<p>kiwik you said your family makes 200k+ a year. Did you mean 20k? That’s why I am confused.</p>
<p>I don’t think it’s Cornell being stingy; Families that make over ~$150,000 simply don’t get enough financial aid from any private school. I got into Carnegie mellon too and they only gave me $6,000 a year. I would have had to go to SUNY Buffalo but I very fortunately got a big scholarship from RPI, which is where I am going</p>
<p>FAFSA does give you an EFC, but state schools and some privates will go with that. Cornell and other privates use the CSS profile which asks for additional info that the FAFSA does not. And CSZs profile does not provide an EFC at the end because each school uses different sets of information from within it.</p>
<p>FAFSA cannot count your home as an asset and cannot count your retirement savings. And with CSS profile, different schools ask or use different info from it. Then, each school has its own methodology such as what percent of parents assets they expect them to put towards school or percent of income.</p>
<p>This why you get different numbers from different schools, but may find sim.r packages from all of the in state schools you apply to.</p>
<p>Beware of the number by FAfsa. When my D applied, it said 35K. That was a lot but we thought it was doable. When we got financial aid packages from all schools, we got NO aid, so our EFC was really 56K. We did not expect such a huge difference. We had a lot of equity in our house which is what made the big difference. FAFSA did not count the equity, Cornell and other privates did, hence the difference.</p>
<p>@cortana</p>
<p>No, I meant about 200,000USD is our family income. Without discussing personal things too much… Like I said, I don’t have any siblings and don’t know how ‘extenuating’ my circumstances can be considered. The price of living in my area is pretty high, but I imagine that it is not much worse than California or the like. </p>
<p>For cornell, i recieved 34k in grants and the rest financial aid in expected work and loans to reach approx. 40k total. A few of my friends who have family incomes in a similar bracket (150k-200k) and family friends tell similar stories of recieving an adequate amt of financial aid (you can say similar to mine). I was pretty happy with my package, considering that CMU gave me half, and I guess you could say Cornell was pretty generous to me. I wonder if they will drop their aid by a lot next year lol (that would suck). But I don’t know, I feel like financial aid is so erratic after hearing your story. I really can’t say why my package was like this or why yours was like that though :/</p>
<p>Maybe they made a mistake lol.</p>
<p>@TKsmom</p>
<p>Oh that explains a lot. Wow, financial aid is so complicated.</p>
<p>yeah they use the CSS to take your houses and other assets into account</p>
<p>@shootforthestarz
sorry I took a while to get back to you - my family makes around 140-150k a year. BUT somehow our fixed expenses are over 3 times as much as the fafsa assumes, plus we pay almost 10k more in taxes than it allotted. We’re getting “$22,951” per year, but with work study and loans it’s really more like 13,000.
If our fixed expenses weren’t so high, it wouldn’t be so bad, but I think it has something to do with living in a rich suburb :P</p>
<p>@sk8erboi84
Thanks for getting back to me. It helps to have something to base off of.</p>
<p>The amount that we received from Cornell was within $300 of the amount we came up with on the Cornell online calculator. You are all correct that Cornell used the CSS profile portion of their calculator to factor in home equity and savings. Your FAFSA EFC may be something like $20000 but if you have a lot of savings and/or home equity, your Cornell EFC may go up to $30,000 or more. If your FAFSA EFC is $20,000 and you have no home equity and savings, your Cornell EFC can go down to $10000.00 or less. I would recommend filling out the online Net Cost Calculator on the Cornell financial aid website and seeing how close it is to your aid package that they send you. If it is way off, then there may have been a mistake made and you can appeal. Unfortunately, 2 families with exactly the same income and dependent children living in the same neighborhood can have completely different aid packages.</p>
<p>Ohh you got very fortunate then kiwik, congrats!</p>
<p>Four years ago our daughter had to turn down Cornell. The package was laughable. Poster who has no siblings and a family income of 200,000 must have some extenuating circumstances. Hard to believe that those considering private schools do not realize that the FASA is just the beginning. The profile is what really comes into play and schools can do all sorts of things to interpret those numbers. Also, schools do not expect you to pay the EFC out of your income. That is just one pot, the others being savings and your ability to borrow. Good luck to all. Please remember that being in debt is not fun and next October you will be at your favorite college.</p>