<p>OP, thank you for giving the update. I know it is not my business but I think you are not dealing with the issue the right way. </p>
<p>So many people have made the point that you should get a read of the next three years from Rice. If what you are telling us is true that the high income is only one time deal. The idea is that you may have to pay a little more the 1st year, your EFC will come down the later years when the income is not there. </p>
<p>What you said about profile is not the same as FAFSA is a well known fact here on CC for 10 years at least. I am very surprised that you know about ED but not aware of that. </p>
<p>I have dealt with multiple FA officers - some are nicer than the others. But, at the end, it all comes down to the facts. If you can’t demonstrate your need with two visits to the FA office, you don’t need additional aid. </p>
<p>Put it a black and white - you don’t want to pay even so you can clearly afford it. </p>
<p>Now, since you have shown all your books to the FA officer, he/she knows you can afford the bill. How are you going to say to them that we are not coming because we just do not want to pay that much? </p>
<p>Your D worked so hard to get into her “dream school” that you can afford it. Yes, you may have to cut back other expenses and get a loan or two. Many families are doing it that way, including us. Our DS is taking two loans to attend the school he really want to go.</p>
<p>Labelness - I am very sorry that Rice has not worked out for your family. But as a previous poster said - you have done everything possible - you have left no stone unturned - it is what it is. I’m sure your D will be happy at other less expensive schools and she will know that she is not burdening either herself or her parents with an enormous debt. Good luck to you - I would love an update later this spring about where she will be attending.</p>
<p>^^ has OP officially said “no” to Rice yet? If it is such a clear case that they can’t afford it, I would guess they would have done so. </p>
<p>Looks to me that OP is dragging their feet. They are probably waiting for the next package and keep the Rice option open. </p>
<p>Many of us have dealt with FA offices in a wide range of schools. If a reputable school like Rice has reviewed the case twice and reached the same conclusion. It kind suggests that OP has not disclosed to us the whole picture. </p>
<p>Besides, this entitlement atitute really don’t help their case. The school does not owe you anything other than the time to review your case. If you are seeking their help, a good smile and a couple of home made cookies may get a better results.
<p>I so strongly disagree and I think making this statement is UNCALLED for. IMHO.</p>
<p>To our original poster, I so totally get what is going on. I went to a LAC in the 70’s for $4500 a year. The shock I felt when I found out that it was now $45-50,000 a year is still a vivid memory. The only blessing was that my oldest D’s dream school was not my alma mater or any LAC, but our state flagship. Although D is very intuitive, and I HAD found this site shortly after the shock. So she knew going in the price tag and never made it her dream. There are definitely times where one CANNOT afford the EFC, and taking out $200,000 in loans is just stupid. Our EFC was more than the cost of attendance, and no we could not afford that. Period. </p>
<p>Fast forward 6 years and oldest D is at state flagship as happy as a clam and second D is at state U not flagship on a very generous scholarship and happy as a clam. Since oldest has plans for grad school and youngest for vet school, we will be in good shape with no loans and have even been able to put money away to have more for grad school or vet school. </p>
<p>Keep us posted on what happens. Your D will do well and in 2-3 years will be happy.</p>
<p>Dad II – I remember the frustration as I spoke with FA officers when my daughter was applying to Profile schools – we needed to understand if/how they included home equity in the family contribution, and whether it was capped. I’m polite, write reasonably short and readable emails, and yet at the majority of schools we were really able to get very little in the way of a direct answer. Lot’s of “it depends”. Let’s just say that I was pretty unhappy to be paying application fees, test score fees, and Profile fees to schools that would not give me direct answer. We did anyway, and each of the waffling schools came back with much higher parental contributions than did the schools that were upfront in telling me the formula they used. D got into all but one of her schools, but as we thought, several took themselves completely out of the running because the family contribution was much, much higher than the FAFSA EFC, and the only material difference was our home equity.</p>
<p>I’m not asking schools to change their FA awards – but I don’t think that it is unreasonable for schools to be a whole lot more forthcoming with parents on Financial Aid questions. This “I’ve got a secret” nonsense does not fly. Congress is getting an earful today on the lack of clarity in the financial aid process, and colleges are a big part of the problem.</p>
<p>arabrab, our experiences are very similar to yours. </p>
