Getting Accepted does NOT mean that a Merit Scholarship will be forthcoming....

Paying for College
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Last spring I attended the Financial Aid night at D’s school and spent better than 50% of the time listening about how to fill out the FAFSA, about 35% of the time hearing about need based aid in our state, and the rest was mostly about loans. They mentioned NPC’s, but didn’t really emphasize them at all. Nothing at that presentation gave me any kind of a big picture view of COA, how to hunt for merit aid, different strategies for targeting schools and school types in a diversified way to maximize chances of making school affordable at a school D wanted to attend.

The other session, which was given the night they handed out the PSAT scores, was more focused on how to find schools that the student likes and how to get admitted there. All well and good, but I have seen very little from our school counselors regarding finding AND paying for the school the kid likes. Some kids on one end of the financial spectrum don’t have to worry about cost, while kids on the opposite end have a real opportunity to get need based aid that at the very least makes our IS publics affordable, but in our district those two ends of the spectrum are a fairly small number of kids on a percentage basis.

I have no idea where we would be if DD and I hadn’t both become research junkies about this entire process, including learning so much from CC and the resources referred to from here. I talk to parents of other HS seniors at this point in the school process and most still don’t really have a clue about full COA’s and the difficulty of getting merit awards from schools. We have a lot of athletes that excel in some of the non-glamour sports that have nice athletic scholarships (we kick butt in field hockey), but a lot of what I have seen and learned explains a phenomenon that mystified my D with last year’s seniors.

Early in her junior year she was telling us about all the dream schools her senior friends were all planning to attend, only a few Ivies and lottery schools, but a lot of OOS publics and fairly expensive LAC’s. Then when the final decisions started rolling in late in March and April so many kids were going to small state schools, some to our state-related flagships and others to some of the local LAC’s that favor local kids with nice scholarship money. It wasn’t a lack of acceptances at dream schools that kept the kids closer to home, some simply didn’t want to go as far away as they originally thought, but a fairly significant portion found they and their parents couldn’t afford their single dream school and hadn’t targeted much beyond those and a local safety.

I do appreciate the counselors emphasizing safety schools for the kids at least, though I am not sure a lot of the kids were looking at safeties with much thought, they were really more purely financial safeties with the right majors, as opposed to affordable AND the kid really would be happy there.

Finally, there are the folks who ended up in the same situation, sticker shock over the dream school’s final FA offer and were suddenly taking out gobs of money in Parent Plus loans that they didn’t even know existed until the school included them as suggested parts of the FA package from the school. Six figure UG loan debt between parent and student for a degree from a good, but not elite school, and with grad or professional school yet to come. Ugh.

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<<<
many schools are quite cagey about merit awards. How many are given, actual value, what they are actually rewarding them based on – it can be very difficult to glean
<<<

True…


[QUOTE=""]

One mother turned to me & said "but if they really want you, they have ways of making it work." (MIT was being discussed at that point.) I was speechless. Ok, believe that if you want & good luck to you.

this mother explain why MIT would want her kid so badly?

[/QUOTE]

Good question.

and that’s the thing…too many assume that they or their child is some special snowflake that will make a school find a hidden secret way to give you more money. BUT…most of the acceptees are easily replaceable by those on the WL.

Occasionally we’ll hear about an athlete with little need getting a prefered pkg at an Ivy, or something like that, but most acceptees are a dime a dozen…even with perfect stats.

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I thank my lucky stars for finding College Confidential.

We have done so much research, and scouted this pretty carefully. When I talk to other parents I sometimes forget that not everyone has spent a thousand hours looking at this.

Where I get my hackles up is when uninformed parents (or informed by private school guidance counselors who tend to favor the elite schools - because they justify the pricey private high school) criticize certain schools or areas of the country (the southeast). It’s like we’re crazy for sending our son there. :confused:

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& misinformation of this type can come from all directions. I once had one of those athletic recruiting service guys tell me that need-based aid at say, Harvard, wasn’t based on my financial need but rather on Harvard’s ‘need’ for an athlete of a particular niche. I believed it for a moment, because I wanted it to be true!

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One thing I still struggle with in estimating COA at schools that give merit aid is, when running the NPC the results sometimes show “XYZ School Grant”. OK, great. What is this for? Is it need-based? Or, does it go away if my kid gets a merit award? The answer is probably: “It depends”. So, it could make a school that kinda-sorta looks affordable become unaffordable. At least, that’s my impression. But then, it’s my first rodeo.

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@SouthFloridaMom9 Oh if I hear, "you know your D could ‘do better’ " one more time I just might deck some one! D’s full merit tuition plus school is number one or two for her major depending which study you look at. How the heck could she have done better?!! Of the other two schools that are often in the top three for her major, one offers ZERO merit for OOS and the other is not only geographically undesirable but only offers a competitive scholarship that doesn’t cover anything past tuition.

