If accepted, will a financial aid decision come with the admission decision? What about the other Ivies? If it doesn’t come with the admission decision, when does the financial aid decision come?
It’s part of the admission packet Harvard sends by snail mail.
Won’t it be accessible somehow in the portal? Snail mail could take a while to arrive everywhere.
If you have filed the FAFSA and CSS Profile and submitted tax returns through IDOC by the deadline, your financial award will be mauled to you in the acceptance packet. Unless things have changed, financial aid awards ARE NOT available through the portal.
Thanks, @gibby. This is very unfortunate, unless the snail-mail packets arrive everywhere the following day. Parents and students need to know about financial aid as soon as possible, because it often determines whether or not the family will even consider attending the school. And students need to make decisions about whether or not to attend admitted students programs and make their travel arrangements. I really hope things have changed and that the financial aid decisions are available through the portal. Both Yale’s and Stanford’s financial aid awards were immediately accessible online, so I don’t see why Harvard’s wouldn’t be too.
Last year, admittees received them as early as 2 days later. That is, admission was announced Thursday, and packets arrived Saturday. (I don’t think anyone got them sooner, but I could be wrong. Maybe if you lived in New England?) Saturday was when our admissions officer predicted the soonest would arrive.
We live in the boonies, so ours came on the 4th day. But the 3rd day was a Sunday, so there’s no way of knowing whether it would have arrived on the 3rd day.
I would simply assume that Harvard’s need-based award will be a little more generous than everyone else’s need-based award.
Thank you all!
Thanks, @WasatchWriter. That’s still late, though, especially given the U.S. Postal Service! We live in a major metropolitan area but have had some things take 5 business days to go approximately 50 miles (and from another major urban area). Applicants and their parents really need to know at the time of the decision, especially when the decision comes this late.
@planner: Don’t most colleges give students until May 1st to reply? So even if your packet with the financial aid award from Harvard arrives a week later, you still have 3 weeks to evaluate the offer and make a decision, which seems like plenty of time. Or am I missing something here?
I have to agree with @gibby here.
I don’t understand what @Planner means by “Applicants and parents really need to know at the time of the decision, especially when the decision comes this late.”
The decision is not late. This is standard reply deadline for almost all the top schools: April 1. You have a full one month until May 1 to evaluate your financial aid awards and make a decision. Even if the packet is a week late, you still have three weeks, which should be plenty of time!
Confused…
If FA is significantly different, it may not be neccessary to go to either Visitas at Harvard or Admitted Weekend at Stanford. So it is late for airplane ticket purchase and other travel arrangement.
Exactly, hmys15. My son just got into Harvard and Princeton too, so being able to compare all the aid offers now would be really helpful in terms of deciding which admitted students events to attend (and buy plane tickets for).
@Planner, my kid only applied for H (EA), M, S, and Y and got admitted to all of them. M is worst, and Y is second worst in FA. Would love to receive the officail award letter from H as soon as possible too.
@hmsy15 It turns out you can get it! I just posted how to in a separate thread. I’m really glad Harvard posted them online—and Harvard turned out to be our best award.
@Planner Yes, my kid just logged in. We were shocked by the Harvard award. Harvard is so generous. I do not think that Stanford, Yale, and MIT can match it at all.
@hmsy15 That’s great! If you’re still interested in one or more of the other schools, though, it’s worth asking them to reconsider your award. We’re doing that with Yale. For us, Harvard, Stanford, and Princeton were all significantly better than Yale in terms of aid, possibly because my son applied early to Yale. Harvard beat Stanford and Princeton (which were very close) by a few thousand.
@Planner I hope Yale will match Harvard for you, For us, Harvard beat Stanford, MIT, Yale all by over ten thousand.
@hmsy15 Wow—that’s a big difference. I hope Yale adjusts its award too, though now I’m wondering if it will (or enough). Today we received a revised award from Stanford, which we hadn’t even asked for—apparently they recently enhanced their financial aid program and revised our award—and now Stanford’s award is almost exactly the same as Harvard’s! If Yale can’t get close to that, our son will be going to one of the other schools.
Yale may not be able to match Harvard’s aid, as their institutional policy includes home equity as part of the financial aid calculation, and Harvard’s FA policy does not. By Ivy League rules, Yale cannot calculate financial aid differently for one student – an athlete for example – and not do the same for the rest of the student body.
If a college does match a peer institution’s financial aid, they are only agreeing to do so for freshman year and are under no obligation to give a student better aid in subsequent years. Parents need to ask for a "side letter’ which states that if the family’s income remains the same over the next 3 years, the college will give the student the same percentage of aid in their sophomore, junior and senior years as they are receiving in their freshman year. Some college’s will give “side letter’s” others will not.
@gibby Wondering if you could give some advice about FA. My DD has been accepted to Harvard for class of 2019. We are thrilled for her! We also have a son who is older who goes to our state flagship. Our DD has a private outside scholarship worth $20,000. The paperwork from the funding organization indicated to her that she could spend the money in any increments that she saw fit as long as it was for allowable educational costs at the university of her choice (i.e. $5000/yr x 4 yrs). We received our FA letter from Harvard and she was provided with a Harvard scholarship and is expected to use all $20,000 of her outside scholarship in Year 1 (plus our family contribution and her summer/term working). Here are my questions: 1) Can Harvard “make” us use all her scholarship in Year 1 or is that negotiable? 2) Since we know that our son will only be in college for 2 more years (God willing, of course), can we ask them to give us an estimate of what our EFC will be for her junior and senior year? 3) Since we know our EFC will be higher with 1 child in college vs 2 children in college, can we ask to backload the scholarship to her junior and senior year (e.g. $10,000 junior yr and $10,000 senior year)? Any insight would be appreciated.