Expected Family Contribution and financial aid

I think you’re maybe avoiding hearing what joshsmother is saying – maybe it conflicts with ideas about how you got where you are or what you’ve been able to do for your kids.

The reality is that college is necessary for most kids at this point – but it’s a small minority of kids who have parents who can guide them in this manner. The fact that information is available is beside the point. If a parent can’t use the information, it might as well not be available.

Why wouldn’t a parent be able to do that? The parent’s own background is a major determinant of whether or not they even think to look for such information or find it important. That’s why so many schools, including state schools, are huge on first-gen programs now: the culture and business of academia is intensely classbound and exceptionally difficult for people whose parents aren’t wealthy and don’t have advanced degrees to navigate well, and everything is fast-moving and high stakes.

Then there’s the fact that many parents simply don’t have time. When a parent’s getting by on four or five hours’ sleep a night, no, there is no time for major research expeditions into some unknown online world. Sorry. When a parent’s taking care of frail elderly parents or disabled siblings or a disabled spouse, no, there isn’t time. And no, saying “find someone to help” isn’t an answer, either. People too busy to manage college searches for their children are also short on time to make social connections and reciprocate for favors. If they’re poor and their friends are also poor, their friends are also unlikely to be helpful here, too.

If your parents are immigrants, then unless they’re highly educated, the odds that they’ll have the cultural fluency to navigate the bazillion cues for how to apply successfully to the right schools – very slim. Very, very slim. And this generation is one of the biggest children-of-immigrants generations we’ve had in a very long time.

Finally, if you’ve spent any time as an adult in the world of wage work, you know that there are vast seas of adults out there who have trouble reading and figuring simple sums. New worlds of highly complex info are not where they’re equipped to go. That’s why training in so many jobs is engineered to be so simple. If those are your parents, those are your parents. And you’re likely to get beat up hard by academia when you attempt college, unless you find a sherpa there, or – more likely – a sherpa finds you.

In the US, roughly 30-40% of all kids are growing up poor, with a smaller percentage in federally-defined poverty. Most of them need to go to college, too. I guarantee that their parents are not well-represented here, and for good reasons.

While I get that one’s own bootstraps can be well-loved, it’s unkind not to recognize that having the bootstraps in the first place is a matter of fortune. And in a society where college is more or less a necessity, arranging things so that not being like you, or me, is going to punish your child longterm – it’s simply wrong, and I think it’s bad for the society as well.

As for the “is what is” notion – frankly, I deeply resent the amount of time and work it’s taken to throw money at a university that surely won’t deserve it, and I can’t even imagine how livid I’d be if I didn’t work at a university, so that at least there’s some advantaged derived from the whole horrible game. I’ve told my kid I’m happy to bake cookies for the revolution whenever her generation gets around to it.

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@bennty There isn’t any love lost between any pair of bootstraps and myself, lol. Rather, I know exactly how long it takes to pay off student loans taken out that exceed the “recommended” amount, know how much that decision can reduce options as a young adult looking for their 1st, 2nd, 3rd job and having to make all decisions based upon loan repayments that just increase if you put them into deferment because you can’t figure out how to make that payment as well as the car repair, or medical bill, or whatever unexpected expense comes up (and those always come up).

I know this because I lived it. My willingness to do the research I did for my child is born of living that way for most of my 20s, after a childhood of poverty. And not wanting any child to have to deal with those circumstances because until you’ve lived with debt that you can’t escape, you don’t know how heavy it is. I grew up in a family that had to learn how to navigate WIC and food stamps (yes, I know exactly how it feels to have other shoppers judge your cart loudly when your mother is trying to make a nice birthday meal), as well as the times when we made too much money to qualify for free school lunches but not enough money to buy subsidized (or bring regularly) school lunches. When I went to college, I qualified for full Pell Grants, Perkins loans, Stafford loans, and also work study (and had to get special dispensation from my college to work two jobs during the school year - during the summer, it was 3). This wasn’t pulling myself up by any bootstraps, this is what I had to do to pay my school bill. At the time, it didn’t even seem strange - it was just what you do when you have. no. money. You work and work and work some more. Poverty is time consuming and exhausting. I very well know this.

I also understand that the reason I was able to pay off those student loans wasn’t because I was “so smart”, or “did everything right”…it was because I got lucky. Graduating with honors from a top 5 US school didn’t make it so much easier to pay off those loans. Getting a job in a HCOL city with a good wage didn’t make it easier to pay off those loans (the cost of living ate much of my paycheck, even renting a room as opposed an apartment). How did I get lucky? I fell in love with someone who didn’t have any student loans (very lucky them), got married and my spouse helped pay them with me. Yes, it took two incomes, but only one set of student loans to pay them off. It is precisely because I know exactly how little my result has to do with all my hardwork that I am so adamant about students/families taking out unaffordable loans.

While I have spent quite a bit of time in the “world of wage work”, I didn’t need to in order to understand that there are vast seas of adults who have trouble reading and figuring simple sums. Honestly, all I needed to do to understand that is to read internet forums, including College Confidential. Growing up poor doesn’t mean that you can’t understand if something is unaffordable, and having money doesn’t mean you understand money or risk. The only difference between being poor and having money is having the space to make mistakes and having a safety net to absorb those mistakes. Everyone makes mistakes, but only those with money have to ability to absorb them with little impact going forward.

There is a lot of research out there - I would recommend Tressie McMillam Cottom’s work, LowerEd that talks about what happens to most low-income, low resourced students looking to go to college. They’ve been sold a bill of goods that college/education is the way out…but many of those students will start college, take out loans, and not finish…leaving them without a credential and with the unaffordable loan. They would have been better off getting the job they could get (financially) without any college.

And why can’t they finish the degree? Because of money, most often. Money is the limiter in most of these cases. If you start a degree without the resources to be able to finish it, it takes a lucky break, or sherpa, as you stated.

To send students unprepared off to college, and hope they find a sherpa seems crueler than telling their parents the issues before college has started. Right now, this is the state of higher education. That is not to say it is what it should be, but I deal with reality - which isn’t known to be nice.

Finally, I find it kind of telling that you wanted to let me know about the plight of poor and uneducated in response to my reply to an educated mother who was bemoaning the lack of merit aid her son received at the selective colleges he had applied to. And my reply had been to say that looking for merit aid required a deeper understanding of finding the colleges that will want to give money to your specific student.

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I believe OP received info requested. Closing thread.

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