<p>My daughter has narrowed her BS search down to 2 schools. She received identical FA offers from both schools. Although the offers were generous, it was not enough to enable us to send her so we appealed. One of the schools (her second choice) cam back immediately and met our request for additional FA. The other school (our first choice) wants to see the documentation that the FA was offered at her second choice school. I would like to know if anyone has any experience with this. My concern is confidentiality and "selling out" the second place school. Thoughts?</p>
<p>So basically you told them you got offered X% more from school #2 and they want you to prove it…wow. I hope someone has an answer. I’d love to know this too. Btw I’m so happy that your appeal was met!</p>
<p>It’s OK to show one school’s FA offer to another if so requested. Whether it’s considered a “selling out”, more of an ethical issue than aything else, depends on how you presented your case with the school giving you more generous FA. Did you make it sound like FA was the only barrier stopping you from enrolling your student in that school, or did you make it clear that you’d be choosing between schools even if the school could offer you more FA?</p>
<p>Thanks for your information. Before your reply…I sent the string of emails from the 2nd choice school to the 1st choice school indicating that our FA was being increased but did not identify the name of the “2nd choice” school (I deleted certain parts of the email string). I hope this approach does not hinder our chances for additional FA at our first choice school. And…to answer your question, I let our first choice school know that they were our first choice school but that the FA package would have to be an offer similar to our second choice school …make sense? This is so stressful!</p>
<p>Yes…exactly NYCMomof3. Fortunately, everything I told them was 100% honest. I was a bit offended that they didn’t believe me but…I guess these schools are a business too.</p>
<p>No need to be stressed. You are in a good position. Just email/fax the offer from the second choice school as requested. To me, the stressful part would be declining the second choice school since you negotiated a better offer from them and now declining it even though they met your request.</p>
<p>Sorry, but they don’t know you - why should they take your word for it?</p>
<p>And regarding the redacted emails, I understand your concern, but . . . one of the things school A wants to know is the caliber of School B. In other words, if School A is well known and quite competitive (and basically has their pick of any candidate they want), and School B is the school no one’s ever heard of in out-in-the-middle-of-nowhere Oklahoma that will take any candidate that applies, School B’s increased offer is not quite so persuasive. So, it can help to let School A know that School B is, in fact, a peer school. For that reason, I probably would not have redacted the school name. But it is, in the end, a personal decision.</p>
<p>I replied on the other thread that we had a similar situation last year. A school who accepted DC had offered no FA and when we turned them down they followed up and asked us to send a copy of the other schools’ FA offers. They specifically said to black out the schools’ names so I think it’s fine that you did that.</p>
<p>FA offers are confidential as every communication highlights. In our case we declined as we had already scratched that school off the list.</p>
<p>I haven’t had to do this yet, but am thinking it may come up for college. My suggestion for those in this boat in the future might be to focus on the first choice school in requesting FA. Or in the case of two schools, going with the school the willingly offered to increase the aid instead of the school asking you to jump through hoops. </p>
<p>Why? Because there are human beings on the other end of this process and I can imagine increasing aid for a student you want who then uses it as leverage to get a better offer from another suitor.</p>
<p>So my question is, ethics aside, what makes the school that increased your aid so undesirable that you would want to field additional offers? And I wonder if the second school wants to see the offer so they don’t “overshoot” the mark allowing you to take the second offer back to school #1.</p>
<p>I think it’s important to negotiate if the numbers aren’t working, but I worry about the precedent it starts. If the offers all came initially, then going to the favorite school and using the letters as leverage seems fine.</p>
<p>But I’m less sure about doing it with the “after” negotiations to find the highest bidder. I certainly wouldn’t reveal the name of the school since FA offers are supposed to be confidential.</p>
<p>Thanks for your input. There are multiple reasons for us to have our daughter attend the “other” school, most importantly location and religious affiliation. Interestingly, we had a coach from yet another school (a 3rd school) in which we declined admission ask us to go tell the FA aid office about our other offers (which we did not pursue). I definitely get the impression that this is “standard practice” and…if you don’t ask, you won’t receive. I believe in being cordial, honest and professional in the entire approach.</p>
<p>What’s done is done, but for future posters or people in a similar situation I don’t recommend that you try to leverage financial aid awards against other schools after the fact. The school that increased the award enough for your DC to attend is expecting to see your child next Fall. Also, the common theme on this site is love who loves you. You shouldn’t have to jump through hoops and show fin aid documents to them as if you were a dishonest person. If you were showing them an initial award that is totally fine, but after you asked an AO to advocate for your DC to possibly leave them holding the bag may be bad mojo. IMO…</p>
It is two years later and our son was just accepted to the same school which our daughter attends. In hindsight, appealing the FA package was the best decision we could have made. It allowed her to attend her preferred school which she absolutely loves. Our daughter is thriving at the school and we hope the best for our son. Good luck today as folks receive their notices. P.S. The aid package for our son was accepatable, although it will be a stretch for us, we did not request additional funds…I believe that was only acceptable one time around.
@2liebe Congratulations and thank you for sharing your story!
@2liebe How fat was “immediately”? I just appealed my first choice school today and I want to know how long it’ll take for them to get back to me. The initial package was extremely generous, but we need a bit more in order to make it feasible for me to attend.