<p>Gadad,
A changing financial situation created a situation where we could not allow our younger one the choices we allowed the older one. Our S had the option of applying to any school he wished; our daughter did not because of the hit our college fund took at the beginning of the recession.</p>
<p>All I could do was be honest with our daughter. As we were struggling to manage the fund, we included our daughter and our son in what was going on financially and they were understanding. We looked at schools in our (new) financial range and she seemed very excited about her choices. She says she is very, very happy with the school she is attending.</p>
<p>I hope she bears us (and our son) no ill will. But I do feel guilty about it.</p>
<p>It is a difficult situation. Most of the kids can understand that you are unable to afford equal opportunity if your financial situation got worse (lost your job/lost college fund due to stock market crisis, etc) Most kids would not hold a grudge in this situation (I think…)</p>
<p>In your case though, it is not the same. You can’t get the discount you previously could get because you now have the funds. You are just not willing to part with those funds. This may look very unfair to the kid…</p>
<p>^ I agree. I think it’s hard to say that you can’t send the kid because your financial situation has improved and you have plans for that money that don’t involve their college fund. If you had lost a job or if your college fund had declined in value due to the recession or something like that, it would have been different and I think the kid would have understood better.</p>
<p>I think there is a difference between changing circumstances because of less money, and because of more. The former allows for less choices than does the latter. I also think that it’s disingenuous to suggest that gadad offer the same monetary limit to his S as to his D’s, when there were plainly financial aid resources available to the D’s but not to the S because of the changed circumstances. (edit: cross-posted with nngmm and smithie…)</p>
<p>I agree with Oldfort and Greta–I would not impose limits on the S because of improved finances. I would allow him to reach for the school that best fits his goals and abilities, which may be GT or GU, may be NU, and may be someplace else.</p>
<p>Just as his sisters got to.</p>
<p>And also, I would not contingent his later family support on how much his college costs now. If paying for a college equal to his needs/desires costs more, than that cost should be borne by all three kids, as all three kids were granted their most desired school choices. As was said above, the inheritance was apparently not planned for, so i would assume that using some toward school would not create dire hardship (if I’m wrong on this, of course, that would change things.)</p>
<p>Absent the threat of true hardship for the family, I couldn’t live with myself doing it any other way.</p>
<p>I agree, and that’s what’s weighing on me. But on the other hand, the sisters went to an expensive private school because we paid $60,000 and the school covered the other $180,000. We had no choice of using that other $180,000 for anything but the school’s tuition. But when the other $180,000 is your own, you now have the option of considering the value of using it for their grad school or eventual home purchase. If we hadn’t qualified for aid the first time around, would we have chosen to spend our own $ for full-pay at Harvard for the sisters or encouraged them to find a way of leveraging it for future benefits? That’s a difficult question to answer, made even more difficult by the fact that there’s an in-state public option that is itself among the top Us in the country.</p>
<p>This is a hard issue to wrestle to the ground. I am close to a cousin who is one of four. Parents were of modest means, neither went to college, stressed the importance of education above all else.</p>
<p>Eldest went out of state to college of choice. Financial situation then changed; parents could afford even less plus needed more support at home. sibs 2 3 and 4 still resent number 1 for the unequal treatment even though it’s not clear that number 1 realized that by going to a private far away it would significantly limit the other siblings choices.</p>
<p>OP- I don’t think parents need to treat all their kids exactly the same. If one child needs braces or eyeglasses or god forbid a liver transplant, I don’t think the other kids can keep a running tab of what those things cost so that someday everybody gets their fair share. On the other hand, I think you run the risk of down-the-road resentment when younger kids don’t get to opt for comparable choices as the eldest.</p>
