That example that you gave is exactly what confuses me. Why, for example, does Fordham need the student’s FAFSA if they have elected to award merit aid to the student on the basis of their stats?
None of the schools where my D received merit awards required the FAFSA.
There are some schools that specifically say that need IS considered in their awards, and IMO, then that’s need based aid but they just aren’t calling it that.
I agree that it can be confusing to first time students/parents applying to college.
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You would have to ask them. Also that info is a couple years old, so may have changed. Suffice to say after your kid applied there, they would communicate what they need.
Do you have examples of schools that require FAFSA for merit aid?
Because if the student is Pell eligible they may reduce the merit by the Pell amount from the federal government. I don’t know if all schools do this… it may depend on the amount of merit. It will not change the bottom line to the student as full merit is still covered, but it saves the school a bit of $$.
My D is on a full ride merit scholarship. We have to file the FAFSA every year even though the CSS had us as a full pay family.
(Edits to clarify as my original response was too specific to our full-ride situation… but that is where I have noticed the FAFSA being required for merit.)
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I am not singling out the posters above specifically; I think they sum up generally held parental/student expectation quite well.
But I do think there is a problem in those sentiments. That there should be a ‘level of school’ students should ‘expect’ to be accepted to while also being able to financially afford said schools.
That’s the disconnect. As many people (including all the posters I quoted from) on this board know - there are plenty of schools where a student can received a good to great education at a fairly decent price.
But those schools aren’t always:
“Dream” Schools
Schools parents/students/friends have “Heard of”
Schools “known” to attract students who “worked their butts off to achieve”
That’s why I called it “magical thinking” in my first post. In what world is a highly sought after, well-known product financially affordable (or attainable) to everyone who wants it? Why is that the expectation when it comes to higher education? Why does anyone feel entitled to that?
I understanding wanting something you want. I don’t understand expecting it to be available at a price you want to pay. Unless everyone else on this board was able to get their dream house, their dream car, their dream mate, their dream job and their dream life in every other way without ever hearing no or having to accept compromises and their student’s college hopes/desires are the first time they’ve ever come across something unaffordable, or unattainable even if they were qualified for it.
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Because people fail to understand that these elite schools are businesses.
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Maybe also because at least for the state unis, some of all residents’ tax dollars go to support those schools.
I also like the magical thinking descriptor. Some people never progress beyond that…because it takes time spent doing research to understand how colleges award aid.
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I do think they eventually get it. I also think many believe the only chance they have is to be at the top of their HS graduating classes, take the most rigorous classes, have good EC’s, prep for standardized tests, not realizing there really wasn’t a chance in the first place. Like most things, it comes down to money, money opens up a lot of options.
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I don’t think it is always a lack of doing research. It’s more like conflicting information overload.
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I think if the regulars on CC want to engage in a true public service, we would bury the trope that “My kid worked his butt off in HS so he deserves to go to X”.
This is insane logic. I worked my butt off when I was newly married, but no, didn’t get to buy the fancy house with the big garage and chef’s kitchen. I worked my butt off when my kids were small, but no, we didn’t have a country club membership and I didn’t get to yoga twice a week. Etc.
If we are teaching our kids that hard work leads to a particular (and very particular) outcome, we are setting them up for a lifetime of failure. Failure because no matter what they have, what they achieve, what is within reach, it will never be enough.
My hard work as a newly married person allowed me to pay off my grad school loans quickly. My hard work when my kids were young meant juggling a demanding job, a family, and augmenting elderly relatives retirement when their own funds weren’t sufficient. If you go through life looking at what other people are doing you are going to miss the satisfactions and grace in your own life.
I’ve posted before about a VERY talented kid in my own neighborhood who took a full ride at a small college a thousand miles away that literally- nobody had ever heard of (I had, but that’s because I review thousands of resumes a year). Even the guidance counselors- a pretty savvy bunch- weren’t quite sure where it was. Definitely the hardest working kid anyone knew.
There are family circumstances which made the flagship state U unfeasible/unaffordable, so she buckled down and did what she needed to do- get a free college education with a guaranteed pathway to the grad program she wants. Did she spend time feeling sorry for herself that after all her hard work and sky high scores she’s wearing the sweatshirt of a place nobody has heard of? Dunno. She’s too busy getting an education to worry about that, I imagine.
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I think because many people see higher education as a public good not a private luxury good like a fancy purse. This is the way higher education is treated in Canada, Europe and most other places in the world. In Canada, bright students who “worked their butts off to achieve” do have essentially assured acceptance to the country’s “dream” universities that everyone has “heard of” without engaging in any “magical thinking” and these schools are indeed “available at a price [they] want to pay.”
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I agree with you but I’ve seen a lot of the magical thinking on CC. Among some parents there is an underlying expectation that their child “deserves” to go to a certain school. Why else all the sturm und drang when XYZ school doesn’t work out? Fortunately, there are lots of great schools at a variety of price points. Attending an expensive name brand school isn’t the only way to be successful or to get a great education.
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Most of the posters on CC aren’t international and don’t know much about their own country’s higher ed landscape, let alone others. The expectations on CC aren’t because people are wishing it was more like Denmark in the US.
This isn’t because everyone else knows how to do it better. Most of the other countries you list do several things much differently that we do:
- Tax rates much higher across the board
- More public money going into higher ed
- Smaller groups of students considered for the college track
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This. If more kids accepted that working hard and doing well in HS doesn’t guarantee a specific result we’d have fewer kids feeling like their HS years were “wasted” because they didn’t get into XYZ elite school. College is four years of your life - it isn’t the entirety of your life.
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There are definitely conflicting sources and doing research should help one sort thru that.
Some tips:
- Use primary sources…school websites, Fiske, Princeton Review
- Don’t use third party aggregator sites
- Read blogs from admissions people like Dean J at UVA, Rick Clark at Ga Tech, David Graves at UGA, and Tulane’s staff
- Attend college night at your kid’s school
- Attend group programs organized by local independent college counselors. Hire a college counselor if it’s affordable and makes sense for your family
- Contact AOs and FA staff and ask questions about how they distribute merit aid (generally controlled by admissions), or handle other aspects of FA
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Yes, and that’s because the best (elite) schools in these countries (University of Toronto, Cambridge University, Tsinghua University, the Indian Institutes of Technology, etc) are public schools that serve a public good.
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The obvious difference is that the most wanted universities in Canada are huge publics (around an order of magnitude bigger than a prestige private in the US) in a much smaller population country (around an order of magnitude smaller than the US). So they can accommodate a far higher percentage of high school graduates than the prestige private universities in the US. Being public and in commute-accessible locations for large parts of the population helps keep the cost to the student down.
But in the US, many seem to think that they can get into reach universities with merit scholarships from those universities, even though merit scholarships (if any are offered) would be super reach if already reaching for admission.
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It is “conflicting information overload” because lots of people would rather believe what they’d like to be true rather than being willing to listen to what is true but not desired. It’s called “confirmation bias”.
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I completely agree with you that American families aren’t directly comparing our college landscape to Denmark’s. And yet, I do think many carry a belief that society does (and should) invest in top achieving students. No, they do not know the nuts and bolts of foreign tax policy, or higher ed funding, or student tracking. But they have a vague belief that top students should get into top schools and be able to afford them. I don’t think that belief makes them entitled or crazy. Especially because colleges are non-profits, receive federal funds, and heavily invest in portraying themselves as finding and educating “the best and brightest” for the public good blah blah blah.
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Agree to disagree.
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