Huge differences between FAFSA EFC and individual college Net Price Calculator EFC numbers

Paying for College
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@intparent : Everything down to Scripps is comfortable, provided the NPC estimates pan out in reality. Carleton is a bit of a stretch, but she really likes the school, so we will see how that goes. Bryn Mawr is pricier, but her chances are higher there, so it remains. Finally, Pomona, the most expensive one, will require us to take out more loans than we originally planned. Seeing that we have a ton of equity in our home and it is her first choice, we can pull it off, if needed. That’s the one where I am praying for a miracle, both for admission and for financial aid. However, as you can see, there are amazing colleges on the list that are less expensive.

@lookingforward : It wasn’t my intention to be amused OR amusing. I start with the broadest set of data possible and research the heck out of it. It’s my nature. You should see how I shop for electronics. In the process, I obviously misled people; however, people also jumped to conclusions without knowing me. No matter, this was my first time around on CC. Fascinating website. Have to start more threads later, when I have a reason to. I also learned my lesson about financial aid. Won’t make this mistake with #2. Wakeup call.

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First advice typically given out here after starting to look at a college is to look at affordability. But a second bit of advice is don’t tap your home equity to pay for it. Stay within your means. No college is worth that. You have to watch out for your own retirement, and tapping your home equity puts that at risk. Plus, you have another kid – tap the equity now, and kid #2 is probably screwed. You kids WILL notice if you are willing/able to pay more for one of the, too (trust me on this one). Your kid is special in your eyes, but you don’t want them to have to support you in retirement, either.

Pomona is a fine college – one of my kids goes to another Claremont colleges, so I am familiar with it. But not worth reducing your home equity for.

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Bob, I’m curious. Given that your daughter is a legacy at Harvard - and you apparently insist that she apply there (or at least have strongly encouraged her) … why didn’t she apply early action? Harvard EA is not binding; the admission rate for EA at Harvard is historically significantly higher than in the RD round, and in general legacy status tends to carry more weight in early admissions. Given that you are looking for financial aid, an early answer from Harvard would have also given you an early look at financial aid – the NPC numbers are rough estimate at best.

Or perhaps she did apply and was deferred?

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Bob, Bryn Mawr offers merit aid to some students, in amounts between $12-$30K per year. I’m wondering whether in your economic circumstances, a higher end merit award might exceed the amount you could expect in need based aid.

Also, I agree with the others – be wary of borrowing too much when you have a younger kid to put through college as well. Your financial planning for D1 needs to include your plan for child #2 - and you have to factor in the spacing in age/ college years (your EFC will go down if any years that you have two in college simultaneously) - and you also need to assume that college costs will continue to rise – so you may need significantly more money to finance the same quality of education for #2. When my son started college, the total COA at the high end for a private college was roughly $33K – by the time my daughter started 5 years down the line, it was over $50K. And the tuitions at in-state publics could rise as well.

Don’t pay more money for a “dream” – keep using your spread sheets and make bar charts to compare financial aid charts. Focus on the bottom line that you need to pay, as well as the balance between grants, work-study, and student loans. When you are comparing awards, create a “we pay” category that includes any student loans and work study as a “we pay” item (not as aid) – because even though that amount will be higher than the out-of-pocket needed to to be paid up front, the burden for those remain collectively on the family.

Look at the objective qualitative difference between schools - again, not the dream. You already knows that your daughter like many schools and could be happy anywhere. If she prefers a LAC over Berkeley -that’s fine, that’s a qualitative difference that you can assign value to.

But if you are looking at Amherst v. Pomona - and hypothetically, Amherst is offering you a package that leaves Pomona costing $25K more per year - well, I think it would be hard to find objective facts to make Pomona worth +$100K more over 4 years. And keep in mind that need based financial aid doesn’t remain entirely consistent over 4 years. If your earnings increase and your home equity continues to grow, then your EFC will get nudged up as well.

