<p>Swarthmore, as usual, was very generous with their financial aid for the upcoming year for my daughter, who will be a senior. The finaid statement came in the mail today.</p>
<p>I haven’t gotten my package yet. I got a letter a long time ago that said that my application was incomplete. I am an incoming sophomore. On my first-year app I said that my dad owned a separate property besides the house. On the second-year app I didn’t mention it, so I got a letter asking about that. Well, it turns out that my dad sold the property a long time ago (5 years ago), so I shouldn’t have mentioned the property at all. I e-mailed the financial aid office, and I got a response saying that because it’s busy with all the other aid awards, I won’t get a response until the end of June/beginning of July. I’m a bit concerned that I’ll get less aid because they will have awarded aid to everyone else. Do you think I’ll get less aid than I should, because I’ll be so late?</p>
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</p>
<p>No. </p>
<p>Swarthmore’s financial aid office is authorized by the Board of Managers to spend whatever it takes to meet 100% need of all students, so it is not a situation where the aid dollars will have run out.</p>
<p>OK, great! I actually got my financial aid letter yesterday (I guess they read the e-mail but didn’t respond.) and the amount my parents are expected to pay did go up by a bit over $3,000. This might have been because they made more money, I don’t know. Is it normal for the parent contribution to go up because of tuition inflation, even after Swarthmore’s scholarship is factored in?</p>
<p>Financial aid is based on what Swarthmore says your family can pay so, if you submit exactly the same financial aid forms, your aid package would increase to cover any tuition increase. </p>
<p>Keep in mind that, if Swarthmore said you could pay “X” last year, that was factoring in all of the family expenses. So, if the family income is now "X + $4000, and family expenses haven’t changed, they are going to expect most of that additional $4000 to go to pay tuition.</p>
<p>Student contribution from work study did not increase for next year (although I believe returning students have always had a higher summer earnings contribution than first year students). Swarthmore is still loan-free for all students.</p>
<p>My returning student is still waiting to hear from financial aid for next year. Is anyone else still waiting? We are very concerned.</p>
<p>We are also still waiting. Glad to hear it isn’t just us.</p>
<p>still waiting, but i also submitted my information late.</p>
<p>Financial aid finally came. Our information was in on time, but Swat needed additional info from us regarding college financials for our other daughter(attending a different school than her sister at Swat) Swarthmore was generous with financial aid, as they were last year. All of my daughter’s friends at Swat have all said that Swarthmore gave them similar aid to previous years.</p>
<p>interesteddad: You said that if family income increases but expenses don’t increase, the school will expect the family to use that additional income to pay for college. But I can’t find a section on the financial aid forms that asks for family expenses.</p>
<p>Today I printed out my CSS Profile and I misreported something. It was on one of the questions where they ask about “parents” but since my parents are separated, they actually meant just the parent I live with. I answered the question referencing both parents. The question was, “How much are your parents willing to pay for the 2009-2010 school year?” I said that they’d be willing to pay X. On another question they asked how much my noncustodial parent will pay and I also put down X. For X, I put down how much my parents paid last year. I think that’s why the aid package was so much more this year. There were also some minor things, too. I’ll submit a corrected CSS Profile back to Swarthmore and hope that they’ll recalculate my aid award.</p>
<p>we just got our FA package back from Swarthmore a few weeks ago and our family contribution literally doubled! (yes there was an increase in income but I am still well below the average for our area)</p>
<p>There is no way we can handle what Swarthmore thinks we can handle and we are now considering transferring daughter to U of MD which is our state uni.</p>
<p>I feel so let down by Swarthmore: they gave us such great support in yr 1 and year 2 we are just left out there in the cold and told: well take a parent plus loan. Mind you, this is supposed to be a school that is “loan-free”. They talk about taking a parent plus loan like it is nothing - dont these things need to be paid back? And what happens in year 3 and year 4?? do the family contributions increase again? </p>