<p>I think the notion of paying for grad school or helping out in adulthood is a nice one but in most families that I know it is a red herring to divert attention away from a parent not paying for college. Who knows if that money will be there 10 years from now. Who knows if the parents health will allow generosity at that point. And maybe all three kids end up doing PhD’s with full support, or employer paid professional school, or some variant thereof. Or never go to grad school. In a perfect world you’d know now where all your kids will end up and could allocate resources accordingly. And allocating grad school dollars gets even worse than undergrad- D 1 gets help to complete a Master’s in Early Childhood education since her salary post grad would make loans onerous, but S 3 gets no help for law school since he’ll be able to pay off his loans in a couple of years? And pity D 2 who lands a great job right out of college where her company pays to send her to B-school.</p>
<p>If it were me, I’d have a sit down with kid number 3. I’d have a spreadsheet in front of me which showed my out of pocket costs for several educational choices, with a little prep work done on a handful of schools which could be good choices for S (i.e. look like he could get in and offer what he’s looking for. And with a range of price tags attached). And I’d say that the entire family is committed to helping the kid make a good choice for college and that within reason, everyone is prepared to do their bit to make it work. But that S needs to step up to the plate to decide what he’s looking for, how important academics are vs. everything else, how much he’s prepared to sacrifice or work in order to achieve his goals, etc.</p>
<p>You may be surprised. S may tell you that all things being equal, he doesn’t care about academic prestige as long as he has friends and can participate in band. Or he may tell you that will split the difference with you, i.e. take out loans to cover half of the EFC if you will cover or borrow the other half. Or that he’d rather go far away with a merit scholarship than borrow a nickel. Or that he doesn’t want to deal with college yet but that he wants to get out with zero debt.</p>
<p>Who knows what he’ll tell you. But I think you are unwittingly setting the siblings up for some rough dynamics down the road if you prematurely decide that you won’t spend the money you now have for him; that you won’t borrow; that you won’t let him borrow; and that a cheap option is the de facto choice since he isn’t the kind of student his sisters were.</p>
<p>gadad, some schools with marching bands have dedicated, non-need-based scholarships to attract players. Marching bands are often aligned with athletic departments, not music departments, and therefore play by “athletic” rules. I have no idea whether this is the case at Northwestern, but it might be worth checking out.</p>
<p>The best marching bands, though, tend to be at schools with excellent football teams–i.e., not the Ivies.</p>
<p>With 4 children, what we do for one, we do for all, has been our philosophy. Three at private schools, one at public, all their choices. For UCONN, we were OOS, but it was much cheaper then, like 28K/year. Thank goodness for financial aid & doing this for 11 consecutive years has not been easy. (not done yet!) :)</p>
<p>You will have to make a difficult family choice, you will now be “full pay” unless the school your S attends will give him some significant merit aid. That is a scary thought for @ 4 years for $50,000 = $200,000 minus $10,000/yr in merit = $160,000 out of pocket! Just using 50k/yr as an example, we all know it will be higher, & doesn’t include the obvious pizzas, books, travel expenses etc! </p>
<p>Certainly the youngest child doesn’t want to feel like he was short-changed, I know exactly where you are coming from. And his parents don’t want to feel like he was either.</p>
<p>To answer your original query if there were other parents who experienced a change in financial circumstances in between two kids going to college, it also happened to us, the same thing, an inheritance.</p>
<p>We were lucky I suppose, because our oldest hadn’t turned down any offers due to finances, her first pick of the schools was also the one that offered us the best financial option. For our second kid the main question hasn’t changed, what school will be the best fit for him? The only thing that has changed is that we have more to choose schools to choose from for finding the one that fits him best.</p>
<p>As far as things being even, our oldest is the one who is really academic and so I think she might to graduate school down the road. If that is the case we’ll won’t forget how her college cost us much less than the full sticker price and we’ll help her out financially with an advanced degree.</p>
