<p>We did fine with FA with only one in school, so I don’t think siblings is the answer.</p>
<p>I am doubtful that your grandchildren’s day care would affect the decision at all, so I think you might be spinning your wheels instead of submitting applications to schools where the outcomes might be happier.</p>
<p>If you have already decided that the projected debt load (although arbitrarily arrived at) is untenable, you and your D should be exploring other options.</p>
<p>The FA may budge, but usually the movement is small.</p>
<p>I think you should proceed on the assumption that the decision is final and then hope for some adjustment.</p>
<p>You might ask for a ball-park figure without the BP money to better project a four year scenario, but again, no guarantees.</p>
<p>OP, Instead of paying your D’s tuition bill at her ED school, you would pay for your grandbabies daycare instead. Do you have to incur that daycare cost? </p>
<p>The FA officer would probably point it out to you - they would rather you use the extra money to pay for the tuition bill. </p>
<p>Please talk to some professionals if you need sound advise.</p>
<p>DadII, we did not throw caution in the wind when we pressed the submit button; we anguished over it; but we felt it was a reach school and when we talked to a family we knew whose son had just graduated from Rice, they swore it was cheaper to send their son to Rice than UT and encouraged us to go ED all the way. We even went to two Rice presentations( one in Houston one in Corpus) and heard what we wanted to hear i.e., need-based and capped loans. This is NOT an excuse, I now know I had not done my home work and I do believe I acknowledged my own stupidity early in this thread. But to assume we pressed submit without any misgivings is WAY off base.</p>
<p>NO NO NO…need based financial aid is based on your income and assets…period. Having other college bound siblings has no bearing on the formula. In fact, a family with NO siblings will get LESS aid than a family with four or five members (or more). Your family size IS considered. The formula takes into consideration that it costs MORE for MORE people.</p>
<p>The lower your income/assets, the higher your need.</p>
<p>I agree with Mythmom, that 2 months of childcare for your grandchildren is not going to remotely make a dent in your FA.</p>
<p>I know that it can be hard for yoru D to give up her “dream school”, but the dream school should not be a financial nightmare.</p>
<p>Your best best is to get released from the agreement and apply to a broad range of schools where your D may stand a good chance of getting merit money. make sure that you have a true safety school; a school that your daughter can be admitted to, a school that is a financially feasible option for your family and a school where if this is her only choice, she would be happy to attend.</p>
<p>For that family it could have very well been true. But unless you have truly the identical financial situation, that may not necessarily have been the case in **your house<a href=“as%20demonstrated%20by%20the%20financial%20aid%20package%20that%20%5Bb%5Dyour%20family%5B/b%5D%20received%20from%20Rice”>/b</a>.</p>
<p>That is like saying the average financial aid package is $25,000. But what you do not know is how may kids have a 50k EFC and are full paying the 50k, and how many students have a 0 EFC where the school is giving them 50k in financial aid. You just know that they average out to 25k.</p>
<p>And remember that the college bills will be for FOUR years, not just one. Factor that into your decision too. It’s sometimes “easy” to make the decision for one year…but then the second, third and fourth year bills come…so please keep that in mind too.</p>
<p>One last reply, then I am going some where to cool down. Not that it is any of your business DadII but my daughter-in-law ran away for two months without leaving a forwarding address. My son works nights, sleeps during the day, and my husband at the time was slurping oil. Thank the creator that you can keep all your extra monies soley for tuition, some of us do not have that luxury. You know, on the other hand, thank-you for your input , if this is what those FA officers are going to be thinking, it is not worth the pain of mentioning it.</p>
<p>Actually it is the more siblings in college at the same time, your EFC does not increase but gets split by that many kids (not all schools split equally).</p>
<p>If you have one kid with a 44k EFC and then you have 2 kids attending the same school your 44K EFC will be split between the 2 of them.</p>
<p>If your kids are 4 years apart (a college freshman and a high school freshman), you could very well be paying this ~44k EFC for 8 straight years.</p>
<p>Trinity is ~ $6000 less per year than Rice, I believe. My D is a senior there and loves it. RD deadline is 2/1. Full tuition scholarship deadline has passed, but not the general merit ones.</p>
<p>OP, feel free to PM me.</p>
<p>If Rice had even one of the two “have to do” EC’s my D wanted, she would have applied there.</p>
<p>The sibling factor is important, especially at FAFSA schools. I think the other sibling could be attending community college 1/2 time, and sibling at expensive school would pay EFC/2 (best case) instead of EFC. </p>
<p>That may not be relevant in OP’s case. But I’m posting it here so that families that might have another kid a year behind can do long term planning. It’s also a warning to families that get appealing aid packages for freshman year… investigate how that will change when older sibling graduates college.</p>
<p>labelness - Good luck on your quest. You do a good service here by posting the ED woes. I’ve already bashed GC a bit for not better warning families. I’ll also say that college info sessions often give overly optimistic pitches on FA.</p>
<p>labelness: I am sorry you feel you need to go someplace to cool down. I meant no disrespect in any post, just trying to help and answer the questions you posed and speak to your situation.</p>
<p>In my experience, the FA officers have not been callous. They’ve actually been kind. However, it’s their job to dispense limited resources when everyone wants more and everyone has a story.</p>
<p>I don’t think anyone wanted to imply that your family is not deserving. However, there are some things FA is willing to consider and some things they’re not. For example, we are helping DD with law school tuition but that isn’t considered under FA guidelines.</p>
<p>I had my hip replaced and was out of work. Loss of income was considered but obviously not all the itemized expenses in accommodations. </p>
<p>It’s not a judgement on your family or its decisions. It’s a formula that works better for some families than others.</p>
<p>And of course, you need to provide for your grandchildren. </p>
<p>The only consideration here was the impact of the daycare monies on FA.</p>
<p>My eldest started college in 2004 (my #4 student is now a senior in high school), and in all those years we never found having two in college adjusted our EFC at all. AT.ALL.</p>
<p><em>They</em> say the parental portion is supposed to be divided between the two students, but every year when the FAFSA is completed the EFC is close to the same, whether I have one or two in school.</p>
<p>We have two in college and EFC is 1/2 for each.