<p>Most of the school want more applicants. So, they will not turn any away before the application is in. This is the reason students apply to more than one school to compare the packages. Another reason probably is that FA is so complicated, no school with large application pool will be able to conduct a detail analysis for every applicants. </p>
<p>I think there is also a difference per “full need meet” school and the rest. Rice meets all your demonstrated needs and I believe they also have a cap on loans. I would like to think that policy is on the top tier of all FA policy. SO, I am a strong believer that if you CAN demonstrate your need, Rice and/or any other top tier FA school will meet your need.</p>
<p>BTW, it is OP who reported that assessment from Rice FA office says that they could afford the bill. I just expressed my believe in the FA system of top tier schools including Rice.</p>
<p>I fully understand than finaid staff have limited time to sspeculate on awards, discuss a single factor in isolation or field other questions from applicant families. Rather, the schools should put finaid calculators on their website so that familes can crunch their own numbers using the institutional formula.</p>
<p>^^ On that same thought, why don’t we ask the school to put their admission formula on web. We all could just plug the GPA and/or SAT to see if we could get in or not?</p>
<p>let’s not forget the known facts here:
Rice has an excellent FA policy and will meet 100% of the demonstrated need; We have people given solid FACTS that their children receive excellent need based aid, supporting Rice’s claim.</p>
<p>2) Rice has given two face to face chances for OP to demonstrate their needs. And they reached the same conclusion.</p>
<p>I would like to see any one giving a known fact saying Rice did OP wrong.</p>
<p>If a school – Rice or any other profile school – has a set way of dealing with the big deltas between the EFC methodology and the institutional methodology, why not be up front and honest with applicants and their parents? Why not explain how you treat home equity, business assets, and non-custodial income. Even in general terms, this would be tremendously helpful.</p>
<p>I understand that only a handful of schools have the financial wherewithal to provide Harvard-style financial aid. That’s fine. Being honest with applicants is important, and right now colleges are behaving in a less than honest way by hiding information until they’ve collected all of the fees, and added another tick mark to the tally of applicants.</p>
<p>Thanks for providing that link, it was useful. Unfortunately, is also leads me to believe that our family financial situation is going to get quite an unfavorable reading by Swat pursuant to my son’s application this year. Almost all of the additional considerations that reduce the cost to the family do not apply to us, but several of the ones that increase it do. Bummer.</p>
Well, you were wise to ask! The home equity can really be a wild card, and colleges use all sorts of formulae. I didn’t bother asking colleges in advance because my d. was getting fee waivers to apply to reach colleges that I didn’t think would accept her anyway, so it was a surprise that we ended up actually seeing financial aid offers from some of those schools. I never did figure out what my d’s college was doing – they told me they didn’t cap the amount but that they did use the federal housing index to calculate home value, which was favorable to me – but when I ran those numbers, it still didn’t correlate to the aid I was getting. (Their aid packages was still coming out better than it should have with full market value of the house considered – so they must have had some type of cap or limiter that they weren’t disclosing to me.)</p>
<p>I do think that the waffling can be a bad sign – though it’s possible that some colleges are using a fairly complicated formula that (a) isn’t easy to explain, and/or (b) is all done automatically by software, so perhaps the financial aid staff doesn’t know themselves what is happening. </p>
<p>One of the tough things for me when my d. was in college was my decision to keep paying down my house while taking PLUS loans, rather than going for a HELOC. I’m glad I did that, because I think long term my high-equity home is the anchor of my own retirement plan – it makes sense to me to have it paid off by the time I hit retirement age. I probably wouldn’t have qualified for a HELOC anyway. But I was pushing up my EFC from year to year, as the mortgage debt decreased.</p>
A “cap” on loans is meaningless if the college defines “demonstrated” need in a way that is too high for a family to manage without borrowing. It just either shifts the loan burden from student to parent, or else puts the student in the position of borrowing more than the amount reflected in the financial aid package. The difference is simply that the student is then borrowing to meet EFC rather than borrowing to pay the balance after EFC. </p>
<p>In other words, if Rice decides that OP can afford $44K, despite a FAFSA amount that is much lower – it means that OP’s daughter is probably qualified to take a full Stafford loan, whether or not a loan is required as part of the aid package. If, hypothetically, the d. applied to another CSS Profile school that expected its students to take the full Stafford amount, but ran the numbers differently so that the family contribution was only $35K – the student would clearly be better off at the school that didn’t cap the loans. </p>
