I will have have 2 children in college. We are middle income family. How much financial aid does Emory give, will they meet your financial need and then some?
What is middle income?
70k< x <100k post-tax?
How much mortgage left on your house?
Emory considers themselves to be a school that meets “full need” meaning if you pay the amount they expect you to pay out of pocket, they’ll cover the rest with mostly grants (with very low limits on loans and a work study thrown in).
However, for most middle incomg families ($50-$100k before tax, and typical assets) most people find that the amount they are “expected” to pay is much higher than what they are willing to. Emory’s financial aid is only very generous for families making under $50k. If that’s the case, I’d suggest looking at sources of merit aid.
Use Emory’s NPC as a starting point:
https://npc.collegeboard.org/student/app/emory
If your child is dead set on working for a non-profit or government organization for at least 10 years down the line, he/she could borrow the entire COA with federal loans now and go for Public Service Loan Forgiveness, though this is risky given how uncertain the future of the policy is and how controversial it is at the moment…
Why should any school give you more than you need? Are you looking for merit aid?
This sounds like a bad idea.
My opinion is that if you are a student, then you shouldn’t finish undergrad with more loans than what you can completely pay off in 3 years… 5 years max. (Whether you actually use your money to pay them off depends on interest rates. But, crippling debt will follow you for life and you will wonder whether it was worth it).
^^This is generally true, but with PSLF your remaining loan balance is forgiven after 10 years of payments, so in theory the debt doesn’t follow you for life. As the program is structured now, the incentive is to borrow as you can (the more you borrow the more that is forgiven while you still pay the same amount), hence why it’s also controversial and some people don’t think it will last.
The only schools that would be considered to “meet your financial need and them some” for middle income families are the top Ivies and schools lie Stanford. Their financial aid packages are much more generous that of Emory in the middle income bracket. Emory does have its merit-based Emory Scholars which will give full tuition to full ride scholarships, but this is very competitive to get, and has become even more competitive recently since they removed the limit on the number of students that can apply from each high school. It may be worth trying to go for Oxford Scholars instead (who automatically become Emory Scholars when they move to main campus).
I am a middle class student who’s parents make about 100k with no savings whatsoever or special circumstances. They expected us to pay about half the total cost. To do this, whey wanted us to borrow money from the house. In short, it was bad.
Emory is NOT as generous as other elite schools in terms of financial aid. And I believe that is one of the key reasons why Emory disappeared from the top 25 schools, and is becoming a marginally elite school. My annual income is about 75 k and I had to pay about two thirds of my son’s education at Emory, and he is junior but already 20 k in debt. Money wise, Emory is definitely not a good deal. I wonder where all the money from Coke has gone.
From my perspective Emory was very good with Financial Aid. They basically paid off all of my tuition and then some, and that’s that I was late to apply for financial aid. However, my family is from a low tax bracket. But in general Emory tries to minimize debt for all students. Usually higher income families pay more than they expect to because Emory subtracts your family’s EFC from the total cost of attendance and then usually pays off the remainder. The thing is middle-upper class families usually have high EFC’s, meaning there is little left for the university to give. But in general I’d say Emory is good with Financial Aid.
The problem with with EFC (whether federal or Emory’s institution) is that is that the percentage of income you’re expected to pay increases with family income. So, for example, a family making $25k may be expected to pay 0% of their income, while for $75k it it may be 20%, for $150k it may be 35%, and for $300k it may be 40%. For most families, having to pay 35% of pre-tax income toward to tuition is a lot, while the family making $300k is really only pay about about 20% since the entire COA is around $60k. (Btw these are not official numbers, but they roughly illustrate the way the need based financial aid is structured).
This illustrates why Emory’s financial aid is problematic for middle income families (those making $100-200k) and there is huge gap in their financial policies that don’t cover this segment of the socioeconomic letter nearly as well as the top Ivies or schools like Stanford (for example at Harvard a family making $150k would only be required to pay 10% o their income towards college). Coming from a suburban public high school in the Atlanta area, I’ve seen many very good high school students who fall into this income range and have to turn down an acceptance from Emory to go UGA or GA Tech. These people may not have the credentials not qualify for Emory Scholars (which in itself is a crapshoot), but they still would have made above average to stellar students at Emory.
@doubleeternity : Uhmm, I have to disagree with you there and I criticize Emory a lot. For one, Emory is ranked 21 by USNWR. You are allowed to claim that Emory has lost ground in the undergraduate admissions department in comparison with peers because that is true, but that does not make it less “elite” at the undergraduate level. For example, most people in their right minds know that Emory is as elite and is as solid academically (if not better in many areas) than some schools ranking between 15-20. In addition, most of the professional programs and several graduate programs rank very highly among the “elite” private and public schools. The fact is: Once your SAT average is above like 1350 or so, your school is very selective (also note that I find that these avg/median SAT scores beyond this threshold do not seem to dictate how good the academics are at a school. In fact, it doesn’t necessarily even control output measures like prestigious scholarships earned by graduates because different elements of these institutions can set themselves up for success in these areas. For example, Emory has success rates with Fulbright Scholarships on par with schools that now have much higher scores. This used to be/may still be the case with Goldwaters). Often what drives down admissions rates is the amount of applications to a school, and this can be done based primarily on marketing tactics. Students don’t neccessarily know which schools outside of HYPS give the best financial aid and decide that way. Often they decide on social environment factors and perhaps some academic factors (like is my major offered there).