Having been through this process with 2 kids opting initially for private schools, as well as being very familiar with the UC campuses from my own undergrad and graduate experiences – I can appreciate what a good LAC offers that a UC doesn’t-- but don’t make the mistake of overvaluing it. My kids at private colleges had bad professors as well as good, classes that bored them as well as classes that excited and stimulated, and scheduling conflicts or enrollment factors that made it difficult or impossible to get into some classes that they would have liked to take. I’m sure that was your experience at Harvard too. No college can live up to the “dream” - though many a safety has turned out to be a lot better than expected.

So it is like any other financial decision you make - a gut level preference might justify a small differential in price, but you really need to take an objective overview, keeping in mind that there is life after college, both for you and your kids. Best to make decisions that keep you on a firm financial footing for the future.

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@intparent , @calmom : Good advice. Thank you. The reason my daughter didn’t apply to Harvard early action is because she had not taken all her standardized tests on time. She had deferred them till the last minute because she knew she was taking a gap year and didn’t want to stress senior year. That’s where she messed up big time. Had she completed her tests, she would have done EA. (Or is it SCEA in CC nomenclature?) They have already filled over 900 of the 1600+ spots in an entering class. Oh well, you live and you learn.

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@BobShaw

Ok…call me confused. I thought your daughter was taking a gap year THIS year. 2016-2017. And she is applying for admission for 2017-2018. Sh graduated from HS in 2016, right?

So her standardized test scores were complete to apply SCEA to Harvard for 2017-2018 admissions…

Or am I somehow off?

Or are you saying she did NOT take the SAT or ACT until AFTER high school graduation?? Really?

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@thumper1 : Yup. These scores are hot off the press: Nov and Dec 2016, so she wasn’t ready for SCEA or ED I for any school. She hates standardized tests, just like me. She gets serious testing anxiety and is allergic to Scantron forms. Before this fall, she never took a single PSAT, SAT, or ACT test. But recently, she did practice a lot of timed, sample tests to build up speed, which explains her scores. Missing the PSAT was a terrible idea since she might have qualified for National Merit. Her mom and I didn’t want to push her too hard. Her college courses and extracurriculars junior and senior year were sucking up enough time as it was. This gap year is a good opportunity to breathe, think, and embrace her natural creativity.

I’ve been reading about the origins of this “BWRK” acronym I learned of on this thread. Seems like a lot of people resent or mock Asian Americans. Asian Americans are diverse. We are a lot of national origins, ethnicities, and cultures. Each family is different. Not all fit the stereotypes thrown at us. Our kids have the same challenges with stress, time management, organization, and teenage angst as everyone else. However, our immigrant parents drilled into us this one principle: excel or be relegated to second-class citizen since you’re not white. Of course, this doesn’t hold true anymore. My parents faced prejudice and discrimination in ways that we don’t experience as extensively nowadays (although it does exist - just listen to Steve Bannon and his Breitbart crowd: apparently, there are “too many” Indian entrepreneurs and CEOs in Silicon Valley). There are also accusations that Harvard sets a higher bar for Asian Americans because we are an “over-represented minority”. (Would that be “ORM” on CC? You guys have “URM”.) Regardless, we are cautiously, slightly more relaxed than the first generation. It’s difficult to be treated like a “model minority”. No matter what we do, we can’t win.

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While I don’t have any disagreement with your observations about Asian Americans — “BWRK” doesn’t have an ethnic overtone. It might have originated with Rachel Toor’s book, “Admissions Confidential” - about the admissions process at Duke and first published in 2001:

Source: Time, August 2001 - http://content.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,172457,00.html

The “BWRK” is the kid who participates in everything - not the Asian stereotype of kid buried in studies and parental pressure, but the all-American type who plays a couple of high school sports, has an array of EC’s and a position in student Government, and basically hits all of the expectations. You’ll note from Toor description that the BWRK is not necessarily class valedictorian and doesn’t have perfect SATS-- because the “well rounded” part means that they are succesfully balancing an array of activities.

Toor’s argument was that competitive admissions favored the well “lopsided” kid – the ones like my daughter who had an imbalance in their academic record with unusual strengths in some narrow area. (And while I never read Toor’s book, I agree with the assertion overall – college admissions is something like casting for a very big play. There are a whole lot of different parts to fill).

