Hello all, Some guidance and/or wisdom on this is greatly appreciated.
Our daughter is in the 7th grade and is thriving at a local, private school. She is already talking about private high school and will most likely be applying to Governors, PEA, Berwick Academy and Pingree as a day student for the 2022 school year. This leads me to my question…
We have a combined income of a little over $200K and my fear is that we will receive no financial aid. I should add that my son will be attending her current school come 2022 to the tune of $26K a year. I don’t know how on earth we will afford nearly $70K in tuition for our kids!? We are obviously in a financially secure position, but in no place to just write a check for that amount of money; in fact we have actually taken money out of her college fund to cover her current tuition.
Any advice is appreciated. I feel like information I receive from folks locally is all over the map.
As for the schools that only offer need-based financial aid, I suggest you to email them in advance and explain your situation. Some schools also have a financial aid estimator that you should certainly check out on their website. You could plot in your household income and it’ll tell you how many currently students at their school with similar financial backgrounds receive aid (along with the average amount).
If you’re qualified, then that’s great. Continue applying to these schools.
If they are unable to offer you need-based aid, then I suggest adding in schools that offer merit scholarships, such as Episcopal high school or Mercersburg.
I hope you realize that college can cost a lot more than the numbers you listed, and many of them will not give need-based financial aid at your income level. Better review your financial plan as soon as you can for that eventuality.
Colleges at least have net price calculators on their web sites to estimate financial aid.
That’s our family income and we get zero FA from colleges and we will have 3 enrolled in the fall (and 2 graduates). In state public is more than $30,000 a year, forget getting merit from top schools.
I am obviously aware that college will be in the private high school cost ballpark if not more expensive, but at that point, there will be more options for merit and loans for both us and our daughter/son. On top of that, our mortgage will be paid and that will free up approx $35k a year.
It’s so interesting because I teach at a private school and most kids do matriculate to private high school. Many of these families drive expensive cars, vacation and have second homes. I know many of the parents personally because I teach in the same town I live in. So many of the families receive FA once the kids are in high school! None of it seems to add up?!!
This is what worked for us. First, make sure you apply to other private day schools that are more affordable. In our case there were 3 well rated Catholic high Schools within easy driving distance for between 12-20k per year. That way you will have a good backup. Next apply to boarding schools but instead of wondering what they may give you, it is better to give them a number that you can afford to pay and beyond which you can’t. We did this to 3 BS that our son applied to and he was accepted to one who gave him more than we asked, one who gave approximately what we asked and one who rejected him. Our son bought into the fact that unless we got sufficient aid, we could not send him since his brother was also in college. One other factor was that our son was a top student and scored extremely well on the SSAT so I think the schools might possibly go an extra mile for someone they really want but I guess we will never know the answer to that.
You are wise to be thinking ahead. The good news is that BS can be quite generous with FA. Check out some schools who have FA estimators. For example, I know Hotchkiss has a very detailed one, and I think Exeter and Groton have estimators (or maybe just grids showing FA breakout by income). I know at least some schools have suggested they use the 10% rule – family EFC being 10% of salary for tuition costs. Just a rough measure. But it certainly would mean that someone making 200k might well qualify for FA, as 60k is of course way above 10%.
HTH
Yes, to bridge the difference between what we’ve saved and what college costs. My 2 oldest attended in state public college (Rutgers and tcnj), the cost was over $120,000 with housing. Both worked part time and took extra classes to graduate early. Once they graduated they had the co-signed loans out in their names only, I think they pay about $1000 a month. My next attends a public college OOS, with scholarship the cost is about the same (high stats, one of the top scholarships). It wasn’t her first choice, but she got no merit and very little FA from her private first choice (over $72,000 a year and the FA was mostly loans and work study). We had 2 in college that year. Tuition gets raised every year. The wealthy can afford it, the poor get FA, the middle class…save.
It really is such a crazy thing to be considered middle class at our income level, but that’s exactly how we feel sometimes! We have a meeting with a financial advisor to discuss how best to proceed. I just wish our public school option was on the table. Unfortunately, I feel like our competency based learning model does nothing for the top or struggling learner. Everything is geared toward the middle. In addition, the students are just not motivated to learn. My daughter expressed this year that it was the first time in her life that the students in her class can all have purposeful conversations during instruction. She said that her teachers in public school would spend 85% of their day correcting behavior.
See what your high school offers. My kids pretty much took all honors/AP classes, took their third year of language freshman year, were on the algebra 2 freshman year track. Most of their friends were in the top of the class, competitive about grades. What we found lacking was college counseling, with 4 guidance counselors for over 1200 students (all have some friends who attend Catholic school like Saint peters or AHA). I think NJ is around 4th for the amount of college debt students acquired.
There are some schools that focus on the middle class and will offer generous FA. I would also look at schools that have large endowments per student body. I know of many families in your income bracket with more than one child in private school that were offered FA, many of them very generous FA.
I would not allow this concern to keep your child from applying.
For starters, it is assumed that college students can pay some of their loans back on their own, and that they’ll foot the bill for their own graduate education.
Prep schools want their reputation to be enhanced by alumni attending good colleges, and account for the fact that their students might need $ to attend college. The formula used does not assume that the student will be paying off loans themselves.
Again, you are missing the point: you are posting in the Prep School section, with apparently very little understanding about the subject.
It is not just a question of what courses are offered. If AP courses were all that, there’d be a lot of empty prep schools, because many prep schools have eliminated AP courses.
My LPS has plenty of AP courses. Every teacher my kid has had has gushed about how they envisioned kid as a future valedictorian - including a teacher who was a parent of a current valedictorian. We wanted more than piles of homework: we wanted a more nuanced student centric approach to learning than prepping for regents and AP exams.
My kid’s prep school has 0 AP courses. The kid commented that they learned more about writing in their first 3 weeks than they had in the previous 3 years in public school.
I guess my point was more about college. Living in NJ, there are many who assume their child will be eligible for FA in college, because a $200,000 annual income doesn’t go as far here as elsewhere. OOS or private colleges can easily cost $60,000 a year, and most families with the OP’s income won’t qualify for need based FA. I was surprised with my oldest.