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It can work the other way too, though. When I first saw the sticker price of a school my daughter was interested in, I said there was no was we could afford it. It was over $50k, and I figured with even a half scholarship I couldn’t afford it. She filled out the recruiting questionnaire and we really went to the recruiting weekend just for the practice, still not thinking it would work. Then I started looking at the numbers, some state grants, one private grant. The coach offered some money, but it still was outside my budget. Then the coach offered a little more, the school offered a little more, the state increased the grant a little more (for everyone, not just us!) and it worked. I think it is a mistake to just dismiss a school because you think it might be too expensive. I also think it is a mistake to expect just one source of financial aid to cover everything. Usually the merit is the big ticket, then start gathering up all the other smaller amounts. My daughter has 9 line items that make up her financial aid package, and she didn’t get work study and didn’t take all the loans offered.

There are people who think that if the school really wants you, the money will appear. Even for athletes, that doesn’t happen. There are rules, there are limits. But hey, their neighbor’s cousin’s DIL’s brother went to Yale on an athletic scholarship. Really, they know for a fact that happened. And their other cousin from California got a full ride to MIT and his father is a billionaire, so it wasn’t need based, it was absolutely merit based. So it does happen all the time, right?

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Very early in the college search process, make that very, very early, I remember my wife and I telling our D that a school she liked back then and whose top published merit scholarship would not make it affordable for us even if she was awarded it, those dreaded and totally naïve words too,

“If they really want you, they will make it work.”

Even though her stats would have placed her very high in the range for that school’s (which didn’t stay on her list for other reasons) accepted student stats, being on CC taught me that such thinking was completely unrealistic. Had she applied there the best she could have done was the top scholarship they offered, and given the stats mismatch with the school, I doubt they would have even offered it. It is a school that knows how to hunt in the demographics where it is likely to do well with its yield, so even being well above the norm stats wise is not a guarantee of anything since many schools will assume you are applying there as a safety, especially if they hand out a very limited number of their higher merit awards.

D is a likely NMF, so that has been a huge boon to our search, but thanks to learning all that we could, especially on CC, she has found at least three very affordable options, two of which she might never have thought of applying to before we knew what we do now.

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re post #46
Oh Brother…

Yale does not offer “athletic scholarships”. MIT does not offer Merit scholarships.
Me thinks you have been fed a couple of “white lies”, created to “polish” the image of their dear darlings. Have you actually laid eyes on the students MIT or Yale statements issued by the bursars office?
Yale offers great FA and some of it can offered to athletes that the coaches really want. But its not a “athletic scholarship”. Its a FA award or grant offered to a student who is athlete. Quite different from colleges like Stanford who are upfront about offering athletic scholarships.

These sort of stories pop up every year…
8-|

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I think you may have missed the ironic tone of @twoinanddone’s post. That was the point, no? That these stories are absurdly inaccurate, exaggerated, fourth-hand rumors. But yes, sadly, as you say, that doesn’t prevent them from popping up every year…

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that’s very possible…

which is why I love it when posters use these- :-*

that way these is no chance of misunderstanding ! :)>-

carry on…

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When we first started discussing college selection with friends with kids who are a few years older than our D1 we were assured that, “While they say it’s need based aid only, if they really want your kid, scholarship funding will mysteriously appear.” These are educated professional people. Don’t know what planet they live on. We now know better and can plan accordingly, before it was too late. Thanks CC!

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I read on the Boston University website that the financial aid office has an emergency button at the receptionist desk to call campus police in case underfunded students and their parents create a scene demanding more money. The receptionist said that she only has to use it a couple of times a year.

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Of course I was being sarcastic. :open_mouth: ;:wink: =D> =D> ;:wink: Better?

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much! :-*

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^^^Regarding #52 - Can we equip all of our cell phones with an emergency button which we push when we hear ludicrous statements like what @mamaedefamilia mentions, at which point multiple posters would magically materialize and explain how it really is? Sort of like a Greek chorus courtesy of an app. I’m thinking of several times when I would have loved for @Mom2CollegeKids to appear at my side.

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^^sort of like being CC’s private police force?

THAT will help make us really popular…not
:-S

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I have a friend whose daughter got into an Ivy and received tremendous financial aid, obviously need based, and my friend was offended that the daughter’s FA wasn’t listed as a “merit scholarship” on the high school’s awards ceremony program.

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^^ Not all eyes will weep for her… 8-|

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Ya Ya (about post 30) If they were talking about MIT and Yale, well then yes both make it work for all students they admit. They are need blind and meet need (not want). So any student admitted, yes, can attend in a way not true of schools not need blind. It isn’t a matter of the school really wanting a student because of a particular attribute, skill or credential. MIT makes it work for any student where finances are really the only impediment. A family who has money but chooses not to spend it on the college-no. That is not need. But if need is really an issue, then MIT and Yale overcome it for every student accepted.

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