We are new to the college seen as our 3 kids will be going into college the next couple of years. Unfortunately we have not saved much and sadly do not qualify for financial aid ( will need to take out loans). Our first child is very smart and has very high expectations on college choices and has great chances to getting into some. What is the typical college loan debt for 4 years? The majority of choices for our first is at schools that do not offer merit money and most likely will have to pay full price. I’ve tried explaining that overall it would be best to attend a school where you get more money for undergrad and then apply to graduate schools on your top choices. What is the typical debt of undergraduate degrees and any advice you can offer as we tread into the college arena. Thank you
Student loans more than the federal direct loans (up to $27,000 for four years) require a cosigner or are parent loans. Cosigned loans or parent loans tend to be bad ideas, especially with more kids behind.
You need to figure out what you can really afford for all three kids’ college and tell all of them what a realistic parent contribution will be.
You can’t just gently suggest that your child pick cheaper schools. You have to tell them what you can pay and enforce that. Some kids think if the best school they get into is too expensive then their parent will find some way to pay. Make it clear you have no problem with community college if the alternative is a school you cannot afford.
Have you discovered net price calculators yet? Every school is required to have a calculator on their website to help you estimate your price after financial aid.
From my experience, no two family situations are alike, so quoting “typical college loan debt” could be misleading. How many assets your family has as well as their type could make a big difference in need-based financial aid eligibility.
I suggest you read the excellent article by Troy Onink from the Forbes magazine website at the link below. We found it to be the most useful and easy to understand explanation of methods and factors colleges use to calculate need-based aid eligibility.
He has great explanations of how the Federal and Institutional Methods are used to calculate Expected Family Contribution (EFC). He also has some handy tables to calculate Federal EFC using your adjusted gross income (AGIs) and number of dependent children. Unless you’re very wealthy, you might be surprised that even some AGIs some might consider “wealthy” are still eligible for need-based aid, especially if there are multiple children going to college.
Private student loans could offer significantly lower interest rates if you have very good credit and would consider being a co-signer for a student. Federal Parent PLUS loans have much higher interest, but some Federal protections for borrowers that private loans don’t have, as well as much easier qualification for them. Much depends on your income stream, tolerance for debt, available assets, how long you expect to work and have steady income, the type of degree and income prospects for the degree being pursued, etc.
Finally, a few highly selective liberal arts colleges (LACs) promise to meet 100-percent of demonstrated financial need, but that is according to their calculations, not yours.
Be prepared to complete both the FAFSA for Federal student loan eligibility as well as the CSS PROFILE for many colleges to be eligible for their institutional need-based grants and “scholarships”. The questions they ask may be viewed by some as intrusive. Both processes will ask for prior-prior year tax information and some colleges require applicants to upload copies of tax returns, W-2s, and other forms to help establish/verify financial need and ability to pay.
Good luck!
Lots of people in your shoes! I might suggest the following:
Find an EFC (estimated family contribution) calculator and see what you might be expected to pay. Go to some college web sites and run the NPC (net price calculator) to get an idea of what different schools might expect you to pay. Remember prices will go up every year.
Figure out what you are able and willing to pay. Look at some loan calculators and look at interest rates.
We could not possibly afford our EFC. Our first child did two years at community college, then transferred to our in-state flagship. She would not have qualified for any of the big merit awards for incoming freshman, so this was the best path for her. We still had her work her tail off during the summers. She borrowed, we borrowed, but it’s all tolerable and we are paying it down quickly. Illinois publics are $$$.
Our second child had the stats to get several full tuition merit scholarships and one full ride scholarship. She did not want to go to any of the affordable schools. She wanted to go to a prestigious private. It was not fun because she had a lot of trouble accepting our budget.
She was/is just a kid, and cannot possibly understand what those numbers mean and what kind of weight big debt is.
She was so mad we wouldn’t “let” her borrow the money (cosigning private loans) to go to an expensive elite school.
In the end we told her she had to pick the full tuition scholarship at U Alabama or the full ride at U Kentucky (or community college).
First year was a bit bumpy. Second year is great. All that drama and angst is behind us, but at the time? It was very bad and she acted as if we were ruining her life and didn’t seem very happy that we were her parents. Ouch.
Lots of kids have unrealistic expectations about college. Just because you can get accepted, doesn’t mean you can afford it. Part of being “smart” is strategizing. Take all unaffordable options off the table. Run those NPCs. Look for merit scholarships.
Good luck. Loads of threads on CC about this topic.
We found a very large difference in cost between various universities that we considered. The most expensive school that either daughter got into would have cost a total price for everything of about $65,000 per year, but this was a few years ago (prices have gone up). The least expensive would have cost us a bit less than $10,000 per year. Neither was with any need based aid, but the latter involved significant merit aid. There was a wide range in between as well. We found pretty much no correlation at all between academic strength and cost. For example the academically strongest school that either daughter got into would have been the second least expensive. The second ranked school would have been the most expensive.
