Hi all,
I’m currently a junior in high school. Since I’ll be applying to schools in a few months, I’ve been working to narrow down my college list.
Part of this process is knowing what schools I’ll be able to afford. Whenever I ask my parents how much they’re willing to pay, they give me the noncommittal answer of “oh, just apply where you want to apply- we can discuss the cost after you hear from all the schools you’ve applied to.”
I don’t want to spend time and money applying to schools that I won’t be able to afford. I was wondering if you guys had any tips for me on bringing up the issue of college costs in a way that would get me a more specific answer.
Thanks so much in advance! 
Good for you for thinking ahead. This information you are asking for is the FIRST thing everyone in a family should consider before you start the application process. Many parents have no idea just how expensive college is going to be until after their teen has been admitted and then they are in the position of having to say no to something that the teen has their heart set on because they were told not to worry about it. Many parents seem to be uncomfortable talking about their finances with their kids, but again, it is important to be able to figure out a way to do this with your parents because you aren’t going to be able to do the financial side of this process without them.
One way might be to invite your mother or father to sit down with you and look at websites together for the schools you are considering. Ahead of time create a form or some kind where you are looking for certain information about the school and writing it down as you look together. For example, you could have a section for admissions requirements, cost of attendance, scholarship opportunities and financial aid application procedures, and whatever other things you are looking for in the school (location, sports, music, Greek life, etc.). As you gather this information with your parent helping, they will see the breakdown of costs for each school and maybe begin to recognize that they are going to have to be part of this process that you are going through long before you apply.
It is also important that you and your parents learn the difference between financial aid that is need based and merit based awards.
If you qualify for an automatic full ride at a school that you like (see http://automaticfulltuition.yolasite.com/ ), then you may want to include an application to that school as a safety in the worst case that your parents refuse to tell you anything about their cost limits before application time and then tell you in April that they will contribute $0.
You may also want to build the rest of your application list to emphasize seeking large merit scholarships.
Try to get them to understand the costs and communicate, but like ucbalumnus said, also do your best to apply to some absolute safeties where you are pretty certain you can get some scholarships as well as more reachy schools (both financially and academically.) And don’t treat community college as a disgrace - it can be a good, solid backup option. Do you know your parents approximate income? Try to run the net price calculators for each school you consider and see the available scholarship or need based aid you might be able to guess. Make a guess in price and make a list of schools with your estimated price for each one. Make sure there’s a range, then show your parents (before you apply) and say, “Here’s where I’m thinking to apply and a guess on the price - what do you think?” If there’s gasps of “that’s too much” or “that’s a crazy price!” for some, then limit schools in that price range that you apply to. Don’t eliminate them all, because NPCs are known to be wildly inaccurate in some cases (in both directions), but don’t spend all your time applying to schools that you have questionable chances of paying for. Throw the community college on the list too, and price it out, just to show them that you are being practical.
What state are you in and what are your GPA and PSAT/SAT/ACT scores?
Edit: I saw your info on an old chance thread. Has the GPA risen any (not that it’s bad or anything, it’s very good!) and what are the actual scores?
When your parents went to college, the Net Price Calculators didn’t exist, so people did have to apply and then see what happened. There were plenty of ugly surprises back then, but the Big Home State Public Us were relatively less expensive than they are now so most people had an affordable back-up.
Do your best to convince your parents that you are doing them a favor by giving them a heads-up about what the cost of college is likely to be for you, not so that you will limit your application list, but rather so that all of you can strategize about the best ways to get the money together for any place where you might be admitted. Now that they’ve (probably) filed their taxes they would have most of the figures readily at hand to run a couple of the NPCs. I’d suggest that they state with Net Price Calculator for Big Home State Public U and for their own Alma Maters (or for at least one other place if their Alma Mater is BHSPU). If they become engaged in the process (and if they haven’t drunk all the adult beverages in the house and used up all of the boxes of tissues by then), let them run the NPCs at two or three other places that you know students from our high school who have interests similar to yours have been admitted in the past couple of years. Then talk over what the results mean for all of you.
Wishing you all the best!
P.S. Puffs Plus really is the softest. Get at least one box and set it by the computer before they run those NPCs.
