Does anyone have any advice or recommendations re how to appeal to NYU for some scholarship money (none was awarded in the admissions process)? S wants NYU with all of his heart. Many thanks.
Pretty much a dead end at the undergraduate level. NYU doesn’t promise to meet full need and they prioritize aid according to their preferences. Does your family have significant need, or were you just hoping for some merit money that didn’t materialize?
The latter…our EFC is deceptively high for weird reasons, and I have chosen this time in my life to embark on my own in my career. Taking on that debt is frightening, but my S wants NYU more than anything. 
OK – it never hurts to ask, but NYU really, truly, doesn’t do much with “appeals” of financial aid. So what you might get would a token amount of aid at best.
NYU basically has a tiered system of aid. Top tier candidates get really generous awards. Mid-tier students get modest grants which may or may not cover need, depending on family circumstances. Basically NYU is capping the aid, whatever the level of need. And then there is a bottom tier that gets nothing.
This was a while back, but when my daughter was admitted to NYU, an “appeal” could yield a mid-tier student an increase of $1000 to $2000 over the basic grant – but that was it. It wasn’t a true appeal in the sense of looking at a student’s financials, but really more of a quick & dirty counter-offer in a financial transaction.
I stayed out of it-- I let my daughter handle the appeal on her own. I knew NYU wasn’t going to give her anything that would make the school affordable, but I felt it was better for her to hear it from them rather than me. I think it also helped her revise her view of NYU somewhat to actually have the direct experience of dealing with them.
The problem is that if your son has been offered -0-, he may not even be in a category where the school will give him anything at all. By offering -0-, NYU has already decided that they don’t really care whether he enrolls or not. NYU knows that 2 out of 3 RD admits are going to go elsewhere – but they also know the lure of the “dream” school.
Really - it doesn’t matter what your son wants more than anything – it matters what you & he can afford. Don’t take on debt you can’t afford. As a parent you need to take a long view of things — your son has other options and NYU just isn’t worth a mountain of debt.
I was offered a 20k scholarship and i was wondering if asking for more would be a good decision? My EFC is <10k per year according to NYU itself. NYU really is my dream school and if I don’t get more aid my parents will take out a loan but i was just wondering if it made sense to appeal @calmom
To be honest, I love NYU just as much as the next person, but taking on debt for NYU isn’t worth it in my opinion. The school cost $75,000 per year, and with inflation that number will rise each year. So by the time you graduate, you’re looking at over $300,000 worth of debt, and just imagine if you want to go to grad school after. There are lots of other good schools in New York, schools that cost less than NYU. If NYU does nothing to offer you more, than if it were me, I’d choose to go elsewhere because taking on that kind of debt, basically buys your ticket to years of financial slavery that you may not be able to escape.
@flowerNcake – again-- there is nothing to lose by asking. Just understand that the result of our appeal for a $20K scholarship might at best be another $5K – so if the school is $75K a year, it isn’t any more affordable. If your EFC is under $10K per year your parents should not be expected to borrow to pay the balance. Go ahead and appeal for the sake of doing so, and then chooose another college.
How does one go about appealing financial aid? Should I call the financial aid office or email a professional letter to the head of fin. aid?
Thank you, everyone, for your responses. I really appreciate that you took the time. I also really appreciate the candor. It’s just so sad to me that my S went from such euphoria at his acceptance letter (19% this year!) to devastation at getting no merit aid. I know it’s my fault for letting him apply to a school with that price tag, but we went ahead with the hope that he’d get some scholarship money. It wasn’t far-fetched, as he got merit scholarship at all but one school, so I guess it was worth the shot. @GiannaC3 - I appreciate your candor given that I know you love NYU;’ ifyou don’t think it’s worth the price, that’s good for us to know. I think we will go ahead with an appeal and then we can say we tried. To that end, I appreciate @calmom’s reality check on the backstory and likely outcome.
@YoungOne4 – both my kids got into top choice schools that fell short on aid. They got over it. It’s a disappointment, but I think one that might be harder on the parents than the kids, as long as the parents haven’t misled the student as to finances.
@calmom how do you know this about NYU?
My daughter was admitted to NYU for undergrad, went through financial aid appeal process opted for a different school for undergrad, but later attended NYU for grad school.
@calmom Which major was she contemplating when she opted to go elsewhere for undergrad? Was the tuition issue at NYU the reason she went elsewhere? Which grad school did she go back to NYU for? Thanks for your insights!
My daughter was undecided as to major when she entered undergrad. She was leaning toward linguistics but was cured of that after she took a class in linguistics her first semester. NYU was not affordable. My daughter attended Barnard, which provided her with need based aid of almost the full cost of tuition. For grad school she attended NYU Wagner and got a degree in nonprofit management. She is not fond of NYU – when she attended as a graduate student, it made her very happy that she had attended a different school for undegrad. She was very frustrated by the bureaucracy & indifference of administrative staff at NYU. (On the other hand NYU gave her a very big diploma which she has framed on a wall on her office … I suppose that counts for something).
Don’t take on debt you can’t manage for your son’s undergrad – that is only 4 years of his life that will go by very quickly – and afterward he will move on wherever he goes and you would be left with the debt. If he does go to grad school, the graduate degree is the one that will matter more --although truthfully most employers don’t care about the college name.
@YoungOne4 :
Generally NYU isn’t worth it. It doesn’t meet need and practices “admit/deny” ie., Pretends you’re admitted full pay when they know you can’t afford it, so they’re really denying you but if you’re foolishly willing to get into debt for them why derive themselves of your money? It’s cynical.
Did your son apply to other New York City colleges? What are his other choices?
Help him move on as it’s unlikely he’ll get anything to make the school affordable.