With three kids, if you ignore cost when picking schools you could spend roughly $70,000 per year times 4 years times three kids, or if I did math right about $840,000. However, this assumes that your children graduate in 4 years (most don’t) and this also ignores graduate school. It would not be hard to get to over a million dollars in total spending. I personally think that this would be severely excessive for the vast majority of people for undergraduate schools.
As such given that cost is an issue you will need to consider a number of options and you will need to take cost into account when looking at universities. I strongly agree with @ucbalumnus who in post #1 said “Cosigned loans or parent loans tend to be bad ideas, especially with more kids behind”. You need to minimize or eliminate debt as much as you possibly can. There are a very large number of schools in the US, more outside the US, and you should be able to find an academically very good fit at a reasonable price. This might or might not be at each student’s “dream” school.
For many of us our in-state public schools provide a very good education at a reasonable price. Folks here on CC can help provide other suggestions. However, the details regarding what makes the most sense for you is likely to depend upon what state you are from, what your children’s stats are, intended major, what sort of school you are looking for (eg, large versus small), and where you would like to attend (north, south, near home, big city, small town, in the US or elsewhere, …).
You should not have to pay full price to get an academically excellent university. However, you probably will need to set hard limits for your children and also you might need to look around some.
A top end high school student (“4.0 in the hardest courses”) is very likely to graduate college in 8 semesters or fewer. However, most college bound high school students are not top end high school students, so the risk of needing more than 8 semesters increases as one gets further away from “4.0 in the hardest courses”. Note that BArch architecture programs are normally 10 semesters, and engineering programs are rigorous enough that a somewhat greater percentage of students in them take more than the usual 8 semesters compared to similarly academically qualified students in many other majors.
For graduate school, PhD programs worth attending should be funded (tuition waiver plus living expense stipend, often in exchange for working as a teaching or research assistant). However, professional programs (MD, JD, MBA, etc.) can be very expensive, though students can often take loans on their own for them (but it may not always be a good idea, since, for some programs, the expected earning power of the degree may not be enough to pay off the debt comfortably).
A number of parents have written here over the years about the disastrous effects that letting kid #1 choose an expensive place had on the options for subsequent kids and the parents’ budget. Don’t do that to your family. Sit down with your spouse and get together a plan for educating all of your kids, then stick with it. You need to be able to hold a united front.
We couldn’t afford our federal EFC. Happykid’s only option was to do two years at the local CC, then transfer to an in-state public U. She never felt bad about this because we always were straight with her about the finances. She only needed to borrow the standard federal loans for her junior and senior year. Paying them down now, is not painful for her at all. Our do-it-on-the-cheap plan proved to be a financial life saver when the family breadwinner’s job vanished halfway through Happykid’s junior year. She never needed to consider dropping out because of money.
Spend some time in the Financial Aid forum, and read up on both need-based and merit-based aid. The folks there have lots of useful information for you.
Wishing you all the best.
This is a time when your kids have to learn that they aren’t going to get everything they want in life. Figure out how much you CAN pay per kid out of current cash flow and any savings you have. Your kids can take out federal loans of $5,500 per year starting freshman year, and slightly more than that each year after. If they work summers and during the school year part time, they can earn a few thousand dollars that way.
Options that will be affordable:
- For kids with really high stats, there are some schools (like UAlabama) that give a considerable amount of aid for those stats. There are schools like Ohio State that give merit to out of state students, too. If you are in the western US, WUE schools have tuition at 1.5 times the in-state rate available.
- In-state public universities, depending on where you live are good to look at. It is cheaper if your kids can live at home, of course. Sometimes states have reciprocity with other states (like MN and Wisconsin), so your kids would pay in-state tuition at the public schools in the other state.
- Lots of students who don’t have much money for college attend community college for 2 years, then transfer to finish at a 4 year school.
Do NOT jeopardize your retirement by taking out much in the way of parent loans, if any. That does your kids no favor (guess who may need to support you in your golden years if you borrow too much for their undergraduate educations?).
I think you need to take a hard look at where you can cut back on your current expenditures, too. Plenty of posters out here drive beater cars (and their kids do not have cars at all, you can definitely go to college without a car), take almost no or very inexpensive vacations, delay house maintenance (and do most of their own cleaning, yardwork, etc), both parents work to contribute to household and college expenses, cook at home mostly (and often from scratch) to avoid the cost of eating out, use the library instead of buying books, pack lunches to take to work every day, and stay out of expensive coffee shops. You might be able to scrape up enough for your kids to attend the state flagship with only taking out their federal loans and working summers.
