Financial Aid and Early Decision

Colleges and Universities A-Z Barnard College
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<p>I know people on this forum have repeatedly said not to apply to Barnard ED if you need financial aid. So… how true is that? How difficult is it to get out of the binding agreement if your family did not receive enough financial aid and simply cannot afford sending you to Barnard?</p>

<p>I went to a Sisters’ schools event and Jennifer Fondiller, the Dead of Admissions, said that a student’s financial situation should not keep them from applying ED. She said that, if you don’t you received enough financial aid, you can talk to the financial aid office to see what your options are and, if necessary, be relieved of the binding agreement.</p>

2

<p>Barnard uses the Common Application, and here is the ED FA rule:

<a href=“https://www.commonapp.org/CommonApp/docs/downloadforms/ED_Agreement.pdf[/url]”>https://www.commonapp.org/CommonApp/docs/downloadforms/ED_Agreement.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>Consider the alternative, that attendance could somehow be compelled, with the student later expelled when the bill couldn’t be paid. There’s a reason no one has ever mentioned this happening; consider the horrible PR if some school tried this. ;)</p>

<p>If a school accepts you ED offering FA, they really want you, and are willing to take a financial “loss” to get you, so they have an incentive to try to make your FA offer work.</p>

<p>This may be of interest:</p>

<p><a href=“http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/04/education/edlife/strategy.html[/url]”>http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/04/education/edlife/strategy.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

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<p>Wow, thanks so much for the quick response. I feel much better after seeing the Common App policy (especially along with the NYT article).</p>

<p>If my parents let me, I’m definitely going to apply ED!</p>

4

<p>If you need financial aid, do NOT apply ED. </p>

<p>If you are not happy with your financial aid from Barnard, you will not have enough information to make an informed decision. You may find yourself in December confronted with deciding to take a risk and accept a spot despite uncertainty about the sufficiency of aid, or turning down a spot only to find that you don’t have any better choices in the spring. Whatever Barnard offers you in December isn’t binding in any case – its a tentative award and it is subject to change based on your parents’ 2010 tax returns.</p>

<p>(Re post #2 – that poster has no experience whatsoever with Barnard financial aid.)</p>

<p>Unless you have a very uncomplicated and very stable financial situation, and are absolutely sure that you will be Pell-eligible – or, on the other extreme, you don’t really need financial aid and are just hoping that you can get a small amount – you should not apply ED. The Dean of Admissions has nothing to do with financial aid and is not the person you would be working with.</p>

5

<p>“Re post #2 – that poster has no experience whatsoever with Barnard financial aid.”</p>

<p>Quite so. If you are concerned about the issue calmom raises, ask the Barnard financial aid office about this situation. Ask them if there has ever been a case of of a student accepting the ED FA offer but then not being able to attend solely because the family’s income went up from their estimate. The FA amount may indeed be reduced in such a case by an amount appropriate to the increase in family income, but this is due to fairness, not because they’re trying to discourage you from attending. As a family’s income goes up, aid goes down, as it should be.</p>

<p>I, for one, think you are right to pay attention to Barnard Dean Fondiller’s statement.</p>

6

<p>collegerock, if you want to follow up on this, you might ask the Barnard FA office what factor they use for increases in family income from the estimate; e.g., for every dollar of income increase, the FA award is reduced by forty cents, one factor in use.</p>

7

<p>I firmly believe that your parents MUST be very, very involved in the decision to apply ED or not. Unless they are fully aware of the ramifications of a possible ED acceptance and subsequent limitations of financial aid offers; AND unless they are willing and able to make whatever financial sacrifices necessary to send you to Barnard (and that is a TOUGH thing to do!), do not apply ED.</p>

8

<p>Another view: </p>

<p>You and your parents can make the decision about these issues after you receive the ED financial aid offer; you are not under obligation to accept it, and schools typically allow something like two weeks to decide. Remember that the school really wants you to attend when they make the offer, so they may well work with you to find a way to make it happen.</p>

<p>All of this presumes that Barnard is your dream school, and that you’re not interested in comparing financial aid offers from other schools.</p>

9

<p>To collegerock – please do NOT listen to someone who has no experience with the Barnard financial aid office. That person does NOT know the issues and the complexities involved. I’m not going to post a lot of details here – it’s just that there is enough internal inconsistency that it would be a mistake to <em>assume</em> anything about financial aid. </p>

<p>ED is NOT for people who seriously need financial aid. The exception might be for the very poor – people whose income puts them in Pell grant range (preferably 0 EFC) and who have no assets (like a family-owned home) that would be considered in the financial aid calculation. And I think that a person in that very low income bracket might find the loan burden & work expectations at Barnard tough to manage, especially with the expenses of living in NY and a variety of <em>extras</em> in terms of costs that either aren’t factored into financial aid or that limit your options somewhat. </p>

<p>And these <em>extras</em> are getting worse, as Barnard is tacking on extra charges here and there that my d. didn’t have to deal with, such as requiring students to stay on a meal plan for all 4 years. </p>

<p>Barnard is NOT one of those colleges like Harvard or Stanford that gives super-generous, no-loan financial aid. So I think one thing is fairly certain – whatever Barnard will offer in need based aid, most students who can get admitted to Barnard will be able to get better aid elsewhere, usually in the form of merit aid or combined merit/need based aid at a public or less selective private. So before you apply to Barnard, you need to ask yourself whether you are ready to pay a premium to attend.</p>

<p>The very best financial aid we got in any year from Barnard still put us paying at least $10K above and over our FAFSA EFC. Our aid fluctuated from year to year, and at least one year our EFC went down but Barnard’s financial aid was less, not more, for that year. </p>

<p>Please – do not listen to someone who has very little experience with financial aid, and none with Barnard. I have seen first hand the differences in financial aid packages among a variety of different schools, many claiming to meet “full need”. </p>

