Kindly point me to the numerous threads by homeschoolers who are saying they should get special financial consideration from colleges because they chose to homeschool their children.
@albert69 I understand what you meant. Our kids would never ask us to fund an unaffordable college experience. They know what we have sacrificed economically for them and recognize that when they graduate from high school they are adults and behave as such. They apply wisely to low cost schools and high merit aid ones. They recognize that we have and continue to assist them to the best of our ability, but they don’t ask us for anything more than we willingly offer.
There are posts about unreasonable parents unwilling to fork over their EFC. The hand-wringing, the lamenting. I would love to hear the parents’ side of the story. If our kids applied to schools requiring our full EFC and then went out and publicly denounced us for not paying it in order for them to attend their desired choices while they had completely affordable options, I would wonder what on earth had possessed them to think they had the right to demand that we pay for a school we had clearly told them was outside of what we could afford. I would be horrified at the attitude that somehow they had a right to demand something beyond what we had shared we could offer without causing us financial distress.
My kids have worked incredibly hard and graduate from high school highly successful and most definitely competitive for top schools. But in no way does that hard work earn them the right to expect us to pay unaffordable amts in order to chase their dream. We are function more along the lines of the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the one. 
I had typed this up earlier and had saved it but didn’t post it. Now I am bc I would like to have the same answer as @austinmshauri I know for our family we have never expected special fiancial consideration. I spend almost all my time on CC posting that kids can thrive and be successful attending financially affordable schools. 
I really don’t think, if you read the full context of her post, that @saintfan singled out home-schoolers in general. I think she was referring to a category of STUDENT postings bemoaning their families’ very real financial circumstances, which were at odds with the dream school’s EFC. These things can happen for a variety of very valid reasons (from the parents’ point of view), but kids don’t always realize that colleges don’t necessarily determine EFC the way any given family does.
Taking care of grandma or an adult sibling, homeschooling one child because the schools just didn’t work for them, and other UNANTICIPATED life situations can throw off the best-laid plans. Most families I know who home-school all their children went into it with a plan and recognized that they would be sacrificing one parent’s salary to provide their children with the type of education they value. This is very different situation than those who home-school because it’s the best, most-affordable option they have for a specific child who was floundering in the local public school or has other special needs. It was this latter category that I thought @saintfan was referring to.
I think it would be helpful to keep telling parents of younger kids (e.g., through Facebook… don’t just keep pigeonholing people at parties or they’ll start avoiding you ) about things like NPCs and that recent Forbes article with a chart on what an EFC is for various income levels.
I know when my kids were younger you hear about things like 529 accounts and current prices for state and private schools, but there wasn’t much detail as to what you’d really pay at what income level. People see these articles coming out now about how the Ivies and Stanford are free for families with incomes under $125,000 and don’t realize how hard it is to get into those schools.
I think if parents repeatedly hear, “look, if you earn over about $200,000 you’ll be on the hook for full tuition, and if you earn over $140,000 your EFC is about $30,000 per year” maybe they’ll start saving. (Or maybe not …)
^ I already told my sister to expect nothing. She has 10 years to deal with the shock.
@mom2aphysicsgeek said
You pretty much just summed up my oldest sister’s search for college, except that she didn’t get admitted to any of the schools that required the big money shelling. At any rate, in the application process, she assumed that my parents would pay for Harvard or Yale, even though they couldn’t and financial aid did not come raining down. I wish I could hear the parents side of the tale on some of the stories you mentioned, too.
And thank you @austinmshauri for understanding what I was saying and clarifying. To everyone: I was NOT suggesting that federal financial aid should be higher for me because my mother chose to stay home. I was just saying that from my perspective, it would have been unreasonable for me to expect that my parents foot the large part of the bill for college because they had already given so much for my education.
In a world where educated adults do stupid things like buy lots of consumer goods on a credit card and pay the minimum every month (do you really want a $600 TV which will cost you $1800 by the time you pay it off? or that nice restaurant meal which sits on your card month after month?), and use their HELOC (if they can get one) to pay for a week at Disney, and DON’T pay into their company sponsored retirement account when there is a full match (who gives up 8% free money month after month? Lots of people…) and over-insure themselves for small losses while being exposed for big losses (i know lots of people who file claims for a broken camera or a lost cell phone but who don’t have adequate life insurance), do you really think they can wrap their minds around financial aid at Stanford or Princeton???
