My son was accepted to a few Ivies that gave very little financial aid and a few non-Ivy, but very selective schools that gave a lot more financial aid. Is it possible to negotiate for more financial aid from the Ivy League schools?
It does not hurt to ask. It depends upon the Ivy League school and the non-Ivy in question.
In general, Ivy League schools will at least rerun the numbers based on a better FA package for a comp school. The offer may or may not change. Be aware, if you’re not already, that some Ivies include different things in the calculation. For example, Yale includes home equity; Harvard does not. Also note that no Ivy will match merit.
Also,for the most part, an Ivy League college will not “match,” but they may reevaluate their offer, so be careful in your wording. Good luck.
Some of the Ivies are known to be very generous and the others, not so much.
If you are comparing Stanford and Penn (for example), then yes, you can definitely ask for reevaluation.
You will get better results if they are peer schools.
You can use another school that is giving aid only packages and inquire why a given school that guarantees full need is not coming up to that mark. There might be some mistake there, there might be an explanation.
Full demonstrated need. An important distinction. Yes, there could be a mistake, but more likely it’s how they calculate (and what any particular school includes/excludes in the calculation, as I alluded to earlier). Also a key point is that any calculations are always done with what the school feels the demonstrated need is, which may be different from what the family thinks it should get.
Each college has their own formula for awarding their need based funds.
Has anything financially changed since when you filed your financial aid forms?
Most of the Ivies are very generous with their need based aid calculations. They might consider looking at school awards from Stanford, or MIT…but other colleges would be a maybe.
Were the more generous awards need based or merit awards? And when you say “very selective” what do you mean?
This, I think, is the key question.
It’s worth asking Harvard or Brown to explain why their aid is so much different than Amherst or Williams, but they may not consider Notre Dame a peer for financial aid purposes.
I can only speak of two Ivies (Yale and Columbia): they did review the decision of another Ivy but did not revise their award as they stated that unlike some Ivy League colleges, they do consider home equity. They were unwilling to budge on that as they said it would be unfair to other students.