Not sure if there is a word that goes along with the Asian stereotype, though it definitely exists. But it definitely is a different stereotype than BWRK.

If BWRK was applied to your daughter in this thread, it was because you didn’t provide any information to move her from BWRK designation into “focused interest or talent” category.

I think you might have focused too much on the “or Asian” part of the comment, “straight no chaser: your child is a female white or Asian BWRK” - what was meant by that was simply that whites & Asians are lumped together as a group not in need of outreach of Affirmative Action. (Whereas a black or hispanic kid probably wouldn’t be labeled BWRK because their ethnicity gives them a “hook”)

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If anything, I’ve always thought of a plain, wonder bread white upper-middle class kid when I hear BWRK.

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I always thought ‘basic white rich kid,’ of which there are so many. Basic.

I disagree this is all about finding well lopsided. Rather, a level of energy, savvy, awareness, etc, and how that manifests in solid, productive decisions/commitments, along the way. Balance. Thats what well rounded means. No extra points for being the juggling unicyclist.

How this got defensive about Asian American beats me.

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Well, I’m not sure how “BWRK” morphed from the Toor definition (bright, well-rounded) over the years. I’m old enough that I was reading this sort of stuff back in 2001 – which is the year my son graduated high school. My son was a NM finalist looking at mid-range, mid-level selectivity LACs --pretty much all matches and safeties. Son was an avid reader an A student with no EC’s – he applied to 9 colleges and was accepted to 8. Pitzer was a safety, with an admit rate of well over 50%.

Whether her rationale is correct or not, I think that Toor’s point was that selective colleges get a lot of applications from kids who all look the same on paper. Same courses, same ECs, same sports, same hackneyed essays. And that term was coined long before the present arms race of a IB schools & piling on of APs, of retaking the SATs again and again to achieve a perfect score. There was a time in the not too distant past when those BWRK kids could expect to be accepted just about anywhere.

The Common App is probably what led to the crazy mess we have now. If you can apply to 10 or 20 colleges with the click of a button… why not? Ten years ago my DD filled out her most of her apps by on paper – Common App was an option but it was clunky and didn’t allow for formatting of essays or other ways of distinguishing individual apps. I don’t know if the colleges even accept paper applications any more.

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Will it matter to colleges that this student took her ACT or SAT tests six months after HS graduation…and never took them while a HS student? Just asking!

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If anything it may make her more interesting to them since it’s unusual.
I think the odds are in the OP’s daughter’s favorite yet I hope she adds one ‘easier’ LAC :slight_smile:
Of course, a class of 40 to me would count as ‘very big’, not an example of ‘small’ (small =8-12, medium 15- 24, 25+ would be big already.) Harkness table vs. Lecture hall.

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They could wonder why they’re missing, how many tries. Or what the original idea was, in not taking them on schedule, then see if the GC offers some clue. Nerves, alone, won’t do.

So in conjunction, it can matter what the gap is devoted to.

We’re speculating, with little real detail. It’s more than stats and a couple of unusual elements. Remember, holistic includes the idea of the whole.

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Looking at this post from the search from the experiences we had exactly a year ago. Spoiler alert, if you look at my avatar you will see where he ended up.

We are also in CA. My son had 12 schools he applied to. We had a rule, he could apply where he wanted, had HAD to apply to my suggested schools and apply seriously, and he got final say with the exception of finances. If it was too expensive I had veto power.

We are middle income with a small business, single income family. Second child at home homeschooling.He wanted close to home so CA and PNW only.

White kid.2320/2400. 800 on M/W and 720 CR. He had 12 APs, 2 DE, unranked school but considered shared Val. 4.0/UW 4.5W. Subject tests math 800, Chem 800, US History 760.

ECs Music - 10 years
Math team
Summer enrichment - STEM - 6 years - long before high school even.
Community service

Increadible LoRs. I saw them (“The reason I went into teaching”)
Fantastic essays - my professional writer sister oversaw
Considered by his counselor as one of his best students - ever.

Perfect candidate.

Pomona - Rejected (not even a wait list)
Mudd - Rejected (not even a wait list)
Stanford - Rejected
Harvard REA -Deferred, rejected.

