Financial Aid at Wesleyan

<p>Wesleyan was the least generous of the six (fairly comparable) schools my son got into, in terms of the difference between the cost to attend and outright scholarship money and in terms of the anticipated debt at graduation. We have not tried to negotiate and probably won’t (i.e., my son will go elsewhere).</p>

<p>I did not receive any financial aid, so I will not be attending.</p>

<p>Hey, everyone. Make sure you filled out the FAFSA correctly. Also if Wesleyan is out of wack compared from what other schools have offered, it is possible thtat they made a calculation error. It is worth contacting the financial air office and asking if the calculation is correct or if there is any way to get additional $$. It cannot hurt to ask.</p>

<p>We just got our final award- after getting a tentative one until our 2010 tax returns got turned in. It was substantially less. Even though the first estimate was far from what we expected, we are floored by this final award. How do they expect a middle class family to pay for 2 students in private universities? With Wes being MORE expensive than the Ivies, one would think they would be a bit more generous. $110,000 a year…we can’t do it. Our kids will be saddled with debt and will be forced to work at jobs solely to make money to pay off loans instead of following their hearts. What a shame.</p>

<p>Usually when one has two children in college, as soon as the second one gets in, financial aid becomes greater for the first child than before. Are you saying that this did not happen in your case? I do know that Wesleyan does take sibling college tuition into account when awarding financial aid. What is your definition of “middle class”?</p>

<p>Thanks for the reply, morganhil.
We haven’t heard from the first college yet- but we were told we should be getting about half of the cost from both- which would mean close to $25-30K from each. </p>

<p>Def of middle class (in our case): Two parents working full-time (teachers), kids working during school year +summers, paying mortgage and living expenses, trying to save for retirement, saving for college since the kids were born and having about a third of what they will need, and not having anything extra for pretty much anything else.</p>

<p>I think we probably make just over what is considered “need”. We were awarded nothing for my older son’s first 3 years (unbelievable). He is saddled with loans now. We are thinking maybe they should have gone to state university- but they are both brilliant and we wanted to best for them. Maybe we are naive, stupid, or something in between. </p>

<p>Do you know if Wes consider having one in graduate school as having 2 kids in college for future years?</p>

<p>We got $0 from Wes and it is breaking my heart as it is far and away my son’s first choice school and also far and away his most expensive option. I went into the FA office at WesFest and told them exactly what other schools (not naming names) had taken into account that Wes had not. The response was . . . sorry, we just never consider those things. So if anyone else has luck negotiating with them I would really love to hear about it.</p>

<p>This is so tough because I believe that whenever possible kids should follow their hearts when deciding where to go to college. I have basically told him that I will contribute more for him to go to Wesleyan, but he will also have to borrow more. I don’t know what his decision will be, but I feel so stressed knowing that his choice is between going to a school he is less than thrilled about or being saddled with some pretty substantial debt – and it will be a strain for me too.</p>

<p>He does have other great options, but when someone falls in love with a school . . . I actually hope he decides to go there anyway . . . but maybe I am nuts to feel that way. . . Aaugh!</p>

<p>@DemonFamiliar:
I am in the same situation with both of my sons . It is a shame that the kids have to worry about debt and dollars when they should be putting all their energy into pursuing their dreams.</p>

<p>It’s a reality of life in the United States. In England colleges are so heavily subsidized by the government that kids don’t have these outlandish tuitions.</p>

<p>It would take a wholesale overall of our higher ed system to create a more equitable system.</p>

<p>These are hard choices. Sympathies to those who have to make them.</p>

<p>I paid my last tuition bill getting my second through college. It was difficult, but we were able to “liberate” more money that I thought we could by very frugal living – example any restaurant H and I went to we shared entrees. Good for pocketbook and waistline. We often went to movies first thing in the morning on weekends and save half on the discount for the first show.</p>

<p>We started to have fun seeing how much we could save, and although on paper the whole thing looked pretty undoable, we ended up the $20K debt for the two combined that we are going to pay. The kids have nothing. We did have FA to help.</p>

<p>I would be so careful about UG debt for kids. My D is now in law school and she is struggling with loans for tuition and living expenses, and my S will be going to grad school to.</p>

<p>Good luck everyone.</p>

<p>Most kids take on debt these days to attend college, it is a fact of life. Unless their families can pay full freight, then that is what happens! </p>

<p>I know a family where the parents have paid full freight for their two kids, had them turn down loans etc so their kids will graduate debt free! In the meantime, they do not pay their self-employed income taxes nor contribute to their retirement accounts. All they are doing is hurting their future & their retirement. The interest and penalties alone the IRS hits them with every year is staggering. Yet this was the parents’ choice!</p>

