<p>Just wanted to say hi and find out if any of you guys/gals here are also entering Hampshire this Spring(S10)?</p>
<p>me! so excited.</p>
<p>Do you know where you are going to be living?</p>
<p>I don’t think we get that information until sometime in January, sigh!</p>
<p>ALF – how do you afford to have all your kids there? I am facing some serious student loans to make this work (although, Hampshire is giving me almost all of the tuition but with a single parent and another sibling in college, there is nothing left over for me). That was more of rhetorical question, as it’s none of my business of course. But eek…My mother keeps trying to pressure me to go somewhere else with a bigger endowment. I think i’d rather be in debt than regret 4 years of my life going somewhere else, though.</p>
<p>We did get some merit-based scholarship grants as well as some needs-based grants, but it wasn’t really enough for us. We thought that we had done a better job than most in putting together a 20-year college savings plan, but tuition rose faster than we anticipated, and we lost quite a bit of our investments in the economic downturn. If you are having almost all of your tuition covered, that is better than either of our kids could get. </p>
<p>Our kids are fortunate in that we decided a long time ago to commit to paying for their college education, so they will graduate without owing anything. I can’t say the same for us - bottom line, we will probably end up with $40K-$60K in home-equity loans that we hope to pay back over the next 10 years. While deferred Federal student loans are great for students, it doesn’t help parents very much. We have found that home-equity loans are less expensive than even subsidized Federal student loans, so we have not taken that part of the offered aid package. So, our kids do the maximum amount of work-study and earn their spending money with summer jobs. We are paying the rest.</p>
<p>I can fully understand your mother’s trepidation over the high cost of going to a place like Hampshire. As a parent, it can be hard to justify the cost of such a school, when compared to another that seems to offer similar courses of study. In our specific case, our kids could have had in-state tuition and a better aid package from The Evergreen State College, which is also patterned after the “New College” movement of the '60s and '70s, and feels very Hampshire-ish. We (and you) will never really know if going to Hampshire, in contrast to a less-expensive institution, was ‘worth it’. I do feel though, that over your lifetime, a few tens of thousands of dollars might not feel like too large a price to pay for what could end up being a better education for you.</p>