@gettingschooled, more than anything else, I’m just pointing out to the OP that it isn’t always a matter of parents and students researching things inadequately or applying to schools that are financially inappropriate. Sometimes even if the application is done responsibly, it doesn’t pan out as indicated, and the heartbreak the OP posted about can be the result.
As someone who isn’t financially savvy and someone who could be much better with her savings, assets and earnings, I took the easy road. Like gettingschooled, I capped the amount I would pay and told D the number. If the total cost was over that amount, she had to make up the difference to attend.
The big eye opener came in her sophomore year when I discovered CC and NPC’s. I ran the NPC on random colleges and slack jawed at the results. I should have known because I have older nieces and nephews so I saw the increased college costs over the last fifteen years but I ignored the obvious trend.
We are lucky in that we have financial safeties because we have prepaid trusts for instate public schools and I also qualify for tuition waivers, so our out-of-pocket contribution would have been minimal. This option has always been known to my daughter. Always. This wasn’t sprung on her in her senior year, or junior year, or even her sophomore year. She’s known this since I started working for a state university (she was in 4th or 5th grade).
I tell people about the NPC and tell then to use it on every single school. Most people in my area, a fairly high income, well-educated community, do not know about it or refuse to enter their numbers. They say they aren’t comfortable entering their financial info so they would rather remain ignorant. I’m now hearing about how unfair it is that college costs so much. It’s hard to be totally sympathetic with their plight although I feel badly for the student.
Further, the high school does a poor job preparing students and parents for college. They have seminars on college costs but they only tell juniors and seniors about these seminars - far too late. I attended when D was a sophomore (thank goodness for older friends), people asked why I was there.
In addition the schools in our area love to publicize the amount of scholarship money their graduates are awarded each year. The do not distinguish between need based and merit , nor do they point out that one child may have earned merit from multiple schools ( but can only attend one 
), that having 1 or 2 kids who get a really full ride ( service academies or big sports scholarship) skews the total number. many people are left with the impression that lots of money is going to fall out of the sky for their kid.
@FallGirl - So true. I hadn’t really thought about how those numbers were skewed, but now that you point it out…
@Hannah - Also true that speaking about money is hard. Now that I’ve retired, my son has been asking me some pointed questions about how/how-much I saved for retirement and I have been very vague with answers (probably embarrassed that it’s not more).
@gettingschooled - I think that it’s extremely important to come up with that “here’s how much we can afford” conversation very early.
When I went to college, tuition and room and board seemed (now) to be ridiculously low. But why have cosst risen so dramatically - far beyond inflation rates - since then? I think there are many reasons, but several I want to point out are:
(1) Elite schools CAN raise rates because there are so many “customers” (supply and demand). Even if the COA rose to 100K per year, there would still be more demand than supply.
(2) Public institutions MUST raise rates because state legislatures are severely decreasing the percentage of support a school needs. In one state university’s case I know here in Colorado, only 10% of the college’s operating budget comes from the state. The rest needs to come from ever-rising tuitions.
(3) Borrowing for an education has become the norm, with disastrous effects. Think for a minute… suppose that borrowing were to be banned or severely limited. You’d see tuitions level off or drop in a hurry as schools scramble for students. This has especially been a problem in for-profit schools.
Anyway, just my two cents.
http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/parents-forum/1761644-parents-do-not-do-this-to-your-kids-p1.html is an example of where the parents and student did not have an honest conversation about cost and affordability before making the application list. The student got into several colleges, but the student’s mother now says that the family contribution will be $0, making all of them unaffordable (lowest net price about $17,000, which is too much for realistic student self-funding through federal direct loans + work earnings).
I give people advice about this all the time - just because a school has need based aid doesn’t mean that they think you need as much as you think you need. The EFC is not the amount you are going to pay, it’s the amount that the FAFSA thinks you can afford, but schools are happy to let you borrow to cover the gap between free money and what’s left over.
With my younger D, I made a spreadsheet with every school that offered her major. I put in the total cost of attendance, or at least as close to that as I could find on their websites - I am always skeptical of schools that don’t want to make it easy for you to find out how much it costs to go there. I looked at the common data sets to determine if they were reaches, matches or safeties. I ran the NPC to see what we might expect given our EFC and income. And all the schools that indicated they would be $20,000 or less on the NPC made it to our list. She might have been able to get into Berklee or NYU, but it didn’t look promising from the NPC, so we confined our list to the $20K and under…hoping that she would get more merit aid. We ranked them and eliminated schools where travel would be cost prohibitive.
We ended up with a list of 10 schools, 9 in the U.S. and one in Canada (we live in New England), and she’s been accepted to all except the Canadian one (so far, they don’t decide until later). The gap we have to cover ranges from $22K to $11K. Two schools have music department heads who have asked us to let them know if the financial aid she received isn’t sufficient, because they will offer more if it means she’ll go there. I will be able to pay $700 a month on a payment plan, and she has the standard amounts of Stafford/Perkins. We’re both going to take on debt, but the amount will be in the neighborhood of a new car rather than a house.
@Irishmomof2 - Thanks for the detailed post. It sounds like you guys have everything in order!
I would hope that a few of you would not be hopelessly enmeshed in this is the way it has to be forever. There needs to be a student bill of rights and EVERY American should be able to afford college http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/business/student-aid-memo.pdf It is a start!!!
“if the posts on that school’s dedicated forum are any indication, there have been several disappointed students reporting that the school apparently often does not meet the number that their Net Price Calculator indicates.”
