I’m still not sure if I should apply EA or ED. Using the College Board NPC, it estimated that I would have to pay about 18k per year. However, this seems too good to be true. For the record, my family made about 100k in 2015 and we have around 20k in deductibles. We also have no investments or anything like that and about 40k in savings. Is the college board NPC bologne or is it legit? If its legit or even semi legit i will certainly apply ED, but if not then I will go the EA route.
Go to the NPC on the UChicago website.
its the same thing
I really wish that UChicago had not complicated things so much for you guys by offering so many options.
Here is my take on it but please remember that it’s only my perspective.
Only apply ED to a school that you are 99.9% sure that you will attend. Have you visited? Stayed overnight? Talked to students? Researched it and made sure it was a good academic and social fit?
Next is the can you afford it question. It’s a very very important one. ED requires that you, your parents and your school counselor sign off on it. You are promising to go if accepted. You can get out of the contract if you truly cannot afford it because the financial aid offered to you was not enough. What is enough is always up for debate.
However, who wants to work on an ED application and have to turn it down? ED applications take up your valuable time and take work to have everything ready so early. You could have better spent that time doing something else that brought more of a reward to your personal application process.
ED historically, favored applicants who were absolutely sure of their college choice and were not concerned about money. In other words, they could pay full price. But maybe they were not particularly strong applicants and wanted a leg up on admissions. They knew that the tippy top applicants were applying later and they wanted to be compared with the less strong applicant pool applying later. ED also favored applicants with a hook- URM, legacy, recruited athlete and development cases. Perhaps the low socio URM economic applicant with a less rigorous academic curriculum applying to a full needs met school could also take advantage of ED.
Sorry cut off-
UChicago has promised to meet demonstrated need. Find out if this is with loans or not. You could contact their financial aid office and talk to them about the NPC accuracy. Also, go through some CC threads and see how happy or unhappy students were with their financial aid. This may give you some ideas of how the school responds to any fin aid concerns the students have.
I would get your parents on board with this. Make sure that you are filling out the NPC and Profile and FAFSA correctly with all the accurate info. Make sure that it’s affordable for them.
If you need to compare fin aid packages either need based or merit, do not apply ED. One of my kids applied ED to CMU and I actually prohibited my D from applying ED anywhere. I really wanted her to look at all the options on the table. It worked fine for both of my kids.
No one really knows how having so many options will all shake out for applicants. You guys are the guinea pigs. Sorry about that.