@flowerNcake ; don’t do that to your parents. If your efc is under 10k, odds are there such a burden is unsustainable for them. They may not get approved after your first or second year and then you’d have to drop out, have huge debt and no degree. What are your other choices?
@YoungOne4
First, congratulations to your S…and you too (it’s a stressful and long process on us parents too)! Don’t be hard on yourself for letting him apply as you just have no idea what the financial aid will be unless you try. We let our D apply to several schools (not NYU) knowing the outcome and FA were anyone’s guess. We were not able to use the NPC’s and it really wasn’t a ‘known’ for us going in, could have gone either way.
We got very lucky, and I say “lucky” because even though we feel the merit and or FA was earned where she got it, it wasn’t a certain outcome and we wouldn’t know until the results came back.
Our D didn’t get aid in some places we thought were a good bet and hit the jackpot in places we thought were going to be difficult to afford so you never know until you try. I have heard that NYU is notorious in the FA department for the “are you out of your mind” ‘awards’. I hope he falls in love with his other choices and knows that this year was just a mess in both the admissions and FA departments. Good Luck to you both
There is a lot of negative responses about NYU’s Aid or lack thereof. My EFC was very high but my daughter received a substantial scholarship and I am not need base. I am a single parent and I do have a six figure income and was surprised she got what she got. I’m also able to pay the difference but I was prepared for it. Where I there’s may not be. I also have friends that are full pay and others that received a substantial amount in scholarships as well who are not . Also, my daughter’s friends that she met at NYU are either on some type of scholarship or full pay. Several of the schools my daughter applied to gave very little scholarships and a lot of loans, and some gave nothing. We just kindly declined and moved on. But a few OOS schools made it affordable as if we were in-state, including NYU. There are several parents willing to pay full pay and others are not. There is no need to bad mouth the school and deter others that may still want to find a way to go there. NYU is definitely expensive and it’s not for everyone who can’t afford it. But congrats to all that made it in. This will definitely be a hard decision for you. If you truly can’t afford it please pick another school.
@VANYU2021Mom I totally agree with you. My D also received a substantial scholarship (and even got additional money her senior year) and knows many other students who were awarded scholarships. It is true that not every student will get a scholarship but that is the case in every school. I don’t understand the bad mouthing of NYU either just because your student didn’t get money. My D did not get money to a few of the other schools to which she applied. That did not make them terrible schools all of a suddent, they just came off of our list.
The reason NYU gets such a bad rap is that they offer meaningful need-based aid to only a very small fraction of admitted students, and they frame their award letters in a way that tends to create more psychological pressure on parents to take loans.
That is the problem the OP has: her son received -0- scholarship money, but I’m guessing a financial aid notice that is written something like this:
NYU COA: $75,500
Direct student loan: - $ 5,500
Parent PLUS loan: - $70,000
Balance Owed: -0-
So the 17 year old kid looks at that an sees that -0- – and it look just fine and dandy. To the unsophisticated it looks like the college is meeting full need, just with loans rather than grants. The kid has his heart set on NYU and look, the college is generously offering to lend mom $70,000!
And some parents have a lot of difficulty with that: (“my S wants NYU more than anything.”)
Other colleges don’t do that – at least not in my experience. Instead, in a no-aid situation – the financial aid letter looks more like this:
Random College COA $65,500
Direct Student loan - $ 5,500
Balance Owed: $60,000
And then after that they might have provide some information about how that balance can be financed. So the kid understands from the outset that college is going to charge mom $$$$$ – and as disappointing as that is, there is less psychological pressure to borrow.
So basically NYU has positioned itself as a major purveyor of parent PLUS loans. Parent PLUS loans are federally funded and have have roughly a 7.5% lifetime default rate. So that’s a bill that goes back to US taxpayers. In other words - more PLUS loans means more money flowing from the US treasury to NYU.
Here are some recently compiled statistics as to how that works:
NYU appears to have the highest overall number of Parent PLUS loan recipients of any private US college, with 4,258 PLUS loans borrowers in the 2015-2016 school year, averaging $3,495 each; 14% of undergraduates have parents taking on these loans. There are 6 public colleges with a higher number of overall borrowers, but average loan amount is at those public schools is between 32-55% of what NYU parents borrow. The highest overall institutional beneficiary of federal loan dollars was Penn State, with $167.3 million dollars in PLUS loan debt; but after that NYU is in second place, with $138.4 million in PLUS loans.
The next highest number of borrowers at a private college is Temple University, with an 11% parent borrowing rate, average per-parent loans of roughly half of what NYU parents borrow, with total federal loan amount of around $58 million -or about 41% of the amount that flows to NYU.
NYU is also the 4th highest on the list as to average amount of parent PLUS loans taken – Dartmount parents borrow more, but only 3% of the parents there borrow, so the total influx of federal dollars is around $4.6 million - or around 3% of what NYU gets.
So you can call it “bashing” if you like – but I see this numbers as facts and data, and the reality is that NYU is drawing a disproportionate share of federal loan dollars – and basically one out of 7 parents of students is taking on considerable debt to send their kid to a “dream” college that pretty much structures its aid policies around the availability of these loans.
But, it’s the parents decision to self pay or take out loans in whatever amount they want, if they choose to do so, whether it’s feasible or not. It can be called crazy to do so to some, but if they choose to go into debt that’s on them. You can always offer your opinion and some people like coming to you for advice. Sometimes you give great advice on various colleges and appear to be very knowledgeable, but it doesn’t always have to be harsh at times. I for one look forward to reading your opinion on some subjects. Some of the kids on here know that their parents can’t afford it and others can. We know that this can be disheartening. They come hear asking us adults for advice and how to approach the subject or their parents and sometimes great advice is given and sometimes they leave feeling defeated.