Middle class families can certainly afford college, but the college you may go depends on your budget and potential merit scholarships. One should check which schools are affordable before putting them on the list. We are in the lower middle class and we can comfortably afford the EFC from income as we do not spend much other necessities. Just one 4 days road trip a year and we eat out less than 10 times a year even including the road trip with fast food. We actually set a budget for my younger daughter which is slightly less than double of the EFC as we have saved 2 year EFC in 529 for her. Obviously, we only look at need met schools.
@billcsho They need a half a million dollars to meet their EFC for their four kids. You canât get there by just not eating out if this family even eats out.
@mom2collegekids They canât afford their EFC of 30k a year. Meets need wonât help.
@cj12345 Middle class families simply cannot afford dream schools unless you planned for it. You need to look at high merit colleges or your local instate options.
One point to keep in mind is that EFC will go down when OPâs siblings enter college. I wouldnât rely on it changing an aid package, but it might help.
@privateID Half the EFC is not affordable. Only 1/6 of the EFC was affordable. OP has only two options. High merit like University of Alabama proper or Huntsville or local/commutable.
Some are getting off thread. I do think this student as NMS needs to apply to those other schools to give him options, but the student needs to get going on it now. Burst out of the bubble. Have parents help guide. As the oldest, be the trainblazer/leader that you are as a student and put that to use on the transition to college. You have some wonderful options as NMF and that bought you time (most of the schools/scholarships would have been needed to be done by Nov/Dec). I do know a student that waited until they knew all their options, then had to squeeze in a visit which was rushed and should have been planned much sooner - ended up attending the best financial choice which was also a highly selective school - and as her parents and I expected, worked out marvelously.
Median household income in New York City is $55,191, according to https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/newyorkcitynewyork/PST045216
For the state, it is actually higher at $60,741, according to https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/NY
So $175,000 should be able to give a very comfortable living and ability to save up for and pay for kidsâ college.
@ucbalumnus They didnât and they canât afford the EFC. Those are just the facts. Maybe this income level was only recently achieved. Maybe the parents had whopping college debt or medical issues. No one knows. If OP made the median then these dream colleges would be affordable ironically.
OP needs to deal with the facts as they are.
@gearmom How do you know it would be half a million for the 4 kids as you donât know how many of then will be overlapping in college and the EFC would be less than the multiple of the kids. If they do not overlap at all, that would be spreaded over 16 years or 31,500 per year. Comparing between the income of upper and lower middle class, it is up to that family to decide how to spend 75k more annually. I am sure if they make no trips and donât eat out but just live with necessities, there will be enough money for EFC.
@billcsho That is just ridiculous. If they didnât eat out and take vacations then 30k a year for all four kids would be no problem. Sure there might be some overlap but there is no way around that would be a whopping amount to save.
And there are so many variables. How long has this family made this amount of money? Has it always been that high or did they work their way up slowly. Was there large college debt to pay off? Were there any medical issues with the parents of kids? Did one of the parents have to go back to school in order to make this salary? OP has been very well educated to reach NMF. Perhaps they bought a home in the best public school district they could afford to ensure the best high school education. And NY has high taxes. Were both parents always working? Did they have high day care costs with four kids? Blaming the parents at this point for maybe eating out ten times a year and perhaps spending a thousand dollars a year on dine out isnât really helpful and doesnât add up to that 30k a year EFC.
@MYOS1634 You dont think parents are using parent plus loans to pay for all the 300k tuition bills? That is absolutely what is happening for many.
@ccsouth Not everyone can get approved for that much in loans but that is just wildly reckless and stupid to take out that much in loans.
@gearmom Agreed, but acting as if it isnt happening doesnt make it not true. Plenty of threads on CC about parents using PP loans. Kids can only borrow a tiny fraction.
The annual loan limit on a Parent PLUS Loan is the full annual cost of attendance (COA) minus other financial aid received by the student. There is no aggregate (cumulative) loan limit.
