financial aid, ED and parents' willingness to pay

<p>Hey guys!</p>

<p>I'm a student from munich, germany, i fell in love with Dartmouth and therefore i'm considering to apply ED this fall ;)</p>

<p>But here's the problem:
My parents couldn't afford full college costs, but still they earn quite a lot (a bit more than €100k which means $150k).
The Dartmouth Homepage says that you can get out of the ED contract if the financial aid awarded doesn't make attending dartmouth possible. But due to the fact that education is nearly free in germany my parents are somehow reluctant to pay huge amounts of money for college and i am not sure how much they will be willing to pay in the end.</p>

<p>So:
1. How generous is Dartmouth's financial aid and which amounts rewarded are like 'typical' for an income class of about 150k?
2. Does anyone know if it is possible to get out of the ED contract if your parents are not willing to pay the parents' contribution? If not i guess i will have to apply RD :/</p>

<p>Need-based financial aid at Dartmouth and elsewhere is predicated upon a family’s ability to pay, not their willingness to pay. Otherwise no parents would be willing to pay.</p>

<p>Dartmouth has a college cost estimator link on the fin aid web pages.</p>

<p>ik and my question was not bout gettin finaid if your parents arent willing to pay but only bout being released from the early commitment if your parents dont wanna pay…</p>

<p>yeh, but i assume its likely to provide misleading results for internationals?!</p>

<p>It sounds to me as if you should not apply ED. You should not go into an ED application actually planning to back out because you KNOW it is likely that your parents will not want to pay. The honest thing is to sit down with your family and run the family figures through the calculator. If the resulting EFC is more than your parents are willing to pay, and you cannot make up a reasonable amount of the difference with earnings, scholarships, or loans, then don’t apply ED.</p>

<p>I doubt that it would give your chances of acceptance much of a boost, anyway. Virtually all of D’s recruited athletes apply ED, and D has a lot of recruited athletes for a school its size. Legacies who really want to attend have to apply ED to get the boost. There may also be some advantage to high-stat URMs. That accounts for the difference in admission rate. If you look through the ED threads, you will see that most unhooked students who apply ED are rejected or deferred. Those who are accepted seem to be those who would have been accepted RD.</p>