Schools may be doing fishy things with their NPCs, but parents may also be putting fishy numbers in, or failing to warn the students that they have assets outside of the NPC framework. In order to keep the NPC simple and user-friendly, it doesn’t ask about things that the CSS Profile does. If you own a bunch of vacation properties, you should know that the NPC will overestimate your aid.
Unless nothing changed from year to year, you almost necessarily have to use previous year’s NPCs to calculate aid, too, we were looking these up last summer since we had to coordinate her applications and auditions - I really just wanted to get a sense of what someone with our income and family size might expect, not a completely accurate number.
Really,florida26, should everyone get to go to $60k per year schools free, or just community college? You’ve posted o a few threads that you think everyone should go for free. What about students who don’t score a 15 on the ACT? What about millionaires? Does everyone get to go wherever he gets in? No parent saving required? I think the US has a good variety of colleges at different price points. Most community colleges are very affordable. There are military options. batmom just posted that her son got a full scholarship for being a caddy.
Even in socialist countries where colleges are free or close to free, not everyone gets to go. Or we could do it like public school and just extend high school,but then you’d be assigned a school and it would be free if you went there but no federal aid if you wanted to go to a private or flagship. A few might be happy but many who would lose aid would not.
@twoinanddone really college costs have gone up 1200 per cent in 30 years. I see something wrong with that. I never said college should be free but it should not cost an arm and a leg There needs to be a student bill of rights and college needs to be accessible to more people of differing income levels. There is way too much blind acceptance to the status quo. That breaks my heart. I hope I am not alone in that sentiment
@florida26 I agree with you about the astronomical rise in college costs and resultant unaffordability for many lower and middle income families. Granted, some states have allocated reasonable funding for both their public universities and for scholarships and grants. Others have not, and less affluent students in these states, unless they are academic superstars who are accepted to 100% need met private schools or qualify for large merit scholarships, are truly unable to pay for college, even with maximum student loans. Costs at my alma mater have risen from less than $3000 to over $60000 since I graduated 46 years go. Yes, this is a private school, but it used to be relatively affordable to many middle class families. No longer an option for an average family. Even my state’s flagship is totally out of reach for the average family. I’m not sure what can be done to remedy the current situation, or whether enough people even care.
Well . . . back to the topic of the thread . . . one of the ways that people of differing income levels can have a happy application result is to do their research, do the calculators, know ahead what kind of need and/or merit aid they are seeking and target schools which align with their needs. The system we have may be less than ideal but within that system it is still possible to maximize your changes of finding a good academic and financial match. Part of it is about early information dissemination and part of it is about both parents and students puling their collective heads out of the sand.
Some of it is quite straight forward, really. For example, in 2 key strokes you can find out that the billable cost of attendance for Reed College is in the 62k per year ballpark. One more click and you can find out that they award only need based aid. Well, my neighbor applied and was accepted to Reed with the blessing of his parents and private college counselor. The rub - they did not apply for financial aid and could not afford the sticker price. For two bright, college educated people with professional guidance (and a neighbor who kept trying to get them to run the numbers) this seems like a no brainer but somehow this is not a unique situation.
On the thread about numbers of applications allowed the point was raised that poorly targeted applications take time and mental energy away from putting one’s best foot forward on those that are real possibilities. This kid was on his last nerve by the end of senior year and most of his supplemental essays and hard work in putting applications together was for not between uber reaches, full pay applications at schools they couldn’t afford and schools where he had a good chance of getting significant merit aid but did not put his heart and soul into the application.
The end result - for a kid with his academic profile they are paying way more than they should be because they didn’t target merit aid and follow through on scholarship days.
Every year there are kids with high need who apply to OOS publics that don’t give merit aid for their stats profile believing that somehow it will just happen. The sad stores just go one and on. Yes, the costs have skyrocketed in the last few years, but on the flip side nobody has a God given right to attend Reed College. Many people actually do have affordable options if they look around, they just find those options distasteful.
^And many just don’t have any affordable options. Even community college costs in some states are prohibitive, and finishing the last 2 years of a bachelor’s degree can be very difficult, even one or two courses at a time.
Actually, it’s up over 500% in money of the day. In inflation adjusted dollars, it has doubled.
You will note that I didn’t say EVERYONE has great affordable options. However, many kids could have had affordable options given their family income and academic profile but don’t because of a faulty application strategy an/or the feeling that attending a school where they are in the 75th% would be settling. Too many people (IMO) get stuck on wanting the academic and financial squeaker and refuse to look at anything “less”.
Agree Saintfan. Although I see that changing somewhat this year compared to even 4 or 5 years ago. The costs have gotten so high and the economy is still dicey enough that even people with good incomes and savings for college are balking at paying over $60K for the name school vs savings via merit money at privates or OOS publics. That being said, it is hard to give up on a “dream school” or a school that is perceived as “significantly better” for a kid that is very bright and worked really hard, especially in certain upper middle class suburbs. But perspective is a beautiful thing and a good lesson, IMHO, for kids to learn that choices have to be made and that they are lucky to be able to go away to college and get a great education - even if it is not at their dream school.
@saintfan please stop trying to blame the student. There is a faulty system out there. Costs have risen 1200 per cent in 30 years that is hardly the fault of the student. It is most likely the fault of the greed of the one percenters We are all victims of that greed
@florida26, we get it that you are bitter being in the 99%