<p>Good point on “getting the stress over early” for strong applications; I totally missed that.</p>
<p>But on the financial front, ED seems like unilateral disarmament. How can you know whether you’ll want to compare before receiving your first offer - unless you’re completely insensitive to the financial considerations? </p>
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<p>calmom - Despite your belief that the majority/significant minority of ED applicants regret their “premature commitment,” admissions officers still seem to think that an ED commitment is “worth” more than the same applicant in RD. And I assure you, admissions does more than its share of institutional research to back up its theories.</p>
<p>Full disclosure: I applied EDII to my current college, a top LAC that is need-blind and full-need (without loans) and accepts approximately 50% of each class through both ED rounds. And I adore it, as do several upperclassmen friends who applied ED. Honestly, although it didn’t make sense “strategically” for me to do so, I wish I had applied EDI to get the process over with, because my internal decision had already been made in October.</p>
<p>I was leery of applying ED for financial reasons. I did so anyway and was offered a package consisting of only grants and workstudy, as promised, which met full need after a family contribution lower than my FAFSA EFC. My college was not legally obligated to do this but DID do so because they promise that financial need is based on the same formula for everyone.</p>
<p>There will always be sad results like the OP, but that is a product of a flawed financial aid system AND parental ignorance of what FA really entails. In conjunction with ED, you will NOT be able to compare financial aid offers–but that doesn’t mean you won’t get atleast the same (need-based) offer as you would if admitted RD. [The previous sentence applies only to need-blind full-need schools where merit-based aid is not a game-changing consideration.]</p>
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By having an absolute $$ number in mind that you can afford to pay for college, and the willingness to pay this maximum amount for your child’s first choice (ideally, also the parents’ first choice). If the offered package is unaffordable, then you invoke the escape clause of the ED contract and apply to more affordable schools RD–which usually means schools of much lower ranking and/or in-state publics.</p>
<p>This is what I tell people who need FA and want to apply ED: if all the packages came in RD and School X was the most expensive, but you could just barely afford it, would you still pick X? That answer is the same as whether ED is right for your situation.</p>
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I never said that or anything like that. I said that ED applicants who need financial aid are at a competitive disadvantage. Many of them probably end up getting screwed over without even knowing it. Since they are deprived of the ability to compare financial aid offers, they don’t have any objective way of knowing whether they have been treated fairly or not. </p>
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Admissions officers are looking out for the COLLEGE, not the student. The ED commitment is worth more because it (a) locks in students who fulfill the institutional agenda, and/or (b) locks in full pay students. </p>
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<p>They are looking out for their institutional needs, not for what benefits the student or the consumer. I’m sure their institutional research probably includes enrollment management figures that also show that they save money on financial aid with ED as well.</p>
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But the ED student has no way of knowing whether another college would have offered more. And most schools do NOT promise “no loan” packages – many ED students may be paying more in loans or have much larger work study expectations than they would have with an RD application. </p>
<p>Your argument seems to be along the line of, lots of kids skateboard without wearing helmets without mishap, therefore there is no need for anyone to wear a helmet. Sure, occasionally there is an injury – but most of the time people don’t get hurt, so why spoil the fun. </p>
<p>I’m saying that it’s risky business. I do cop to being one of those parents who insisted that my kids always wear helmet when they biked or skated, and to this day refuse to start the car until every passenger has fastened their belt. It isn’t about the percentages; it is just a matter of risk vs. benefit, and avoiding unnecessary risk. </p>
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<p>There is no such thing as a “full need” school. That terminology is a marketing gimmick as well; it is a fiction because colleges determine “need” on their own using formulas that vary from one college to the next. If college A decides that the family is able to pay $20K --the family may never know that college B would have looked at the same numbers and decided that the family would only be able to pay $10K. </p>