The cost of attendance includes:
Tuition and fees
Room and board
Books
Supplies
Equipment
Transportation
Miscellaneous personal expenses
@gearmom We are middle class and we did afford tippy top college for our DD1. She is graduating this summer with zero debt. We didnât save anything earlier and just by polling money from two paychecks every month did the job. Our EFC was in higher 40Ks. And yes, it involved careful planning and discipline. Again it is an anecdote but doable.
Yes, lots of people in your situation. There seems to be a strong cultural narrative out there to âjust apply and see what happensâ. And what happens, frequently, is families end up looking at acceptances to schools they simply cannot afford.
There was no way we could afford our EFC. We had to hunt down generous merit scholarships and our youngest kid was very, very disappointed she could not attend her top choices due to cost.
All of that is in the rearview mirror now.
My child applied to a number of schools where we could not afford to pay full price. The NPC helped narrow the selection, but there are just too many variables to know for sure what colleges will be affordable till you get your aid package. We are a very straight forward case (not self employed, etc) and NPC was not always accurate. In fact, it eventually came down to 2 schools where one school upped their aid to us by $5K and the other would not budge.
Count your blessings, folks. With the use of prior prior tax year, and ability to file the financial aid forms in OctoberâŠyou will get a REAL financial aid package from the get go.
Back when my kids wentâŠboth applied EA to schools. The FAFSA couldnât be completed and submitted until January. Ourntaxes werenât even done when we submitted using the âwill fileâstatus. Then,of course, we had to update.
I will start by sayingâŠwe didnât expect need based aid but one of our kids actually received some at one i found her EA schools based on our estimatesâŠand OH yes we had TWO kids in college. They offered the kid $12,000 in grant money. WellâŠwe updated our FAFSA, and our income was $2000 too low on our estimate. That school reduced her grant toâŠ$3000. YepâŠreduced it by $9000. We made an appointment to see financial aid when she went to accepted student visit dayâŠand they wer a school that would NOT even discuss their financial aid awards. Period. In fact, the financial aid officer actually told us that, the excused herself and left. It was beyond rude.
SoâŠwith the prior prior yearâŠand a real tax form completedâŠyour financial aid awards are etimates until you get your actual award.
Believe meâŠitâs a LOT worse getting an award and having it taken away, than to never get it in the first place.
We werenât the only ones who had this happen.
I am late to the thread and fully understand the OPâs frustration. I felt it as a parent for my son who was unable to go to his top choice because we just could not make the numbers work.
The cold reality is that most middle class families cannot afford to send their children to colleges that equal their intellect. Many have to settle for colleges below that so that they can get merit aid. Colleges only give merit aid to students over and above the average student attending. So if the student body is composed of 3.0 GPA HS students then you need to be higher than that to get merit aid. All these so called dream schools have 4.0 GPA kids lined up out the door. They will not give aid because they don;t have to.
The good news is that you can get a college education. The bad news is it just might not be the school you want.
You will do fine at a NY state school. They have a very respected system. Count yourself lucky. Plenty of kids cannot afford that either.
Iâd like this thread to get back to the OPâs problem but âŠ
In high schools where family incomes are mostly > $150,000 /year, counselors are often pretty terrible at getting across information about affordability. The flip side is that the parents feel a stigma about being constrained by costs when all of their kidsâ friends families seem not concerned.
As a result, counselors do a fabulous job of encouraging students to select and get in to colleges that are perfect academic matches for them without regard to financial consideration. Of course there are individual student hardship situations that they know about and try to help with but they assume that for most kids, affordability is not an issue. This is reinforced by parents who often say things like âaffordability is not an issueâ.
The only financial aid advice parents at my sonâs school received was a brochure from a private lender about Parent Plus loans. When I asked about financial aid at private colleges they just told me that my son would have his choice of UCs or Cal Poly so there was no reason for me to worry. I sensed very quickly that I needed to reassure them that âaffordability is not an issueâ in order to ensure their cooperation in helping him with non-UC related matters.
Back to the OP: for math and music, UA sounds like a terrific option.