It doesn’t do any good to let your kids get attached to schools you can’t pay for. Set your number, and help them run net price calculators. Once you have an idea what you can pay and what their academic interests are, come back out and we can make more specific suggestions for schools that might work.
You need to get your spouse on board with this, too. I’d suggest you run a few net price calculators with them, that can be helpful.
Do you know you won’t receive need based financial aid even from the most generous schools? Some schools give financial aid up to incomes of $200k. If your children are close in age, you may receive better financial aid if two go to school at the same time, so delaying a year for the oldest.
Otherwise, set your budget and their expectations up front. Don’t apply to NYU if you can’t afford it. Don’t miss scholarship application deadlines.
@collegefam787 If we haven’t beat you into submission, we can help you with a couple questions.
- What schools are you considering? We can help with general knowledge on who provides best aid.
- Have you run Net Price Calculators for each school, as opposed to FASFA Generic EFC?
- What are your child's stats? That will help with chances of admission at schools gTasks give good aid as well as recommendations on merit options.
Here is a good site on student loans and a calculator that shows what the payments are and what kind of income would be needed to support that payment. Not only have college costs risen since we were in school but the rates on loans have sky rocketed.
Be sure you use the correct interest rate. Loans students have available to them are better understood with the repayment plan and seeing the length of time to pay back is enough to get a kid to understand how important those scholarships and getting the best net price are.
Your child has “first choice” schools because they used some criteria to choose them. Tell them that criteria now must include the net cost…They can’t take loans over $5500 freshman year without you cosigning.
Have them find schools that offer merit aid or are just cheaper (in state schools).
I have been through this twice in the last 3 years.
- Have an in-depth discussion with your child about: (a.) why does she want to attend college at age 18(versus all the other things she could be doing) and if college at 18 is the best choice (b.) are the most popular schools really the best place for an undergraduate education, i.e. what type of institution facilitates a high quality undergraduate education ? (c.) keeping in mind you have 3, give all of them an approximate estimate of what you can afford per student on an annual basis.
- Get Stack and Vedick’s Financial Aid Handbook (2017 edition) and Lynn O’Shaughnessy’s The College Solution.
- Do a lot of reading on this parents forum and the financial aid and scholarships forum.
As parents you need to set the numbers, so grab last year’s tax docs, crack open a bottle of wine and start running NPCs. Do this away from the kids so you know what’s coming: look at your assets, look at your spending, look at what your kids will bring to the table both financially and in academic merit. You need to know what your assets will buy, and you need to know what various things will cost. Price a variety of types of schools: in-state and out of state, public and private, small and large, elite and middle of pack. Then throw in more money than you think is wise for travel to school more than a drivable distance away, for books and for other costs that will appear. Someone above lost a job during junior year: this really happens even when it really can’t. What can you afford? What did you save for college, how quickly will it melt away? Also read up on how the EFC is calculated so you know how your savings are measured and how the formula is expecting you to burn them. (It’s likely that with three kids you’re not going to like their schedule.)
Then give some numbers to your child. Trust your cherubs with some actual financial facts so they know this isn’t just some arbitrary parental exercise. You can round to the nearest $25k, but give them enough data to fill out their own NPCs. Show them a real budget, and then draw the sliding windows diagram of the Dark Years. At least that’s what I called the graph of time along the bottom with stacked four year bars showing how their tuitions will overlap while they are in school. “There is going to be point in 2023 where we’re paying for three of you.” Show them what an actual car repair bill looks like and ask where that $2100 would fit. Then explain the budget you came up with and let them go off and run their own NPCs on their own schools. Most kids will be pretty good about eliminating outrageous choices or keeping them in only when there’s a chance of enough merit aid to make it work.
Other good things to recognize:
Excellent schools pay out very little merit aid because everyone is meritorious. They may cover all but your EFC, but they will rarely cover more. Otherwise how could they possibly choose your valedictorian all-state athlete eagle scout from the dozens of others in the class? Go google the annual Brown Univ doc about how many top kids they reject every year. It’s grotesque but real.
There’s more money further down the prestige chain, especially for higher performing kids. You don’t need a 34 ACT to cash in as long as you are willing to endure the notion of attending a school you haven’t heard of. Take your 3.5 GPA and 28 ACT and get paid by someone excited to have a kid of that caliber in the class. Most kids are in that huge space between US News dream school and community college, so make the most of it by dipping down to where you’re in that 75th percentile sweet spot where they’re chasing you.
This one is huge: there is no Perfect School. There are literally thousands of colleges in this country where your kid will not be the smartest or dumbest in the room. Find one that fits, that you can afford, that you like. Pick some financial safeties, but also make a real effort to look around and cast a wide enough net to give other schools a chance. Make your child find places none of you know much about and then dig through the website and run an NPC. You might be surprised how well it turns out.