<p>Oh good grief, I realize it’s not HYPSM or the U of Chicago to which we’re all supposed to genuflect at every opportunity, but it <em>is</em> the #12 ranked school in the country, you know.</p>
<p>NWU is much “better” than Georgia Tech looking at most academic criteria, but whether it is a good “fit” is a whole nuther question. Also, admission to NWU is not predictable; he shouldn’t count on it, just in case. It’s not a safety for anyone.</p>
<p>The concept of going to a cheaper college so they can have money for a house is where I get especially stuck. Do you want to communicate that having a better house is worth more than a better education?</p>
<p>My belief is that you provide your kids with the best educational opportunities you can and then they’ll be prepared to do the rest on their own.</p>
<p>I would think very hard about what messages you want to send to your son. If you need the inherited money to maintain your lifestyle in retirement that’s one thing and I would explain that. But if the money will be spent to elevate your lifestyle and give the kids who already got elite educations money for houses, I think you risk his being resentful.</p>
<p>I get totally stuck on that one. My job is to pay for their education; maybe I’ll help with a down payment later down the line, maybe I won’t, but that’s nothing I need to plan for or decide now. Anyway, their colleges cost what they cost. My two wound up in colleges that cost roughly the same, but if one had been appreciably cheaper, that kid wouldn’t have pocketed the difference - that’s my money, not theirs.</p>
<p>“Now, I for one frankly value the latter over the former. I would balk at paying top dollar to send my kid to “the Harvard of drum line”.”</p>
<p>Same here. Maybe if you could show that his odds of a career as a percussionist were materially greater at the more expensive school, it would have more traction with me.</p>
<p>I don’t think it’s so evil to have different rules for a different kid with different needs. If what this kid really cares about is an outstanding band experience, and he can get it at School A for $240k and School B for $40k, it doesn’t make sense to me to send him to School A, regardless of what his sisters got. The part of college they really cared about could not be had at UGA or GaTech.</p>
<p>gadad, DCI has a band in Atlanta if your S were so inclined. Might be difficult to do DCI and GaTech band, though. Agree that he should take a serious look at the climates of UGA and GT. Very different places. (I went to UGA.)</p>
<p>Does he want to major in snare? It can be hard for non-music majors to get into some of those ensemble opportunities, even at big schools.</p>
<p>How about UMich? Great math, fabulous marching band. </p>
<p>Agree that NU combines top academics with Div I football/band.</p>
<p>As to equity between kids, S2 is costing us more than S1. S1 has merit $$ and highly marketable job skills. We were not going to limit S2 to only those schools where he had merit $$. Our deal with them, made years ago, was that if they put in the effort, we would make college happen, but they would also be expected to have a fair share in the game. Both have jobs and Staffords. At least we are getting some FA while both are in school!</p>
<p>Pizzagirl and garland: I thought long and hard about my “gap” comment, and you should read it darn carefully before you tee off on me. Remember, the OP was getting Harvard at the price of UGA or GT, so the gap comparison wasn’t Harvard vs. GT, it was Harvard vs. something meaningfully less expensive than GT. Second, I remember from a long-ago post by molliebatmit that GT, Michigan, and Berkley are the only public universities that more than one or two students a year pick over MIT, and GT gets about as many wins as the others. So for lots of students GT is probably pretty high quality. If the OP’s son is tech-y, as many kids here are, I don’t know that you can make a compelling argument that Northwestern is so clearly superior. If he’s interested in French literature, it would be a different story. (About UGA I was maybe being politic, but I don’t know very much about UGA except that REM, the dBs, and the B-52s seemed to have come out of there, so it can’t be too bad. What cool bands has Northwestern produced?)</p>
<p>I absolutely would have made the same comment about the University of Chicago compared to GT. Maybe even Harvard or Yale; I’m not certain. But remember – I’m someone who signed up to pay a clearly unreasonable amount in the name of sibling equity, where the quality gap between the schools (one of which was garland’s alma mater) was infinitesimal as far as I was concerned. If I had been making decisions on this basis, I would have behaved differently. But I had to own up to what decision I was making: I was paying for e-quality, not quality.</p>