<p>That is why it is really, really important to be able to compare financial aid offers! A much better picture emerges when the numbers can be plotted in Excel with bar graphs showing overall out-of-pocket costs and the distribution of aid. </p>
<p>I mean, what’s the point of a school that promises “no loans” if they are going to require so much cash up front that you have to borrow to get there?</p>
<p>Re post #235 – cptofthehouse, thank you for that post. You have put forth a very cogent explanation of a point I have struggled to make here at CC for so long – that ED means you have to make a yes/no decision at a point of time when you may be in a different frame of mind than with RD. So many people think it’s going to be an easy, bright-line determination. </p>
<p>An array of RD choices and financial aid offers gives parents and kids the opportunity to not only compare awards in the context of real, objective information about what college is going to cost (as opposed to pie-in-the-sky wishful thinking) – it also provides the opportunity for some cost benefit analysis. </p>
<p>For example – 5 years ago I was looking in the spring at the choice of state public for my daughter at $8K-$10K a year out-of-pocket, Barnard (with its Columbia affiliation) at $15-$20K annually out of pocket, or Chicago and other privates at $25-$30K or more annually out of pocket. Barnard was pricey for me, but it looked like a steal when arrayed against those other private schools; and of course there was no question in my mind that the private college would offer a better quality education for my daughter than the publics we were looking at, especially with our state’s budget problems.</p>
<p>I have re-read the entire thread and here are the disclosed facts:</p>
<p>The normal yearly income is ~80K. For 2010, the income was - $115K. With that higher income, Rice assessed the family should pay $44K. The OP first claimed that they don’t want to have 100K loan, then changed the limit to $40K total loan. So, folks, we are only talking about 40K for 4 years of Rice.</p>
<p>That 40K did not include any work study or summer incomes. OP simply refused to entertain that as an option evenso many suggested.</p>
<p>Basically, Rice saw 115K income with possibly some home equity. ($44K EFC is high for 115K income. I guess OP has some assets). Having reviewed the numbers twice with OP face to face. Rice says you should be able to make that $44K bill. Do you know what OP did with the extra income this year? OP disclosed that they used that to improve their house. Now, I would also love to use my money to put a new kitchen instead of paying tuition bills. We actually thouht about it but decide to pay the tuition bill first. It is a personal choice and OP choose to improve her house.</p>
<p>I would like to think a student should be able to make at least 20K in four summers. </p>
<p>Also, we know that some colleges pad the COA. So what you really pay oftens is a couple K less than the estimated COA. A student could buy used books and does not go home as often etc. Let’s say the saving is 5K for 4 years.</p>
<p>So, the total gap between the Rice FA and what OP could pay is only $15K. That is 15K for a total of 4 years. Now I ask you, is that a reason to back out an ED?</p>
<p>Oh please…Dad II…you are getting VERY generous financial aid at Stanford (when your DD was the only one in college, you posted that your costs were $10K a year). Now you have two in college. Your income is reportedly about the same as the OP of this thread but your first child did get accepted at a college with MUCH more generous financial aid policies for higher earners.</p>
<p>The OP, unfortunately, hoped that their family contribution would be less and that Rice would somehow make some sort of an adjustment to help the daughter attend. Rice did not do that. Rice’s financial aid is not nearly as generous as Stanford. If this family, with an income of $115K per year had a kid accepted to Stanford, their bill would be 10% of their income…less than $12K per year.</p>
<p>You were being asked to pay 1/4 of what this OP was being asked to pay at Rice…on a very similar income.</p>
<p>T1, what you said are not true. Because you did not know my complete situation. When I went to FA office, I demonstrated my real need to the FA officers. The initial FA was not as generours.</p>
<p>Besides, as far as I have read, no one put a gun to their head to prevent them from applying to schools with much more generours FA policy.</p>
<p>Is it possible that depending on how much a school wants a student, institutionally calculated need could differ? Mayhaps that’s why no one wants to get tied down with specific calculations. There’s always “special circumstances” to consider. Is there any oversight into how equally things are considered when doling out institutional aid?
I also giggled when browsing through Rice’s student handbook online, they put need in quotes.</p>
<p>That is a good point DadII. An appeal can always be useful if there are extenuating circumstances such as medical expenses. But trying to pass off frivolous expenses such as expensive cameras, exotic trips or the like won’t pass muster.</p>
<p>DadII, could you give us more details on your appeal so others may benefit from it?</p>