Well, since it April, it’s likely taxes are fresh in their mind. If they don’t want you around for this, give them some links to the NPCs at a few colleges and ask if they’d be willing to take their returns and plug in the numbers. (Second the notion to keep some Puffs handy. And maybe a good, stiff drink.)
Another idea would be to say what you said here. You don’t want to waste time and money applying at places that are out of the question. Can they give you a maximum?
And yes, if you cannot get any sort of number out of them, look at the full ride/full tuition links.
Keep pressing them until they give you an answer. Ask them every day if you must. Also, you can ask them to make a list for you. Then, run a NPC for each school, and then have them see what t would cost for them. That should help you find a budget.
You can run the NPC initially at one school and bug them for the answers to the numbers asked (write these down).
Guaranteed they will ask to see the result.
Be sure they are sitting down when you answer.
If your parents refuse to help you run the NPC at colleges, then make a list of schools that genuinely interest you, that you have a realistic chance of being admitted to, and where your GPA/test scores are above the 75 percentile so you might be eligible for merit aid.
Give your parents a list of the colleges and the annual cost to attend. (Tuition/room and board) Tell them “Since you aren’t able to have a discussion with me about finances, I wanted you to see what we are up against for my college years. If you can communicate with me, have meaningful discussions using our actual income figures, it would help me save you money. Could you at least tell me if you can pay the annual costs at any of these schools? If not, can you give me any kind of ball park figure of what you could afford to spend each year?”
A bold move would be to refuse to apply anywhere until your parents can communicate with you about finances. Maybe that would get their attention. Of course, only you know your parents well enough to speculate on how they would react to this.
Are they interested in you attending college? Are they obsessed with you getting into an elite school, or to a particular alma mater? If they didn’t attend college themselves, they may not understand the process. Is there anyone you know that they trust that could help persuade them to engage with you in this financial discussion?
Do you have friends in the senior class?
You could use them to bring up the topic of money again at your house. For example, “There’s a guy I know who’s going to have to go to community college next year because his family couldn’t afford any of the colleges that admitted him. And he’s not poor, either. It’s just that the colleges were incredibly expensive. I don’t want to get in that situation next year.”
Whether or not the guy in the story actually exists is up to you. There probably are people in the senior class at your school who are in exactly this situation. But it may or may not be worth the trouble of finding them.
Definitely apply to at least 2 schools where you’d get HUGE merit (remaining costs low) in case none of your other schools are affordable.
Also…do this…
Run the NPCs for at least 4 schools…an instate public, an OOS public, a top (non-ivy) private, and a mid-tier private and look at the results.
You may need the basic info from parents…income, assets, home equity, etc…or ask them to sit with you while these are done.
Usually when parents are vague like that, they really have no idea how they’re going to pay for college.
Obviously I don’t know if this is relevant, but:
Not all parents are willing to take a close look at their finances. Except for the mortgage and the car payment, they might not know what their monthly expenses are. They might not know how much consumer debt they are carrying. They might not really want to know this stuff.
And there will be more stuff than you or they might realize. A family who has never sat down and made a budget can be shocked at how much they pay altogether for cell service, landline and Internet, cable/satellite, basic utilities, groceries, liquor, clothes, piano lessons . . .
Part of my point is that your parents may not want to have this discussion because they may not be prepared to have it. Getting prepared might require them to do some (possibly unpleasant) research.
There may also be a kind of emotional reluctance.
So at the very least, you should try to schedule a meeting with them at a time when everyone is available, without the threat of something interrupting. You should even come right out and say something like, “I understand you’ll probably have to do a little research first, and maybe even discuss it yourselves before you discuss it with me. So lets make sure we find time for all of that.”
Sit down with your parents and TELL them exactly this:
“I don’t want to spend my time and your money applying to schools that I won’t be able to afford.”
I’d add the following
“My Senior year is going to be tough enough- do you really want me to get into a school that I LOVE next April and THEN find out I cant go because we can’t afford it ?? Please be straight with me now- It will save ALL of us a lot of grief next year. I fully intend to apply to both schools that award merit $$, but winning a scholarship is a crap shoot, so I need to have financial safeties, and for that I need to know how much you CAN afford to spend over the next 4 years”
If after saying something like this^^, your parents don’t realize how mature you are and that its time to stop playing financial "don’t worry honey " games, I don’t know what will work, other than a talk with them AND a guidance counselor.