<p>DemonFamiliar, your experience with the Wesleyan financial aid office is similar to mine. They say up front in the financial aid office website that they do not “negotiate” and it is true. I do think they do a very accurate analysis of how much money a family has and goes with that as their financial aid offer. I was surprised when we did not get any grant aid at first, but if you go back and look at factors such as your retirement contributions and your private high school tuition for other siblings not being counted as factors that would result in a college financial aid award, it turned out for us that they were right on target. Keep in mind that there are several ways for our kids to get loans forgiven post-graduation in part or in whole, and also realize that it’s not all bad for our kids to work their way through school. I think if you try to keep your son’s total student loans under $25k, it won’t be such a burden in most cases. You get at least ten years to pay them off and payment does not start till they stop going to school full time. I also look at it from another standpoint–Wesleyan is extremely generous to those kids who are just like our sons but who happen to come from low-income families. I was one of those kids from a low-income family who Wesleyan gave a full tuition scholarship to (as well as paid most of my room and board) and here I am over thirty-five years later with the opportunity to pay Wesleyan back. I hope you can find a way to send him there in the fall–it is worth every penny, in my opinion!</p>

<p>Mommyg, I believe that Wes will take into account grad school tuition as well provided that your grad school child still qualifies as a dependent. It is worth it to write an email or call the Wes financial aid office to get the real answer. They are very friendly people and they realize they are in the business of helping people like you and me.</p>

<p>morganhil -</p>

<p>I did not mean to criticize Wesleyan’s financial aid policy, just to point out that another school (a direct rival of theirs I would say) did take certain special circumstances into consideration that Wes would not. I think it was the other school that was the exception and most schools probably would not have considered these extra factors. Besides this one particularly generous school, my son’s options are publics - very good publics, but I do not feel that he personally would do well at a large university. This is less of a preference than a real concern about his personality in such a setting.</p>

<p>The real problem now is that I feel the logical thing to do would be to convince my son to at least go to the more generous private school, which after all is on a par with Wesleyan - but I don’t really want to convince him, as I was as smitten with Wesleyan as he was.</p>

<p>My situation is difficult because I am a single parent and my ex is not going to contribute to college. It is his income that is blocking a reasonable financial aid package. If the schools were looking at my income/assets alone, we would have a pretty good award. So the reality is that I can find a way to send him, but it will be a bigger strain on both of us than it should be.</p>

<p>Oh, and regarding your other point - It has occured to me that if I make the sacrifice and pay the tuition with loans, etc., it will be a form of charitable giving. As difficult as our situation is, I know there are others far more desperate. I like the idea of having the tuition be my way of helping someone not so well off attend the school.</p>

<p>great points DemonFamiliar, thanks. and morganhil- yes, i will call them :)</p>

<p>I would echo everything that DemonFamiliar has said. It meshes almost perfectly with my experience. You need to have financial safeties lined up or else you might get left out.</p>

<p>My attitude is that the colleges owe us nothing. I am flattered for the acceptances my S received and it would be presumptuous of me to think that, in addition to those invitations, these colleges owe it to him to pay for part of his education. The types of colleges he applied to are almost all so competitive that it’s astounding enough just to be accepted. All of them have endowments that help assist some students but how they allocate those funds is, frankly, entirely their prerogative.</p>

<p>Wesleyan sticks to their playbook with religious fervor and they don’t seem to stray. The number that spits out the first time is pretty much the number they’re going to go with. That, too, is their choice to make. So, if you’ve got a plain vanilla situation, there should be no surprises. And if you’ve got a screwy situation that doesn’t plug into an on-line calculator very easily, you can avoid surprises by getting hooked up with them early on to find out how your numbers spit out when run through their algorithm.</p>

<p>Unlike other colleges that denied us aid, Wesleyan calculated the EFC anyway. In other words, other colleges wrote to us and said they thought we were in a position to pay the full amount. That left us in the dark as to how well off they thought we were. Would we get $10 in aid (this is just to illustrate the point) if we had made $500 less? Or was our financial picture much rosier, putting us far away from being in a position to obtain need-based aid? In most cases, we had no idea if we were a borderline case or not. Wesleyan’s letter spelled it out, to the dollar, that our EFC was nearly double the cost of S’s Wesleyan education.</p>

<p>In subsequent conversations with Wesleyan, they were willing to discuss the aid package and put our appeal information into their appeal process. Because S considered Wes to be among his top choices, we gave the appeal process a shot despite the preposterous differential we had to overcome with Wes. In conversations with other colleges, they all reported a much different picture, where we were close to their cut-off. Some said that an appeal would be worthwhile. Others discouraged it up front. Some colleges, of course, offer merit aid – and when our appeal crashed and burned the Wes FA office strongly encouraged S to look heavily at those colleges (which, fortunately, S had done since that advice is good to have and best acted on far in advance of April of senior year). Other colleges don’t offer merit aid, but seem to take merit into account when deciding how aggressive they will be in calculating the need-based aid on appeal.</p>

