<p>If you get accepted ED at a college but you can't afford it (i.e. they don't give you a good enough financial aid-package are you still required to go?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>There have been some long and heated discussions about ED and financial need on College Confidential. You could search for them.</p>
<p>I am of the opinion that if financial aid really matters to you, ED is a bad deal. Your ED school might offer you a package that is workable, and it might not. (NYU, for example, is notorious for inadequate financial aid offers.) But what you’ll never know if you apply ED is whether some other college or university would have made you an offer that was even easier to swing financially.</p>
<p>With ED, you have a binary choice: yes, my family can pay this, or no, my family can’t pay this. With RD, you have the choice to comparison shop. You can say things like, “Well, I could go to Oberlin, but I could get a pretty similar experience going to Denison, and with the combination of merit and need-based aid they’ve offered, it would cost me $18,000 less over four years.”</p>
<p>IMO, if money is an issue (and, honestly, I think money is always an issue–even if you ultimately decide you’re willing to pay more for something that you perceive to be of higher quality), RD is the way to go.</p>
<p>Sikorsky: I found that I had a third choice with my ED1 acceptance. I was accepted ED and found that my family could not pay, so I personally wrote a letter to the Financial Aid department of my college detailing them my story and some things that are overlooked through FAFSA/CSS. I didn’t expect or feel entitled to anything more, but they re-evaluated my case and sent me a new, affordable, package. </p>
<p>Now that could have just been luck or it could have just been my special circumstances. But I did follow this third option route and it turned “not being able to go” into “going”.</p>
<p>That can happen, true. But I don’t think it can be depended on to happen.</p>
<p>And it still means you don’t get the chance to comparison shop.</p>