<p>We will end up doing what we never thought we would do and that is to take out almost 100K in loans for an undergraduate degree for our child. My ex has 2 more children to send to college. </p>
<p>Dont’ mind me…just feeling real discouraged at this point. I should never have trusted that first introductory financial aid package that Swarthmore gave to us; it was a good $12K less than the FA offered by almost all the other schools that offered our daughter admission. We were just please with it because it was less and did not stop to ask ourselves why it was less. </p>
<p>It seems that the FA number of all the other schools was correct because that is the number Swarthmore now wants us to pay next year. If we had known that Swarthmore would do this, we would have just gone straight to U of MD and avoided this painful discussion of telling daughter that she will have to leave Swarthmore. </p>
<p>Oh well, we have the weekend to finalize our decision. </p>
<p>Is anyone else considering leaving Swarthmore over money?</p>
<p>This situation was explained in an article earlier this year. Assume that you were making “x” last year and that they calculated your financial aid accordingly based on need and your all the expenses that go into the calculation (number of kids in college, etc.). Now, assume that everything stays exactly the same except that you are now making “x” plus “y” due to increased income. Your “need” has changed by exactly the amount of increased income and the College will expect most of the increase “Y” to go towards higher family contribution.</p>
<p>It’s a reasonable and fair way of looking at need-based aid. It does, however, lead to an occasional shocking increase in expected contributions. Swarthmore’s attitude is that you had a fair deal last year when you weren’t receiving the addiitonal “y” income so there is no reason that you wouldn’t be just as financially comfortable this year passing along “y” to tuition payments.</p>
<p>The Phoenix website is down, but here are some Daily Gazette articles that address your situation. Somewhere, Laura Talbot gave the number of students who leave Swarthmore each year due to issues with financial aid issues. I can’t remmber the exact number, but I recall that it was under five (out of 1400 students). It is usually a case like yours where the expected contribution goes up significantly due to a new job or increase in income that is expected to go straight to tuition. Good luck.</p>
<p>[Financial</a> Aid Q&A Addresses Some Student Concerns :: The Daily Gazette](<a href=“http://daily.swarthmore.edu/2008/11/19/financial-aid-discussion/]Financial”>http://daily.swarthmore.edu/2008/11/19/financial-aid-discussion/)
[At</a> Financial Aid Forum, Bloom Discusses Philosophy behind the Policy :: The Daily Gazette](<a href=“http://daily.swarthmore.edu/2008/12/9/aid-forum/]At”>http://daily.swarthmore.edu/2008/12/9/aid-forum/)
<a href=“http://www.swarthmore.edu/documents/administration/financialaid/petition_response.pdf[/url]”>http://www.swarthmore.edu/documents/administration/financialaid/petition_response.pdf</a></p>
<p>interesteddad: You said that if family income increases but expenses don’t increase, the school will expect the family to use that additional income to pay for college. But I can’t find a section on the financial aid forms that asks for family expenses. And when my parents’ income increases, can’t they expect to be able to spend their increased money on other expenses? For example, let’s say last year my parents made a combined $1,000 and had to live on canned beans every day of the year. And let’s say for that year Swarthmore covered all my college expenses for that year. And the next year, my parents made $50,000 a year. Since my parents paid 0 in the first year, according to your explanation, wouldn’t my parents have to pay $49,000, and continue living on $1,000?</p>
<p>There’s a more pressing concern for me, though. Recently, I resubmitted my financial aid forms, because there was an inconsistency. My parents are married, but are geographically separated, and we fill out the forms as if we were separated (which is legal). On the Non-custodial parent statement, we said my dad gives $5,000 in child support and $9,400 in alimony. But on the CSS Profile, when asked how much child support my mom received, we put down 14,400 (the sum of 5,000 and 9,400). For some reason the College never asked about that.
So we changed the CSS profile answer from 14,400 to 5,000 in child support, to match the Non-custodial parent statement. And, as it turns out, now, we have to pay $2500 more!!