“Usually when parents are vague like that, they really have no idea how they’re going to pay for college.”
This.
Go to the Financial Aid Forum, and read through the links in the threads pinned at the top, and find at least one place that you could pay for without any money from your parents. You need to have a back up in case it turns out that they can’t get their act together in time.
I wouldn’t assume that they don’t know how they are going to pay. I know we never gave my daughter a number, but when we started looking at schools and merit scholarships the exact numbers did come up and we open about what we thought was reasonable. But you are smart to ask, I don’t think many parents are comfortable saying “we have $XYZ in an account for you” but I agree that you could show them some NPC’s and see how they react.
So I would come back with:
"Listen Mom or Dad. It doesn’t work that way. So it’s a lot of work to apply to colleges on top of an anticipated difficult senior year. Many people are applying to over 10 colleges. I have to visit and show them that I am serious, I have to interview, write essays, etc. Everything that I’m reading suggests that I need to have some idea of what you guys can pay is so that I can craft a focused strategy that produces the best results for the least amount of work. Are you telling me that you can afford $70K/year?
If not, I need to determine if my strategy revolves around financial aid or merit aid. There are a very different set of schools for each direction.
Can I send you a link to some Net Price Calculators and have you run the numbers to get a rough idea of what kind of financial aid I can expect and if you would be willing to pay the expected financial contribution? If you are, then I can pursue the top and most competitive schools. Otherwise, I need to target lesser schools where I am one of the better students so that they will give me a scholarship.
If your parents have a fairly high income it might be that they could afford anything and would be willing to but don’t want you to pick the most expensive school out there because it’s still an amount of money that matters, so they’re holding that back. But you shouldn’t assume that’s what’s going on.
Do you know how much your parents make, how much they spend, their net worth, their liquid assets? You can start getting a gauge from there. If your parents make 50K a year you can start by knocking off any private schools with poor aid as it’ll be pretty obviously unaffordable.
“oh, just apply where you want to apply- we can discuss the cost after you hear from all the schools you’ve applied to”
As we all know from reading posts on this forum, many kids are told that, they apply where they want, and then spring comes and parents are shocked that all the schools expect the parents to pay a LOT more than they can pay.
How sad for those kids. They spent many, many hours making their app list, writing essays, filling out apps…only to find out that NONE are affordable. Then what? For many, they are relegated to their local CC…when they COULD have had some other options if their parents had just been pro-active from the beginning.
I don’t’ know what your stats are, but if they’re good (and maybe after retesting your scores could even rise), there may be schools out there that will give you very large merit awards. But, right now, you don’t know if you need to apply to them. Of course, I think you should apply to a couple of those big merit schools just in case.
Heck, even if your parents were to say, “Don’t worry, we will pay for any school you want,” unless that money is locked away somewhere that can only be used for college, it’s still wise to have a back up. Every year we see kids posting from about January thru spring with words like, “Dad just lost his job, now they can’t pay.” or “Parents are separating, now we can’t afford any of my schools.” or some other issue.
Ask your parents to read your thread and the responses here.
Thank you all for the wonderful responses!
I’m not sure exactly how much my parents make/have but I know it’s probably too much for me to get need-based aid. They don’t like discussing finances with me, so I’ll probably send them links to the NPCs of colleges I’m looking at for them to play around with.
My GPA is currently a 3.84 UW and 4.0 W. My SAT is a 2060 (1340 CR + M) but I’m retaking it in June so that’ll hopefully go up.
I live in California, so I’m lucky to have a lot of affordable and good options. Some of my top choices are UCs, and I live near some very good CSUs and community colleges.
Both of my parents went to college, and my dad actually has a PhD, but he attended UCs and worked his way through all of it, so that could be influencing his outlook. I’ve showed them the COA for the schools I’ve been looking at, so they are aware of the cost of attending college, but I think they believe that I’m going to get a ton of merit aid.
Thank you all again! I’ll take a look at the automatic tuition website to see if I qualify for anything. I think I have a good shot at a scholarship at my mom’s alma mater, so I’ll look there too, though she doesn’t want me to apply there. I’ll show them this thread when I get home from school :). Thank you all again!
I’m glad you have a number of good in-state options.