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<p>That’s not true – often the higher ranked (better endowed) schools end up offering more in aid. Again, colleges calculate need differently.</p>
<p>I am glad that you are happy with your school and your financial aid package Keilexandra, but you speak from a position of practical ignorance when you talk about financial aid in general. You are familiar with the practices of one school only – yours – and you’ve seen only one package. So I doubt that you really understand how variable the packages can be. There are a handful of schools that are particularly generous with aid, and perhaps your ED school is one of them – but the vast majority of students aren’t going to get accepted to those schools.</p>
<p>With the belief that students are “screwed over” by colleges, and schools that meet full need don’t exist (tell that to the many who receive attractive packages from such schools!), it’s no wonder such a cynical viewpoint results.</p>
<p>I’ll stick with the “dream school” requirement as necessary justification for applying ED; I think it needs to be more than the favorite at the moment, re MisterK’s concern. I don’t see why rejection by the dream school, or inability to afford it, hurts any less at RD vs. ED time; if ED there is time to adjust expectations in choosing schools to apply to RD.</p>
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<p>But isn’t that part of what, in an ideal world, the ED applicant and family would be researching prior to putting in the ED paperwork? If the ED school has a well-established history of giving workable FA packages in previous years, that’s different than applying ED to a college where packages are skimpier. Armed with that and a firm family commitment on the maximum $$$ to be paid, that makes ED financially workable. If the parents want to minimize COA by comparing all acceptances, or want to weigh COA with school desireability/quality, then ED can’t work. </p>
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<p>It might not be logical, but feelings are what they are. For some students, rejection at ED time is gonna feel especially painful. Just something for people considering ED to keep in mind, but not a factor for everyone. Adjusting expectations after an ED rejection or deferral only applies if the student regarded the ED school as a match or safety. Most of the time ED is for a reach, so getting rejected doesn’t really change the student’s expectations. One of our conditions for allowing D1 to apply ED was that she had to have the rest of her apps completed and ready to go prior to the date when she’d hear a decision from the ED school. It would have been horrid to have to add any more schools to her list at that point.</p>
<p>I agree with Slithey- “If Jane applies ED, she won’t be competing with her classmates” who may be stronger candidates. I also agree with K’s comment re: “parental ignorance of what FA really entails.”</p>
<p>For the record, I did substantial research, beginning when D1 was in her junior year. In hindsight, I realize we couldn’t know it all. But, for the schools she liked, we looked beyond marketing blurbs and happy phrases about FA. DH and I felt comfortable that her final list would probably offer her a primarily grants-based package that we could “probably” afford. I ran the Fafsa Forecaster over and over to see how some extra work my husband might be offered would affect us- or a change in my work. Or, if our miniscule assets suddently got a power jump.</p>
<p>When she decided where to apply, we clearly said: it all hinges on FA; if you love a school and it does not offer aid we can work with, we’re sorry, but you will need to reevaluate. We spoke to her about the real possibility that she’d be at our (not very desirable) state U.</p>
<p>Because, to us, affording college is a huge undertaking that affects the entire family’s welfare and cohesiveness. </p>
<p>Note: all her FA from 5 acceptances (RD) was nearly identical- yes, the grants portions.<br>
D2 applied ED. No change in our wealth. She got grants nearly identical to what her sister had. </p>
<p>Maybe we were lucky. We still have a few more years of all this FA nail-biting to go through. I wish everyone luck. And, as is often mentioned in this sort of thread, by other parents, we can’t even convince our friends that the marketing blurbs colleges put out about FA are not what they think.</p>
<p>If ED is used at a reach school, then there should be little disappointment; rejection is expected. I think I’d rather have ED used at a match school, with roughly a 50/50 chance of success. I followed two ED schools this cycle; there were far more acceptances than rejections at both (re the kids posting who were waiting for responses, so, yes, just the CC community).</p>
<p>ED may be less risky for those whose families are not in the “middle income doughnut hole.” While a low income student may lose the opportunity of comparing financial aid packages, it might be worth applying ED to a school that meets full need for the added acceptance rate boost. Most financial aid policies at the “meets full need” colleges are very transparent for the lowest income students. Thus, if the student is confident that her family’s EFC is 0, and finds that the required student contribution is reasonable, then applying ED may be an appropriate action. Similarly, families who know they are full pay and fully support their student attending a certain college may find ED an excellent idea.</p>