<p>In the end, Wes didn’t change the picture much. Our situation is really too specific to formulate lessons that would be useful. It’s not reasonable to extrapolate from our one experience into some sweeping claim that they don’t calculate things “fairly” at Wes. I think the disparities we saw with the Wes FA calculation can be attributed to hard and fast rules that didn’t cut in our favor. Wes was alone in calculating certain items to our detriment – while all the other colleges that I dealt with treated those items the way I hoped they would. But it’s a zero-sum game, right? So while that could be a strike against Wes from where I sit, doesn’t that mean that there’s more money in the kitty for them to spread among others who, based on their FA playbook, are the people they prefer to allocate a greater share of aid to? So I can’t make a value judgment on the fairness of Wesleyan’s FA process. The reasons that led to my unfavorable outcome could be the reason Wes can put some money on the table for you. Even if I tried to impose a value judgment on this, I’d still have to concede that what’s “unfair” from my perspective may mean they can be “abundantly fair” to you. The one thing that I can say is that they are rigid and unbending. And, again, there’s no value judgment in that statement because the willingness of other colleges to be flexible is arguably less fair to some even though it worked to our profit.</p>

<p>It pays to remember that it’s their money to spend. And, as you can imagine, it’s not as if we’re some charity case. We’re merely not in a position to buy an uninsured BMW every year and then, at the end of the year, drive it into the Connecticut River so we can buy a new one at the full sticker price for the following year…for four years running. If they think their scarce resources are better spent elsewhere, I’ll be the last one to argue against them. In fact, I’d wholeheartedly agree with them if only I wasn’t the one with the hat in hand.</p>

<p>This is not to say that I wasn’t surprised or disappointed. We probably dodged a bullet. I’d be far less magnanimous about this if S didn’t have lots of great options and choices among his top colleges after the financial picture shook out. Had he not been accepted to some of the top colleges on his list where the financial picture was ultimately workable, I might not see things the same way today. And I think that’s the lesson here and why I’ve bothered to post this. I can see where the bitterness and dismay of some parents takes root. My S did everything he needed to do to get in…and then because we, the parents, make too much money – while, at the same time, we make too little money – his barrier to entry is now: us, his parents, and not some capricious admission officer (or, to throw it back on the applicant, that C- in Woodworking on his mid-year report). That can be a bitter pill for a parent to swallow. From the day s/he’s born, you work hard and try your best to create opportunities for your child and then – BAM! – in April you get letters that officially certify that you’re now the obstacle.</p>

<p>Ultimately, he spared us from that ugly fate by doing two things: (a) by doing very well on tests and in his classes and – this is the important point you can control – (b) by finding a range of colleges that he was very excited about, including some that made merit money available and others that were more generous with financial aid where the applicant was desirable. That last part was dumb luck because he didn’t do that intentionally and we didn’t focus on the differences in college FA philosophies until this spring. That’s where you, the parent, need to come in during the fall and help shape the list of colleges the student applies to. Make sure there are financially viable options – and not just “crap” schools that fill that role (colleges that your child will “settle” for) because that’s not a happy outcome either. If I did it again, I’d be investigating the aid picture much earlier at each college he shows in an interest in and I’d encourage him to visit the schools that might produce decent results from a financial perspective and hope there are some of those that are at the top of his list and that he gets accepted there. That’s what happened in our case, but not in any intentional way. </p>

<p>When it comes to the bottom line results, YMWILLV, so for your purposes, the Wesleyan FA playbook may very well produce a good outcome. And the good news is that, because they are so rigid, any preliminary read you get from them is likely to be an accurate one, which is a huge help to you because you’ll be less prone to being disappointed in April if you made the effort to get a FA read in the summer or fall.</p>

<p>Wow D’yer, I’m impressed by such a level, objective report.
I have to add that we’re probably among the people on the other side of your FA loss. We got a number of awards, and applied to a number of schools that were reported to be generous FA-wise, and to our surprise, none were more generous than Wesleyan. But I agree with everything people have said, they are rigid.</p>

<p>Based on our experience, I think its truly difficult to predict in the fall which schools will be helpful or generous with financial aid. A couple of schools on DS’ list were there mainly because of their merit and need aid reputations. But we found that merit aid did zero good because it just decreased need-based aid. We did best with Wes, which was certainly not on the list because of FA concerns, and we never would have predicted that outcome.</p>

<p>D’yer Maker - Wow, thoroughly analyzed and really well-written.</p>

<p>as the second or third or so response to the OP, this was said, “… there are lab costs for science, film, and art classes, etc.” The response was dated circa 2008. In the recent, ie last two or three weeks, town hall meeting by Prez Roth re explaining why Wes will for now up to “10%” of applicants not be need blind, he addressed this exact issue of extra fees in response to a student question as to why not that should be adopted as a way to raise $ and thus maybe avoid limited abandonment of need blind, etc. Roth said they considered it but basically it was too ‘nickle and dime’ (my words, his sentiment) given the high tuition already. So, it appears that Wes doesn’t do this now, ie extra fees for labs or film class, and won’t be doing so in the foreseeable future. fwiw</p>

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<p>In a sense I think this is important. In this and in previous threads, some people defended that the adoption of this 10% need aware is a good thing. Not only for Wes, but also for the applicants. It is nice to see that there are members in the Wes community that realize that this limited-need-aware policy is indeed troublesome.</p>