On the CSS, doesn’t it ask college costs for the other child- so the lower costs of a comm coll would be factored into the more expenive school’s offer?</p>
<p>BUT, I have my own question: despite all I learned about FA, I am hard pressed to figure how income of 115k gets to an EFC of 44k. Without revealing our own specifics, I played and played with Finaid’s longer calculator and can’t get there. The other day, I did a quick EFC using $168 for OP and house value 100k and only got to 41 something.</p>
<p>Can I assume those of you around 115 have considerably higher asset levels and home equity? </p>
<p>And, for OP, is it possible her other assets are what’s driving the EFC high?</p>
<p>Labelness - I would still encourage you to talk with the FA people; they may be able to make adjustments for some things, and if not, well there are other schools out there that will love to have your daughter attend! Also, this may just be a financial “blip”, and you will get more aid when your income is lower next year.
The friend’s son must have taken out some private loans to meet some of the parental EFC; even back a few years ago, Rice would not package loans above $17,000 total… and as of two years ago, Rice student loans are capped at $2500. per year, so $10,000 MAX at graduation for ANY students receiving loans.</p>
<p>Again – just laying it all out there. :eek: There were a couple questions about our financial aid EFC. DD had merit aid and need-based aid, and her package included no loans or work/study. DS (who is graduating this May) had need-based only, with small workstudy ($1800 per year, for all 4 years) and small amount of Stafford loans. Apart from that, there was no difference in aid offered. We have over $200,000 in home equity, virtually no savings other than in mandatory fixed-benefit retirement accounts, and income I mentioned in my other post. Our FAFSA EFC was $25,000’ish this year, and that’s what Rice asked us to pay, even though they use the Profile. It is obvious to me that they did not include our home equity in the equation, so we must meet some cut-off for including home equity… Our income was lower when DD started at Rice, and costs were lower for us, but our increased EFC mirrored the FAFSA EFC each year, so no surprises. </p>
<p>We were able to pay college costs out-of-pocket, with no parent loans and only about $5000. in college savings (which were originally from a grandparent), but with no further outside financial help from relatives/grandparents or anyone else.
Hope this helps answer some unanswered questions. I feel a little weird laying all my financial data on the line like this, but, if you googled my work or my husband’s, you’d ending up knowing this anyway…Thanks to the internet, all our public service worker’s salaries are available online, just a google away… :eek:</p>
<p>The parents of the high end kids at our high school are often shocked at how little merit aid their kids get at the good colleges that they apply to. To get really good merit aid, you need to apply anywhere from 1-3 tiers down from a selective school.</p>
<p>I can’t fault OP from applying to Rice. Rice has a rep for being about $10,000 cheaper than the back east selective schools and is always talked about as being generous with merit and financial aid. </p>
<p>I suspect that things didn’t work out because of the BP income bump, D being at or near the 75% level of the incoming class instead of much higher and OP being from Texas. </p>
<p>If Rice won’t make an adjustment for the 1 time BP income, then move on to some of the other great choices she will have. Not going to college is a tragedy. Not getting to go to Rice is not. Don’t beat yourself up over it.</p>
<p>Many may disagree with me but I think playing financial roulette at the ED stage is a mistake. If you can’t afford being a full pay customer, why risk it? Perhaps if you are a very low income applicant, you will be all right. But anyone in the middle income area may be in for a rude surprise.</p>
<p>Labelness - you have probably already read this - but just in case:</p>
<ol>
<li> How does Rice determine parents’ expected contribution? </li>
</ol>
<p>Rice considers it the responsibility of parents to contribute to students’ educational costs. We calculate each family’s contribution in part by using a federal methodology approved by Congress, but we also consider the financial resources available to the parents. Although Rice recognizes that parents have many financial obligations and preferences for how to allocate their resources, we expect that a student’s undergraduate education will be a priority in the use of those resources.</p>
<ol>
<li> If my family has asked for a file review and are unhappy with the response, what is the next step we can take?</li>
</ol>
<p>File reviews are carried out with great care and under the guidance of the Office of Financial Aid’s upper administration. If you are unhappy with the results of a review, you can request that an administrative committee additionally review the file. However, in very rare circumstances does that committee recommend changes to the review response prepared by the Office of Financial Aid Review Committee.</p>
<p>Per the sibling factor (example - $50K EFC mean $25K per student if 2 in college, assuming school fills full “gap”)… I think that applies for FAFSA. So it relates to Federal Aid. And FA from public colleges. Private colleges that use CSS Profile or other formulas would differ. </p>
<p>Disclaimer - This info is based on my readings, not personal experience. I have no real example to offer.</p>
<p>lookingforward we are full pay because of investment and house assets. I’m not complaining, but basically every penny we inherited is going straight to the colleges.</p>