<p>However, many families find themselves in the “middle income doughnut hole” where applying ED is not a wise choice. Finances are still very important to these “doughnut hole” families, yet complicating factors* and different methods of calculation need will have significantly different outcomes.</p>
<p>*complicating factors may include, but are not limited to: divorced & remarried parents, non custodial parents who are either MIA or refuse to contribute, considerations of other siblings and other financial (retirement) needs, living in an expensive area, family income due to two parents versus one parent working, parents who own a small business or additional property, family income fluctuates significantly from year to year, and any other situation where families earn “a lot” of money on paper but there is not a lot of extra left over each month… etc.</p>
<p>Middle income donut hole–I think that is a perfect picture in my mind.</p>
<p>But still, if there’s that one dream school above all others, and it meets full need, and you believe ED will provide at least a small boost, you can have a look at the financial aid offer, and (sadly) turn it down if it’s not enough. You would have to turn it down at RD time, too.</p>
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Out here in the real world of the middle income donut hole (thanks, college_ruled – that’s an apt description), it’s not so easy. We are starting from the idea that we are going to have to borrow via a home equity or PLUS loan whether we like it or not; we are also starting with the stark reality that we have very little put away for retirement. Assuming that we want to help our kids through college, then financial aid isn’t about affordable vs. unaffordable — we can’t “afford” ANY college. The issue is how big a debt hole we and our kids are going to be left with post graduation. </p>
<p>So if a college offers a $20K grant (out of $50K COA) – in a vacuum, its pretty hard to know what other alternatives might be. I took my kids’ respective financial aid awards and entered them on a spreadsheet, then created a bar chart. I had a very bumpy bar chart, because there were LOTS of differences, not just in grant levels, but in loan levels and the amount of expected student work.</p>
<p>I also learned something very important with my son, who had high stats relative to the schools he chose to apply to. The so-called 100% need schools were NOT the most generous. The most generous were the schools that gave need-based aid, but only to some of their students. Those schools leveraged their financial aid budgets, being stingy with many students, but very generous with the students who fit within their “preferred” category. I also learned that even many 100% need schools have preferential aid categories – where the admissions department provides the financial aid department with a ranking of some sort, that signals how the aid will be packaged. </p>
<p>My d’s situation was very different, but the fluctuations between awards was not. </p>
<p>My d. has graduated. She is paying off student loans, as am I. There is a big difference between a student being left with $15K of loans at graduation, and one who has $30K. There is also a difference between parents who are left with $20K and parents who are paying off $60K of borrowed money. </p>
<p>If you go back to the OP in this thread, you will see that the issue is NOT what the family can managed to scrape together for next year. The H. is unemployed, but thinks he will get a job later this year. The COA for next year will be $32K, which the family might be able to manage, but if H. gets work, he expects to be full pay in successive years – and he is looking at what will happen down the line. The W. (according to the initial post) has a different view – she is willing to make any sacrifice necessary to see D. happy in her dream school. The family has another kid doing just fine at a CSU. </p>
<p>There is no happy ending for this family, because they do not have a crystal ball for the future and they don’t all see eye-to-eye on the choices. </p>
<p>They would not be in this situation with an RD application. </p>
<p>I’ve been through the process twice. I know from experience that there wasn’t any sort of argument from my kids once they saw the spread sheet. There was anger, but not directed at me (the parent) – but rather at the former top choice school – because even an 18 year old kid is smart enough to see when he or she has been screwed over. If the financial aid from choice #1 is markedly WORSE than the financial aid from most of the other choices, then the luster fades from choice #1 very quickly.</p>
<p>I did not expect or require that my kids would choose the absolute cheapest college available. But having an array of financial aid awards to look at – and a bar chart – gave us the ability to easily construct a concept of a median, and to distinguish between “fair” and “generous”. Before those awards are in hand, the expectations of parent & child may be quite unrealistic, because of lack of transparency in the system.</p>
