<p>People here say that your kid’s stats are good enough that Cornell is almost a sure thing.</p>
<p>Kids with that kind of stats often get merit money from the University of Maryland. And UMD does have an animal science department, so a pre-vet could get the large animal experience they tend to be looking for.</p>
<p>Thanks for the other school suggestions! She is applying to UMD for sure. We will just have to see if the merit money is enough (if accepted of course). </p>
<p>I just looked back at the beginning of this thread and saw your daughter’s stats. Given those numbers, Maryland may consider her for a Banneker-Key scholarship, either full or partial. Even the partial brings down the cost of attendance substantially. <a href=“http://www.financialaid.umd.edu/scholarships/banneker_info.php”>http://www.financialaid.umd.edu/scholarships/banneker_info.php</a> </p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I do think it is worth applying to Cornell ED for the extra chance of getting accepted but a possible loan scenario?</p>
<p>This typically works out fine for 95% of the people who get accepted because they do get enough FinAid. Some risks are worth taking. What’s really the risk here?</p>
<p>If you get enough aid, you are fine. If you don’t get enough aid, you can ask for a release and continue the college search. If it turns out that Cornell was the best financial option after all, and you turned it down then you lose out. If it turns out that Cornell does provide sufficient financial aid, but there might have been a school that provided more merit aid, then you might lose out. </p>
<p>Really, if you’d be willing to pay the results of the NPC, then ED makes sense. </p>
<p>Reminder - Also prepare for the years when there is one in college, so less FA for D2. </p>
<p>I’m not sure this is that big a risk. Run the efc calculator using your best estimates. If it’s affordable under that scenario apply ed. Schools really are pretty lax about letting you out of ed with a sad but understand smile if the efc was way off. </p>
<p>Yes, you can get out of ED school if unaffordable. But you don’t have the flexiblity to compare all offers and decide which is the best value. </p>
<p>The line as to what is “unaffordable” can be fuzzy, and it can depend on circumstances. It doesn’t necessarily mean “impossible.” Let’s assume that debt is part of the equation, and parents don’t want to borrow. KId gets into ED school, but tentative financial aid award would require parents to borrow $10K a year to manage. Parent’s don’t want to do that: so now a decision needs to be made. At the beginning of January, before the parents have even had a chance to put together their tax returns from the previous year. Unhappy kid now has to rush to meet deadlines for RD schools. So let’s fast forward to spring – maybe all the financial aid awards are disappointing. Parents realize they have to pay more than anticipated Maybe instead of needing to borrow $10K a year, they can get away with borrowing $7500…to send the kid to a school that is much lower ranked and a poorer fit than the ED school that was turned down. Now the equation isn’t so much “affordability” but whether dream school was worth $2500 more per year than safety. </p>
<p>You can’t make those sorts of decisions without all info in hand. </p>
<p>This is complicated by the fact that the financial aid offered with the ED admit is only tentative and subject to change. It could get better, it could get worse. But the bottom line is that the family has no way to compare. </p>
<p>I think that many ED families probably end up locked into paying more than they had expected or wanted…because it must be terribly difficult to say “no” to the kid who has just been admitted to the dream school. So the parents take out larger loans, or divert funds that could have benefited a younger sibling, or whatever. </p>
<p>Both my kids got into top choice colleges in the RD round that didn’t offer adequate financial aid. But they had other great choices and that made it a lot easier emotionally for me to say no – and I also felt more confident in my decision.
I didn’t have to wonder, “is this the best that we will get?” - because I had a bunch of awards in hand that I could enter into a spreadsheet. And there was no internal family strife or angst because my kids are smart enough to know that $30,000 is a whole lot more money than $18,000 – so with all the numbers at hand, the decisions pretty much made themselves. </p>
<p>Logistical question. You get an ED acceptance on December 1st. You feel the finaid is not enough. You file a request be released. Assume most RD application deadlines are January 1. Are you even allowed to apply RD while the release is pending? Is the ED school under any requirement to release you in time to make RD deadlines?</p>
<p>There’s no question that you can say “no” to an ED acceptance without having to prove to anyone that the financial aid offer was unaffordable by anyone’s lights but your own. And, as a practical matter, you will not be required to withdraw any other applications (or refrain from filing them) until you have definitively accepted the ED offer. The deadline for doing that can and does get extended on a case-by-case basis if there is discussion going on about the financial aid offer. The fact that you have a particular assessment of your ability to pay by Columbia is a real help, because if Cornell (or any other college) takes a different position you can show them how Columbia evaluates the same information.</p>
<p>All of which is to say that my advice would be to apply to Cornell ED, as long as, at the end of the day, you are willing to walk away from Cornell if you are not comfortable with the financial aid offer (including being comfortable with how they are likely to change the offer when your first child leaves Columbia). I wouldn’t get hung up on the possibility that they will radically change their offer based on 2014 vs. 2013 information, unless you know that your private business results from 2014 are way out of line (on the plus side) with the prior few years. It’s precisely because your child is a strong candidate that ED is particularly valuable. I don’t think ED is really a way for marginal candidates to get accepted; the advantage of ED is that candidates who would have a really high relative chance of acceptance RD – people whose chance of RD admission would be as high as 50-50 – get accepted.</p>
<p>But you may find yourself in the position of having to say “no” to an acceptance from the college your child most wants to attend, without knowing exactly what anyone else will be offering. That’s the real problem with ED: if you turn down a Cornell acceptance, you may well not really know if you can do better elsewhere. That will encourage you to take Cornell’s last, best offer, even if you have doubts, and that’s the way ED works. If you want the boost, you have to accept that dynamic. But you are not committing yourself to financial ruin by applying ED, just depriving yourself of some (but not all) elements of bargaining power.</p>