<p>I am glad that my d. has a Barnard education – I think academically, the school was an excellent choice. But she had to work very hard to keep up with the academics, and she had to work very hard to earn money along the way – usually working at 2 or 3 jobs simultaneously. And she came out with the maximum in subsidized Stafford loans – and I have had to take out roughly the same amount in PLUS loans. </p>

<p>I am very glad that my daughter went the RD route and that we had all the financial aid awards in front of us when she made the choice. Barnard was not the least expensive choice we had – that would have been an in-state public – but at least we went in with eyes open and an opportunity to compare awards. </p>

<p>Do you even know what your FAFSA EFC is?</p>

10

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<p>There are many students who enroll at Barnard and are unable to continue their studies because of finances. When my daughter was a continuing student, we ran into a problem because of difficulty getting some information to the financial aid dept. that they wanted – the ability to get that info was outside our direct control. We were told that without that info, there would be no award. I believe this was before my d’s junior year. I specifically asked whether they would actually withhold financial aid forcing my d. to dropped out, and basically I got an answer along the lines of “yes, this happens to a lot of students”. I was pretty stressed out that year – I even posted something on CC about how stressed I was because we did not get an award until late summer. </p>

<p>So for someone to think that Barnard financial aid is going to go out of its way to help out some ED-admitted student whose financial aid package has changed materially between December and May is simply naive. They tend to be quite rule-oriented when it comes to adhering to their internal policies. Also – I’m not sure when you would even find out – the RD students are given packages in early April, but continuing students are not given their award packages until July – so I don’t know if ED students get their final packages in April or May, or if they have to wait until July like the continuing students.</p>

11

<p>What would be really good now would be to hear from someone with some ED financial aid experience with Barnard. :)</p>

<p>“but at least we went in with eyes open and an opportunity to compare awards”</p>

<p>I agree, as I said before. Do not apply ED if you want to compare FA offers.</p>

<p>Also check with Barnard if their ED and RD FA offers differ for the same applicant; schools will often/usually tell you they are the same. calmom’s daughter had a good experience with Barnard financial aid. (Yay!) Your ED FA can be just as good.</p>

12

<p>What informative posts! Thank you so much.</p>

13

<p>“There are many students who enroll at Barnard and are unable to continue their studies because of finances.”</p>

<p>Sadly, this is true at most schools, but has nothing to do with ED vs. RD. If your actual award goes down from the estimate, it’s because your family income went up by an even larger amount, providing the money to pay the increase in cost.</p>

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<p>“What informative posts! Thank you so much.”</p>

<p>I think it’s great to hear all sides of an issue. :)</p>

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<p>You can read my posts above and call it a “good” experience?</p>

<p>We opted for Barnard. I’d give Barnard a A+ for academic offerings, but a B, maybe a B+ at best, for financial aid. It’s been an expensive and often very stressful, sometimes frustrating, experience. </p>

<p>I think Barnard wants to do the best for its students through financial aid, but Barnard also is not well endowed and so they have limited funds to work with. That means that they really don’t have some sort of extra pool of funds they can draw on just to “make things work”.</p>

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<p>That’s a naive and untrue statement.</p>

17

<p>“You can read my posts above and call it a “good” experience?”</p>

<p>Well, your D was able to attend her first choice school on aid.</p>

<p>“That’s a naive and untrue statement.”</p>

<p>For the benefit of readers, an explanation would be helpful!</p>

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<p>No, my daughter turned down her first choice school because of patently inadequate aid. So did my son, for that matter. </p>

<p>I find it rather odd, actually, that you would assume that Barnard had been my d’s first choice. </p>

<p>Also, my d’s aid at Barnard fluctuated during the years. She had better aid her first year than in subsequent years. If the aid award her first year had looked like the aid award for the 2nd & 3rd years, its possible that she would have turned Barnard down as well.</p>

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<p>There are a variety of factors that impact aid determination – not just actual, real income – and an increase of income in one year does not necessarily mean that the family has more available money. As but one example, the increased earnings could have gone to pay off debt accumulated for necessities of life during the previous year when income was lower. </p>

<p>I’m not going to go into every other factor that comes into play – I mean, if I listed them all I’d have to write a treatise. There are dozens of things I could think of, and probably more than I haven’t thought of. </p>

<p>If the OP decides to share information about her own family situation, I’d be glad to point out what might be a concern in her case. But financial aid determinations are often made based on numbers that exist only on paper, not as money in the bank. One more wrinkle is that ED awards, being tentative, are not based on verified numbers – so its quite possible that a family could make a mistake in filling out the CSS Profile forms – and then without a real change in circumstances, come up with a problem down the line when actual tax returns are submitted and the FAFSA verification process is completed.</p>

19

<p>Ok, good.</p>

<p>Stepping back and simplifying, and nothing to do with Barnard in particular, there are two main ED vs. RD issues:</p>

<ol>
<li><p>With ED you give up the ability to compare FA offers. That’s why ED is appropriate only if you have one dream school above all others, where the only question is: can I afford it?</p></li>
<li><p>If your actual income is more than the estimate, your FA amount can decrease. The school’s assumption is that the increase in income will offset the decrease in aid. If you have reason to think that this might not be the case, you might want to apply RD instead.</p></li>
</ol>

<p>If you need FA, with both ED and RD you get an offer and then decide if you want to accept it.</p>

20

<p>Not exactly.</p>

<p>As to point 2,</p>

<p>With ED, you get an “estimate”, not an offer. It may or may not change down the line, and the changes may or may not render the “affordable” school unaffordable. And again, there are many circumstances other than increased parental income that can change the financial aid picture. </p>

<p>With RD, you get a firm offer – though of course the offer covers the first year only.</p>