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<p>Anyone who has done their research would know that need based financial aid is based on individual financial circumstances, and you can’t draw conclusions based on other people’s aid packages.</p>
<p>I’m not talking about the handful of well-endowed schools like Harvard or Stanford (neither of which has binding ED) which have announced initiatives that cut costs to well below FAFSA EFC for most middle income families. I’m talking about the rest to the pack – the schools that are going to take a very hard look at parental assets such as home equity.</p>
<p>Like Keilexandra, D1 applied ED to a top tier needs-blind LAC with a substantial endowment and whch promised to meets 100% of need; subsidized loans are capped at the federal max, about $4.5K/year. As expected, D rec’d a package that was all-grants (except for the susidized loan and $1.5K work-study); the package was w/i a couple thousand of our FAFSA-EFC. And each subsequent year’s package was equally fair/generous (grant increases kept pace with COA increases). </p>
<p>I’m not sure D would have been admitted w/o the ED boost. And it was wonderful - - for the entire family - - to be through with the process by Dec 15. ED doesn’t work well for everyone, but it does work well for some, including some middle-income families (don’t really know whether we are/were in the donut-hole).</p>
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<p>Because at RD time, there are a bunch of other acceptances in hand, with financial aid offers that are clearly more generous. Since some of the RD array are safeties, the student is likely to have some offers of merit money plus be the recipient of more intense marketing by the RD schools – letters signed by college professors or Deans, phone calls from current students, invitations to attend admitted student events.</p>
<p>Here is one school’s view of ED (Lafayette College in Easton, PA):</p>
<p>[The</a> Case for Early Decision - NYTimes.com](<a href=“http://thechoice.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/13/the-case-for-early-decision/]The”>The Case for Early Decision - The New York Times)</p>
<p>That article is written by a spokesperson for a college which is need-aware – see [Colleges</a> Where Need for Aid Can Hurt Admission Odds - US News and World Report](<a href=“http://www.usnews.com/education/paying-for-college/articles/2010/03/23/colleges-where-need-for-aid-can-hurt-admission-odds.html]Colleges”>http://www.usnews.com/education/paying-for-college/articles/2010/03/23/colleges-where-need-for-aid-can-hurt-admission-odds.html) – and which does NOT guarantee to meet full need of all its applicants – see [College</a> Search - Lafayette College - Cost & Financial Aid](<a href=“College Search - BigFuture | College Board”>College Search - BigFuture | College Board) – it meets full need of less than half of the students admitted who are determined to have need.
Additionally, graduates of that college have average indebtedness in excess of $20K, which tells me at a glance that the college is expecting borrowing in excess of the maximum subsidized Stafford amounts (probably via unsubsidized Stafford or Perkins; private loans are not reported in that common data set figure).</p>
<p>So basically that is an article extolling the virtues of ED, written on behalf of a school that shortchanges about 52% of the students who apply for and get financial aid. The financially needy ED admit has no way of knowing exactly how badly he or she has been shortchanged – because there is nothing to compare it to. </p>
<p>It is interesting to see comment #25 to the NY Times article:
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<p>I’d note that without the experience of the siblings, that particular family would not have the information needed to realize how badly they were being shortchanged by that school’s award. That is, they would not know what they could reasonably expect in aid from other private schools.</p>
<p>“The financially needy ED admit has no way of knowing exactly how badly he or she has been shortchanged – because there is nothing to compare it to.”</p>
<p>Indeed, as many of us have said all along, if you want to compare FA offers, don’t apply ED. And if you’re truly applying ED to your one dream school, you don’t care about comparing.</p>
<p>Full-time freshman enrollment: 616
Number who applied for need-based aid: 395
Number who were judged to have need: 260
Number who were offered aid: 258
Number who had full need met: 126</p>
<p>Average percent of need met: 98%
Average financial aid package: $35,727
Average need-based loan: $3,579
Average need-based scholarship or grant award: $31,097
Average non-need based aid: $18,968
Average indebtedness at graduation: $20,745</p>
<p>Working on an iPad here and hoping that my copy-paste works correctly. Please share how this data should be interpreted. How do you reconcile 52% having full need met with Average percent of need met: 98% </p>
<p>These stats are not my forte and I’d like to get a good interpretation. Thanks.</p>
