Columbia FA about Home Equity?

Paying for College
21

@sybbie719 Thanks for posting the details regarding the typical values, good find.

It seems the college board calculator ignores primary home equity if the value is below $250,000. However if the value is greater, it looks like it takes the full equity value into account, not just the surplus value. To demonstrate this, I tried following scenarios, note the jump in net price in the 3rd line caused by an additional $10k of home equity:

Income, HomeEquity, NetPrice
$50,000, $100,000, $5,500
$50,000, $250,000, $5,500
$50,000, $260,000, $17,500
$50,000, $500,000, $29,500

The methodology seems different from some other private colleges that seem to cap home equity at a certain multiple of income.

22

Just out of curiosity, I looked up which colleges that do not consider home equity in their FA calculations and here they are:

Bard College
California Institute of Technology
Cooper Union
DePauw University
George Washington University
Hamilton College
Harvard University
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Princeton University
University of Chicago
University of Virginia
Ursinus College
Whitman College

23

Thank you.
@brantly, yes, I have a screenshot of the inputs and result. At that time, I didn’t know how to save it because there is no save button. Later, I found how to save: click “print” and save as pdf.
Anyway, even if we can appeal with the screenshot after ED result, the current amount is still too big even after some discount.

@nypapa , Wow, you are smart! It seems that they made a new rule when considering the home equity value.
Usually, most schools see income first, and if the income is lower than certain value, they cap the home equity regardless the amount of equity. But not anymore for Columbia. They see home equity value too like income.If the home equity is bigger than certain amount, they see the value first like income. They cross check income and home equity.

BUT the most frustrating part is why they change it after November?

I ran NPC many many times last year and this year and the last time I ran NPC was mid October. (Maybe, they might have changed it late Oct? I don’t know.)
If the NPC had been like this in October, we wouldn’t have applied for Columba ED even though Columbia was the first choice.

Anyway, we changed the application to RD last night. :((

I just hope my kid will get admissions from other good schools at regular decision and ,I hope,Columbia, too.
I really want to see the real FA package from Columbia and if possible, we can appeal with other schools’ FA.

And thank you for the info @TiggerDad ! I will look into the schools for RD.