outside scholarship to make it work. He also worked two jobs that summer and took a job second term at the school. He worked this past summer and banked his money as well since the outside award was just for one year. We’ve avoided borrowing, but will have to when the next one goes to college and we have two college payments. We’re still paying S1’s loans that we took. They won’t be reduced till well into 2012 and won’t be done until 2016. </p>
<p>Oh, yes. I’ve paid for my education in the college financial aid/merit/athletic scholarship fields.</p>
<p>^^^^
Sounds as though you’re STILL paying for your education in the college financial aid/merit/athletic scholarship fields</p>