<p>It means that 52% have substantially less than 100% need met. (You’ve done the math wrong – the 126 of 258 students who had their need fully met are 48.8% – so it is 51.2% who have LESS than full need met). </p>
<p>Let’s simplify – if you had half of students having full need met, and half having less than that – with an average figure of 98% of need met – then that could mean that each student in the shortchanged half had 96% of need met. But there’s probably a wider range – that is, some students have 97% need met, some only 90% – and those percentages might be heavily influenced by the actual dollar figures involved.</p>
<p>That is, lets say that you have two families - family A has $10K of need, and family B has $30K of need. The college offers family A a package worth $10K (100% of need) – and family B a package worth $25K (83.3% of need). Obviously family B has a better overall package – but if you only look at percentage of need, then the statistics would indicate that family A is better off – after all, they have 100% of their need met.</p>
<p>A college with need-aware admissions could easily jigger its numbers to show a higher percentage of need met simply by admitting students with moderate amount of need and turning away students with high amounts of need. They could do that intentionally to skew the figures they report – but they are more likely to do that deliberately, but with a different intent – namely, to conserve their financial aid budget. They can assist 3 family A’s ($10K need) for every 1 family B ($30K need) – moreover, by shortchanging family B, they discourage that high need student from attending, thereby increasing the chances that those dollars are freed up for other students. So from the school’s perspective – they are doing a good thing – they are stretching their limited budget to help more students. But for the individual high-need student, that’s a bad thing - that student has been given less than what he needs, and the fact that he is high-need is probably an indication that his family has less flexibility when it comes to finances.</p>
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I concede that my paraphrase of your prior post might have been off-base, although it remains a reasonable interpretation. However, I believe that ED applicants to full-need need-blind schools–see below for my defense of why this category of schools can and does exist–are at a competitive advantage because a) they would have received the same FA package regardless of ED/RD from this particular school and b) for various institutional reasons, colleges are more likely to admit borderline ED applicants than RD, without individual discrimination on basis of financial need. Thus, the college takes 50% of the class through ED based on institutional research results that show ED students are more likely to be full-pay; but in the process, they will also accept borderline students with significant financial need who might otherwise not have been admitted at all, since they are “need-blind.”</p>
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I agree entirely. But both of these goals are easily achieved by simply admitting half the class through ED, need-blind. That is, because of the make-up of the ED pool, the minority of applicants who demonstrate financial need are treated equally to the full-pays. After all–if the ED admits are financially unbalanced, a highly selective college only needs to tweak RD results a bit to re-balance the budget.</p>
<p>Colleges do save money on FA through ED. And applicants can use this knowledge to their strategic advantage. Even if the college admits one borderline high-need applicant through ED, they are probably also admitting two ED full-pays and rejecting two other borderline high-need applicants through RD. Since these successful applicants–admitted with great FA packages to statistical reach schools–do exist, the college only decides whether to admit through ED or RD; and unhooked students stand a much better chance in ED.</p>
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Right. The true compromise for financially needy students who apply ED is this: they must be willing to pay the maximum amount that they can afford for the ED college. If the package comes back unaffordable, then no harm (except emotional) has been done because that package would still have been unaffordable in RD–200k loans are always stupid, no matter what kind of other options are on the table. If your first choice would change because another school gave you more money, but both are affordable, then ED is not the right decision round for you.</p>
<p>The ED-FA student must also trust that the college will offer the same FA package to ED students as to RD students. I, personally, am willing to accept this “risk” because admissions whistleblowers run aplenty and none of them have yet accused a college of actually lying–that is, calling themselves need-blind while writing FA packages on folders, or practicing preferential packaging while claiming to use the same formula for everyone. The latter promise of “one formula” is rarely stated in writing on the FA website, but some harder-to-find documents such as responses to student petitions do put it into writing.</p>
