<p>Thanks so much for posting this. Very helpful!</p>
<p>A couple of questions:
You said that you did not count loans as aid - in other words, if they packaged $5500 of loans, you counted that as YOUR (or kid’s) expense, which makes total sense. Did you count work/study as aid?</p>
<p>What was your FAFSA EFC for this upcoming year (2011-2012)? - this would serve as a useful point of reference.</p>
<p>I agree that it’s most useful to look at what your total 4-year cost will be for this kid. But since things are complicated with the 2-kids-in-school-this-year-but-only-one-for-the-following-3-years scenario, it would also be helpful to see what your costs are going to be for this first year, w/ 2 in school.</p>
<p>I like the way the OP presented this. Awards are often not useful without the costs they are offsetting. This way the thing that is ultimately important, cost is what is being compared. I wouldn’t think workstudy would be included as it is self help and is not a cash award but a possibility to make money.</p>
<p>Oh, I also like the way the OP presented this and didn’t mean to seem critical. I just think it would be useful to see the first-year numbers as well as the projected 4-year totals. (since the OP obviously did a lot of number-crunching, these numbers are probably something s/he already has…)
I assume that work/study wasn’t included, but I wanted to verify since the OP didn’t explicitlly say so.</p>
<p>Thanks again, OP - this thread is a very helpful resource for the CC community!</p>
<p>Very good information indeed. We all have talked and suspected about this. You actually have numbers to illustrate this.
Thanks for sharing.</p>
<p>Both loans and work study were deleted from the “aid” that was the basis of the actual cost calculation for exactly the reason that cpt pointed out in post #22. Almost every school included it at about $2k/year, so it would not change much had I treated it differently.</p>
<p>Again, I am not trying to prove anything, or convince anyone, or bash any schools–this is interesting data that I would have found to be very thought provoking a year ago in my crash course in college finance. So I offer it up to allow people to draw whatever conclusions they wish.</p>
<p>I am sorry, but I don’t quite understand your point (and I don’t mean to be disrespectful; I do appreciate your sharing information on CC). Just to clarify, is it that one student can be offered a wide array of fin aid packages with the same stats and family financial information at all those different colleges?</p>
<p>I have read OP’s original post over many times and I think I have answered my own question–in that it showed there was a huge range of awards/costs.</p>
<p>Okay, I’d like to share a bit of our experience which was quite different. My d was accepted into 7 colleges and universities; no ivies but several top tier LACs and universities as well as several top quasi-LACs/universities combos. No state or OOS schools; all privates.</p>
<p>Like the OP, I did not count loans and work study when comparing and the end result was just a few thousand dollars difference between all the schools. I have not calculated the numbers based on 4 years with increases in costs as the OP did and I only include tuition, fees, room and board in the COA because I feel the other expenses are only estimates and will be about the same at all schools (geographically they are all close) but for one year this is how it shaped up for us: </p>
<p>Cost to us – COA
27,653 – 52,083
27,662 – 46,622
28,550 – 44,700
28,770 – 54,370
29,191 – 53,460
31,278 – 51,278
31,874 – 54,474 </p>
<p>Two of the schools were meets-need types and the others gave merit scholarships and grants or just merit scholarships. So for what it’s worth here is an example of another outcome in the fin aid game. Had I known how it would turn out a year ago, I still do not think we could have predicted this or anything else.</p>
<p>@FooMonChew - I’ve heard this before but didn’t really research this. Would you be kind enough to let me know where are the links on these? I tried googling and searching on their financial aid sites and not getting info.</p>
<p>Not that it matters any more for my family, but I do want to alert my brother’s family he has two high school kids going to college in the next few years.</p>
<p>OOps - I found one from Yale on Yale news:
<a href=“http://www.yaledailynews.com/news/2011/apr/27/financial-aid-budget-up-by-10-percent/[/url]”>http://www.yaledailynews.com/news/2011/apr/27/financial-aid-budget-up-by-10-percent/</a>
They changed that to 15% for 130K-200k family. I wonder anyone can validate this.</p>
<p>At a Yale information session within the past month the presenter stated that from 65k - 135K in household income you can expect to pay 10% of your household income and for household incomes above 135K the calculation was much more complicated and would depend on a number of other factors.</p>
<p>Bear in mind that income is just one factor in financial aid. If you have assets, they can play a role in the aid you get. The %s used for assets is not usually a fixed one either. The more you have, the more is expected from you. </p>
<p>A close friend of the family got zilch from Harvard with $60K income. He got that income from rentals in real estate and they were his family nest egg. Not only did they supply his family with their income, but they were what he and his wife were counting on for retirement. Social Security was going to be minimal since little or no earned income in their case. Son applied when the real estate boom jacked up the market value of the properties, most of them have mortgages of sorts on them, to the point where he got no aid. When he appealed, they told him to sell a building to pay for college which would reduce his income drastically and made no sense in his situation. So income is very much not all of the picture.</p>
<p>Agree that you need to go beyond income and understand that assets are also factored in for HYPS. </p>
<p>We have an income well within that range but have substantial assets. And while we pay more than the 10% at Y, we also receive significantly more FA from them than from any non-HYPS school including places like Dartmouth, Brown, Amherst and Pomona. </p>
<p>Like FA anywhere, what you receive varies based on individual circumstances, you can’t depend on the generalizations/averages that the college websites or US News & WR give you. You need to run as many calculators as possible and plan for the worst case scenario as well.</p>
<p>@cptofthehouse: “…If you have assets, they can play a role in the aid you get. The %s used for assets is not usually a fixed one either. The more you have, the more is expected from you. …”</p>
<p>Agree,
The asset is probably a total sum of the following class of assets:
* Cash, savings, checking
* Investments (I don’t know whether they count 401k and IRA)
* Home equity, capped at x% times annual income
* Equity in real estate other than the home (if any)
* Business net worth (if any)
Not sure how they count kid’s 529, UGMA/UTMA. </p>
<p>I suspect schools want family to contribute at least 5+% of that amount for the education cost of their children. That is, they will reduce any aid by at least 5% of whatever they estimate from your reported assets on your application.<br>
Can anyone validate this? is the number (5%) on high side or low side?</p>
<p>Our experience was similar to the OP with about an 80K plus difference between the best and worse offers. Also a NMF. We found the 10% mark was not just at the HYP schools but also found it at a couple of LACs.</p>