And it’s stressing me out, because all we did was change the answer to make our forms consistent with each other. We didn’t really change how much my dad contributed to my mom. Now I don’t really know what to do. It’s a really bad feeling when you resubmit your financial aid forms, expecting to eventually pay less, and then received a revised letter, asking you to pay more.</p>
<p>dchow:</p>
<p>I can’t help you with the forms. The links I posted above suggest that the financial aid office considers a number of expenses, including mortgage payments, college costs, private high school costs, medical expenses, child care costs, elderly care costs, and so on and so forth. You would have to contact the financial aid office for the complete list of items included in the profile and where on the forms you report these expenses.</p>
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<p>Come on dchow. Please. </p>
<p>I do not believe that Swarthmore’s need-calculations are based on a family eating nothing but canned beans. A combined family income of $50,000 with no assets to spend on college would not result in an expected family contribution of the full sticker price. 47% of Swarthmore’s aided students have annual incomes of $100,000 or more.</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.swarthmore.edu/Documents/administration/ir/FAStats.pdf[/url]”>http://www.swarthmore.edu/Documents/administration/ir/FAStats.pdf</a></p>
<p>Now, let’s say that your family income is $100,000 a year and you are getting an aid package of $20,000. Your income goes up $20,000 a year and nothing else changes. Don’t you think most if not all of that incremental income should go to pay Swarthmore? Remeber, we are talking need-based aid. Would you rather see Swarthmore slash the need-based aid budget and go to merit aid? Would you like to see them go back to loans instead of grants? Once you move away from need-based aid, we have a whole different set of questions to ask.</p>
<p>The vast majority of Swarthmore families find their aid packages to be fair and reasonable. From reading here, the particular poster above hits two of the issues frequently associated with the exceptions to the rule – a significant increase in income that results in a signficant increase in family contribution and a broad category individual factors frequently triggered by “ex’s” and financial assets and willingness to pay and so forth. I have no idea about any individual cases, but it is not unheard of for the financial aid office to have a different picture of an “ex’s” financial assets than the parent applying for financial aid (if you get my drift). There are still other cases where an “ex” is simply unwilling to pay a fair share, despite having assets. It would not be fair to the 1500 students at Swarthmore for the financial aid office to say, “OK, you don’t have to pay if you don’t want to, even though you could…”</p>
<p>It is impossible to talk specifics of financial aid, because every situation is different.</p>
<p>“Now, let’s say that your family income is $100,000 a year and you are getting an aid package of $20,000. Your income goes up $20,000 a year and nothing else changes. Don’t you think most if not all of that incremental income should go to pay Swarthmore?”</p>
<p>Well, yes, IF nothing changes. I was trying to show by my example that if nothing changes, then the family can’t use the extra income to pay for, for example, a new car to replace a broken-down one, or fixing the house. In other words, they cannot use their extra income to enhance their quality of life, because 100% of their extra money has to go only to paying for their child’s college tuition. Unless, of course, the student takes out a loan, but any student would be hesitant to take out a loan when the school brags about how it’s “loan-free.”</p>
<p>Hi Interesteddad - thanks for the links and the comments…made for interesting reading. I guess we will be one of the five!</p>
<p>Swat must have changed their criteria for FA since S was a student there. We applied for FA the year our income went down; we also had private HS tuition to pay & were dealing with elderly parents. Swat didn’t offer us any FA & only suggested we take out a PLUS loan.
Needless to say, we’ve never been as impressed by Swat’s FA as other people are.</p>
<p>I wouldn’t know, but apparently some students are happy with their financial aid at Swarthmore. Swarthmore was the #1 school in the country for “Great Financial Aid” on the student-survey driven Princeton Review rankings this year. </p>
<p>[Test</a> Prep: GMAT, GRE, LSAT, MCAT, SAT, ACT, and More](<a href=“http://www.princetonreview.com/Schoollist.aspx?type=r&id=748]Test”>Colleges with Great Financial Aid | The Princeton Review)</p>