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I agree, a small minority of schools have no-loan promises. However, as Project on Student Debt will show you, more schools have loan cap promises in writing. I have yet to see evidence of the SAME school, if it claims not to practice preferential packaging, giving different-composition FA packages in ED and RD (disregarding the influence of merit scholarships).</p>
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To continue your choice of analogy, I would characterize my argument as long the lines of, lots of people drive cars, and teenage drivers are definitely riskier (cf. auto insurance premiums), but most parents don’t ban their adolescent children from driving cars. Instead, they educate teenagers about defensive driving tactics and encourage them to avoid risky behaviors like texting while driving (comparable to applying ED if you have divorced parents and one isn’t willing to contribute).</p>
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I disagree with your assertion that “full need” schools do not exist. They exist aplenty–consumers are simply misinterpreting what “full need” actually means. Formulas varying among colleges is a fact of life, and does not change the definition of “meets full need.” If you take a family with one 60k income stream, not self-employed, no home equity, <10k in parental savings, both parents are married, no medical expenses or other extenuating circumstances–the formula can only stretch so far in the college’s favor, so long as it is “full need” and does not practice preferential packaging (excluding merit aid, which is almost always given in writing on the website). The risk is much greater with schools that do NOT promise to meet full need, since they are free to offer as little grant money as they wish.</p>
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Since my base assumption is that FA-needing ED applicants are only considering full-need need-blind schools for ED, the original ED college is probably already one of the few with strong endowments. If the applicant has considered her options carefully and still chooses to apply to, for example, Scripps ED instead of Pomona ED–then the applicant is already aware that Scripps caps loans at 4k/year while Pomona promises no loans, and that is a conscious consumer choice.</p>
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I gave my personal example in order to counter the idea that most ED applicants who require FA accept an inferior FA package or else are forced to back out. From numerous anecdotal accounts, both on CC and IRL, I do understand the variability of packages, in some cases as much as 20-40k difference. But the risk of variability, varies by family situation. I also know people who applied in the RD round and received very similar packages from schools with similar FA policies (e.g. met need with Stafford loans only), or with <5k difference. Personally, my family was OK with paying 5k more for my first-choice college; we had run calculators at peer institutions and considered those numbers affordable, so it was a reasonable risk to take for the possibility of high reward–like investing in stocks vs. bonds.</p>
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I agree, which is why I would recommend ED to FA applicants if and only if they were applying to a school that promised to meet full-need, was need-blind (at least in the ED round), and had reasonable advertised or unadvertised limits on self-help expectations. This assumes that the FA applicant’s financial situation is relatively simple–normal employed income, no exceptional assets or expenses, nuclear family with children spaced 4+ years apart–and the first-choice ED college is indeed a strong enough first choice that the applicant would be willing to pay a (small, affordable) premium for it.</p>
<p>With due respect, calmom, I cannot privilege your family’s FA experience over lookingforward’s–though the two had opposite results–or with my own, which is even more limited in both number and scope. Those few who are in a position to know the “insider” truth are also bound by confidentiality. We can only speculate.</p>
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<p>And, to conclude this ridiculously long post–I concur entirely re: the middle income doughnut hole and the much higher risk when “complicating factors” are involved.</p>
<p>The FA system is flawed and does screw over a lot of families due to lack of transparency. But I still believe that the solution for familes and consumers is not to throw up their hands and boycott ED, but to push past the muddy waters, do the difficult research (there are few centralized sources of information, so you may have to dig through obscure website PDFs and/or write the FA office with pointed questions), and make a carefully considered decision despite the obstacles in their way.</p>
<p>Lafayette, and any other school, will report average indebtedness as the actual average debt of its students. This includes students who borrow extra to meet family EFC; this is why no school in the nation has a $0 average indebtedness rate, regardless of their FA policies.</p>