Finally, this can be fun if you enter it with a sense of adventure and joy. Try to make it a big game hunt even if you already kind of know you’re going to end up at UW-Eau Claire rather than UW-Madison. If it starts as a set of limits and fences rather than a springboard you could have a long year, so offer whatever trips you can afford and be supportive whenever possible. You know your kids best, so do what you believe will work. Good luck!
“A number of parents have written here over the years about the disastrous effects that letting kid #1 choose an expensive place had on the options for subsequent kids and the parents’ budget.”
This is a very important point. You will be setting a precedent with the first student that you are going to need to live with for your younger children.
And they won’t forget for the rest of their lives (trust me, I was the 3rd kid in that situation).
You are getting very good advice on this thread!
Please don’t underestimate the pressure your kid and you will experience during application season. Our kid went to a small private HS with a lot of affluent families.
It was very hard for our kid to swallow the fact that two of her smart friends, from low income families, both were going to be attending top 20 colleges. Most of her other friends, from affluent families, did not make mention of having budget constraints. Our kid felt like she was the only kid in her class who didn’t get to choose where she was going to go to college.
This private HS had a dedicated college counselor who was not focused on affordability, but rather focused on fit and “where do you see yourself”. It was not a fun enjoyable process.
I had D listen to Frank Bruni’s book on audio when I had her trapped in the car on a college visit roadtrip. I tossed around stats about how most kids go to community college (like her older sister!). I reminded her that her school was not the real world. While she was focused on whether she would be accepted, I told her that was not the hurdle. The hurdle was affordability.
These kids are not stupid. They see the adults LIGHT UP with praise and approval when someone says “I’m going to Northwestern”. And they see adults nod politely, tight smile, with a tiny whiff of hesitation or pity – because you’re such a great student, right? – when someone says, “I’m going to University of Kentucky.”
Same thing with the peer group. Lots of judging. Lots of self-worth and future prospects based on that May 1 decision. It’s so crazy and out of balance.
Frankly, I did lose my mind for about 2-3 days after D was accepted to her dream school. I was doing all kinds of martyr-ish financial scenarios in the spreadsheet in my head. But if we…then we might…I can’t believe she got in…what an opportunity…a good parent would make this work…
I had made several errors in calculating what we’d be expected to pay, probably the worst error was forgetting to run the NPC with her older sister no longer a college student. You’ve got to look at it as a four year cost. If $20K is a painful stretch for year one, and you’re counting on everything going right, no bumps, what are you going to do when years two through four are $35K each? Or what are you going to do with more kids in the pipeline?
I snapped out of it, luckily, early in application season, in December. A big help was reading blunt post after blunt post about finances here on CC.
@Midwest67 Ohhhh man, can I relate to your story.
DD is currently on a gap year because she didn’t believe us when we said we would not enable loans or take out loans. She didn’t believe that we would actually say no to the “excellent” schools where she applied and got accepted. She didn’t think we were serious when we said make sure you choose a financial safety school as well as an academic one.
I completely understand your emotional waffle when your DD got the dream school - we had the same thing happen - Univ of Minnesota, Twin Cities College of Science and Engineering. I wanted this to happen for her so bad it almost physically hurt when no matter how we twisted or spun, we just couldn’t justify the 4 year output of $160K. We came so close to caving in, then we came to my senses and DH and I had to utter the hardest words ever - “you will not be going to college in the fall” that was tough, oh man, it still tears me up a bit but we am so very thankful we held our ground.
Not a private high school but a fairly high demographic high school with a dedicated college coach who like yours, was all about the “fit and feel”. DD’s friends have gone off to a plethora of very expensive schools including Berkeley, Pratt Inst, Harvard, UT, A&M and Berkelee Music - some parents are paying portions but most of these kids are taking on BIG loans as are their parents. Why? Because “well he got into Berkeley, we have to make sure he goes”.
DD is hanging out at home, she licked her wounds for about a month and then seems to have resigned herself to her fate 
She has solid stats and I kept telling her to sell her stats - that she needed to go after Merit. She started applying a bit less “prestigious” and went after guaranteed merit. She was awarded the full tuition/housing at UAH - she is a STEM kid so this is a good match even if it isn’t in the North East or a LOC as she would have preferred. It has occurred to her that she can partake in study abroad and co-ops while maintaining her debt free status since most of her schooling is now covered with a scholarship.
@Midwest67 and @SnowflakeDogMom Thank you for those stories. It will help me remain steadfast with our budget constraints with the Sr. and Jr. high school students. I agree the high school wants the kids to own the process, but its taken me a solid year of reading to feel that I understand how to manage the finances of this decision. The schools do not put enough emphasis on the cost aspect of the research.