People are dumb about money. That’s pretty much my conclusion. It’s not about financial aid, and it’s not about the power of compound interest and why no load index funds are a better investment for someone with modest savings than churning an account to chase the latest IPO, and it’s not about evaluating your property tax bill to make sure there isn’t a clerical error which describes your cement floor basement as a “finished family room”.
It’s just that people are dumb about money. I know people who are really strapped financially but who brag about their $5 prescription co-pay and “free” dental care. (They obviously don’t know how much they are paying for that “free” dental care). I know people who are really strapped financially who drive gorgeous cars (leased) not realizing how much that Audi is actually costing them vs. purchasing a basic Honda Civic and driving it 120,000 miles. I know people who haven’t put a dollar away for retirement whose plan is to sell the family home and “cash out”- not realizing that they will still need a roof over their head once they move to Myrtle Beach or Hilton Head-- and that once they’ve paid for said roof they will be living on $1200/month which will not be enough to pay golf membership fees at the country club.
What do you do about a country of financial illiterates?
@LucieTheLakie captured what I meant. I did not single out staying home with kids to home school or just because. It is part of a laundry list of circumstances and life choices that people have. Maybe I should have made my laundry list longer so that the homeschoolers wouldn’t feel called out exclusively or maybe there’s a pre-existing sensitivity.
@saintfan Perhaps a preexisting sensitivity on both side since Albert never said anything about the government paying for his education but was criticized for being a burden on the taxpayers because of his homeschooling. And then he was criticized for HIS tone.
Sincere apologies (and congratulations! to @albert69). I misconstrued his post. I thought he was saying he should be entitled to FA because his engineer mother chose to be a SAHM. Instead he was saying he wanted to be a good kid and not burden his parents financially because they had already made big sacrifices for him. My bad…
Apology accepted, @GMTplus7. Sorry if my original post was unclear. 
^^Awe. Don’t you love a happy ending.
Maybe we should lock the thread. Lol
@gearmom Lol.
Can someone point me to the link to the Forbes story mentioned earlier on this thread? Thanks.
@saintfan I guess my question is if you have read that actual scenario on these forums. I ask bc in all honesty I can’t say that I have. I have shared that we have a disabled adult child on top of a boatload of kids but I have never once lamented not receiving more in FA. We have never used an aid package for any our kids to attend school. They have attended strictly on merit $$ and our cash outlay. Homeschooling parents lamenting they want more aid would tend to stick out in my memory bc so many people disregard it as a worthy endeavor (not saying that is representative of CC, just society as a whole, though it is different now than when we started in the early 90s.) complaining about the consequence of that choice would strike me as being open to the very criticisms presented in this thread.
I think a far more prevalent and very real scenario on CC is divorced parent households struggling to meet EFCs.
I’ve got huge sympathy for the folks who are surprised by just how much they’ll be expected to pay. Because that could so easily have been us. Even though we’re generally smart about money.
I stumbled upon CC back when D1 was about to start 9th grade. Ran a quick FAFSA estimate. I can still remember seeing the number and thinking “surely that’s the total for all four years?”.
Yes, NPCs help but to get to them first you go through the schools saying that they offer generous aid, or they work with you to make the school affordable. Once you’ve hung around CC for a bit you know to be skeptical, but that’s assuming you’ve hung around here a bit. Folks may have heard about the terrible burden of student loans but the schools are going to give them great aid so they won’t need it, right? 
Easy traps to avoid when you have some knowledge. Not so easy when all you’re hearing is the school GC saying where your child should apply, and that there’s money for hardworking kids.
I said quite specifically that it doesn’t matter either way to me if he had all merit based aid or if he had applied for and received need based support either federally or from the schools.
Again - I used a laundry list that should have been longer and included the high cost of living area people and people who were unemployed or underemployed before so now have low savings and high income and people who used to homeschool so may have lower savings but went back to work and now have a higher income, etc. etc. The point remains the same that there are lots of individual special circumstance and many people (I expressly excluded @albert96 from this group) don’t understand that the FAFSA number is what it is based on the last year’s taxes and a snapshot of assets and schools may choose to consider or ignore any other “special” financial circumstances. @albert96 took a sound strategy to avoid financial worries but lots and lots of kids and parents don’t. THAT is what this thread is supposed to be about.
@saintfan It wasn’t exactly a strategy. It was luck because I had a good testing day with the PSAT. My criteria for deciding on colleges to apply to was laughable.
Well it was more strategic than a lot of kids and parents who post here after the bloodbath. 