<p>OK, your financial picture is going to complicate how folks can advise you on schools. I’d urge you to take the time to run the Net Price Calculators for each school, and then add into consideration that some schools (where you are above their average stats) may award merit aid above what the calculator says. (But many schools do not give out merit aid.)</p>
<p>Forgive me if you already know all this but we didn’t when we started and everyone assumed we did, so I’ll recap: some schools are “meets full need”, meaning they will “meet” the cost of attendance minus your federal FAFSA Estimated Family Contribution. They MAY do that entirely with grants and work/study (I think Wellesley often does that) but more often they’ll also use the maximum federal subsidized loans to meet the need, in addition to work/study and their institutional grants (Mount Holyoke does this.) Meets-full-need schools tend to be the most difficult to get into, of course. So if you’re shooting for a spot a school that’s a bit reachy for you, you’re unlikely to get merit aid on top of financial aid.</p>
<p>Then there are are schools that don’t meet full need. You can check their stats as to how much they meet on average, but the better plan is to run the net price calculators. You can also get a sense from these boards about how generous these non-full-need schools tend to be. For instance I’m pretty sure Northeastern is known for being very stingy with FA…</p>
<p>As an example: Mount Holyoke is a “meets full need” school. My daughter’s FA package meets COA (tuition, room/board) like this:
- Estimated Family Contribution (their methodology but in our case it was close to the FAFSA EFC) - this is what we have to pay out of pocket
- Work/study (She works ~10 hrs/week)
- maximum federal subsidized Stafford loan ($3500 freshman year, increases after that)
- subsidized Perkins loan
- the rest is covered by MHC grants
There is no “gap” between what we have to pay and the EFC, because it’s a “meets-full-need” school. That is not to say we can afford our EFC. We can’t, and it’s going to be very difficult. What they SAY your family can pay is often not what your family actually can pay.</p>
<p>You can use this tool on finaid.org (a very helpful site, by the way) to estimate your federal EFC. Note there are two methodologies, federal and institutional. You really need to be as accurate as possible, get your parents to help you! Then, use the same numbers on each college’s Net Price Calculator. The easiest way we found to do that is to open an account at the College Board’s BigFuture.com web site and use their interface to access the NPC’s. That way the information gets saved and auto-filled into each calculator so you don’t have to keep retyping it, which is very tedious.</p>
<p>*******Your situation, though, sounds very unique. I urge you to do this with your parents. For example, if your household income is really 1.5k right now, clearly there is other financial information that needs to be reported. Either your family is being supported by someone else, or there is savings, or some other type of income that you are living on. You will have to report that all carefully, and it’s going to affect your EFC It’s not just about the 1.5k income number, it’s all the peripheral stuff too. Don’t omit it now or you may find yourself in for a big surprise next spring when the FA offers come in much worse than you expected.</p>
<p>And you need to keep in mind that even if you get a WONDERFUL financial aid package your first year from a meets-full-need school, if your dad gets that $80k job next year, you’re likely to lose a lot of that.</p>