I would honestly postulate that Emory has lost ground mainly because of the economy in some sense. The drive toward STEM majors, especially the TEM part puts Emory at a disadvantage as the academics in physics, CS, and mathematics are rather unremarkable and we do not have an engineering school. This in addition to lackluster marketing by the institution has led to stagnant admissions not less “eliteness”…I simply do not conflate the two after taking a look at some of the undergrad academics at some other comparable institutions. I honestly don’t think others conflate the two either (I do believe however, that most incoming students do not recognize or care about actual differences in academics). Like no one will go to ND over say Emory, because it is more “elite” but they may go because “it has engineering”, “it has D-1 sports” or “it offered more money”. It seems obvious to me that Emory is regarded in the same light as many of the peers around it (even those in the top 20) even if it is nowhere near as popular. I remember when University of Chicago was not that popular, but now with some awesome marketing tactics, it became what you call “more elite”. Of course everyone knows better. Chicago is no more or less elite than it used to be when those tactics began. It’s scores however, are higher, and so is its rank I think. Emory’s probably only went down because of selectivity vs. peers, not actual quality which USNWR has no actual way of ranking beyond input values.
As for the money: Administrators like every other expensive school, but also lots of construction projects (luckily that are now leaning toward academics and Healthcare than student comfort/gimmickry, though the student center renovation will be a mess)
Apparently my experience was an anomaly with Emory financial aid since my parents make ~80K a year with no financial strains and my parents and I have pay around 15K, not including 5K of loans.
Wow - 100-200K is ‘middle income’? Every public school teacher in the Atlanta area would disagree.
.
^It probably is among the students attending Emory, considering about 40% of the students come from families making over $250k.
I did some calculations that basically figured that 11-12% of Emory students benefit from Emory Advantage. Emory Advantage includes those 100k and just shy of it. You can pretty much say that being at 100k puts you near the bottom decile at Emory. Emory is no different from many other elites (even the super elites like Harvard with the most “inclusive” aid packages actually have an even more skewed distribution).
Where did you get those numbers, Bernie?
100k pretax is definitely middle income. That’s two 9-5 jobs service jobs.
200k could be as well - depending on where you live and the number of people in your family. Income class is really a case by case definition which depends (although nobody says this) on your spending habits, number of family members, geographical location, etc.
If I was pressed towards defining middle income, I’d describe it as “someone who works because they need the money and their career trajectory would enable them to theoretically retire at 55 - but he is glad he doesn’t have to”.
@aluminum_boat I made an approximation using one of the alumni association campaigns from 2011 (I forgot how I found it). They said that, to that date, a certain amount of students had benefitted from Emory Advantage, so I took an average across the (it started in 2007…time for them to revisit it) and then applied that up to 2014. The number can be an underestimate if we assume that more students needed EA over time or it can be an overestimate if you assume that the need for EA went down as the economy “recovered”. There has also been an increased effort to get international students since then, so I suspect it was an overestimate.
You would have to define “service” jobs: Your ideal definition of middle income may apply in the bubble that is a private school, but most Americans define it as something around the median household income in the country or each state. This is often below 50k, and is generally below 100k even if you do pre-tax. The sample of students and families associated with private schools (or OOS students at a flagship public school, especially the tops) do not represent what people perceive as “middle class” which I think most people think of as “working class”. Your definition also assumes that most households have two people that work full time. I suspect that is not as typical as many think. I think many people would view those in that bracket as in the upper middleclass which, in many eyes, is essentially viewed as well-off and even wealthy. Nonetheless, when college costs as much as it does these days, no doubt that even 100k+ becomes a very sensitive area in terms of “need”.
And I’m saying that is too broad. You can’t compare it to country or to state or even county.
I also don’t know why middle class needs to be defined as median income. You don’t need to allocate buckets like that. I defined it by lifestyle - enough money to take a nice vacation or two a year, but still need to budget. And in trouble if you lose your jobs.
I don’t know the economist’s point of view on this.
If you’re making 50k in Buckhead with a family of 3, I wouldn’t call you middle class. I’m not trying to be insensitive or anything, but you’re struggling to make ends meet.
Same situation in Macon is definitely middle class.
Also, your two parents working comment might be right. On one hand, people who are making 40-50k probably have their spouse working. For the sheer necessity of it. On the other hand, being a single parent is probably much more likely around that income level as well.
I didn’t say it was defined that way, I am just saying that lots of people in America, especially those near those average and median income levels would not view someone making 100k+ as middle class. Perhaps an exception would be places like NYC and many major cities out west and up north.
As for the 50k comment: Let’s be real aluminum, a person at that income level and 3 children is typical, but is not typically living in Buckhead. They know better…that would be a person clearly living beyond their means. There are areas of Atlanta that are much more affordable and most are not near the city. There is a reason the city is so small and that there are 28 counties in the CSA.