Accepted
Reed - my STRONG suggestion - His eventual choice to apply halfheartedly
Whitman - My choice for safety and he, grumbling and eye rolling, applied.
Occidental - His Choice for safety
Lewis & Clark - My choice for safety -Vetoed for finances. Worst financial aid.
Berkeley His choice
UCLA His choice
UCI with Regent and honors program - His choice
CSULB Auto admit due to location.

Money
All the private LACs (except L&C) were cheaper than UCs with blue and gold scholarship
CSULB - was crazy cheap

Whitman-------
Here is the funny thing. Once we visited Whitman,which was my choice (and which would have cost approx $9000 a year out of pocket after merit and need) it jumped to the very very top of the list. All other schools including UCB and UCLA were forgotten. he LOVED it. LOVED it. All rejections forgotten or (when they came later) ignored. He would have chosen Whitman over Stanford and Harvard. No kidding. LOVE LOVE LOVE.

… Then he visited Reed. OMG. LOVE and happiness.

Why do I give you this story. Because I know my kid and I knew where he would fit. He would fit at Reed and Whitman. I knew this because I did my homework. Whitman is in the top 50 for STEM PhD success according to the NSF - better than UCB when looked at by percentage.

Reed is #4 for STEM PhD success only after CalTech, MIT, and Harvey Mudd, and is #5 over all for PhD success.Yes they have grade deflation and famously so. But Reed is well know for this and it is not counted against the student. The qual exams in Jr year and the final thesis senior give students an advantage. There is a significant failure rate in Physics for the exam and students are forced to change major. Reed is known for sending out the best students. Don’t knock it for STEM.

Why this long post - once again, look around and knock some of those highly selective schools of the list and look closely at safeties because they may actually turn into hidden gems that you would never have considered if you not had taken a moment to really think about this.

Good luck to your daughter…

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The acronym BWRK has been around since at least the late 80s (dating myself, or at least my high school years). But it was in use then, not as a pejorative but as what many high schoolers should be looking to market themselves as to attract those top schools.

It used to indicate the kind of kid who was a shoe-in to those top schools (in the 80s). Have at least a A-/B+ average, get above a 1400 on your SATs, have 1-2 good ECs with leadership shown and you could be assured of going to a very good, if not excellent school. With significant merit money and/or need based money attached.

I, like many others on this board who graduated in that time period, applied to and was accepted at a top 10 university (actually a couple of them, as well as a couple others in the top 50), and chose the one that gave me the best package. It was a lot simpler then, with a lot less stress.

But, as others have alluded, times have changed and I think the advent of the common app along with the explosion of advertising from colleges, combined with the ease of researching colleges from the comfort of your own home (hello world wide web), has made the world so much smaller, which ironically makes the number of application to each top college that much greater. Lots of those BWRKs in the 80s didn’t think to look outside their comfort zone of good to great schools near where they lived, reducing national competition. And there were fewer overall applicants to compete for basically the same number of spots.

Now, all 32,000 or so valedictorians graduating in the US have the means and access to fairly easily plastered college apps far and wide. Those 12,000 or so perfect SAT test takers each year do too, as well as the 10s of thousands more who rocked the SAT even if they didn’t get a perfect score. As do all the 1st violins, clarinets, cellists, etc as well from all those 32,000 or so schools. And the ACT takers. And the star football players, club soccer players, chess prodigies, the student activists, each kind of talented child of which in each category there is at least 32,000 competing people to take ‘top title’ if we just count the number of high schools in the US.

The plain and simple fact, at least in my eyes, is that many people don’t seem to look at college admissions as the numbers game it is. There is a lack of understanding (or acceptance) as to what the numbers, which are easy to find, actually indicate.

@Lindagaf wrote on this topic with her “average excellence” thread which I would recommend to anyone with a smart, active, thoughtful child who seems to shine brighter than most other children you know. Because, stats wise, there are literally thousands just like them every year. Each wonderful, each bright and full of potential. Unfortunately, not nearly as many spots available at each college as there are amazing and wonderful students who could fill those spots admirably.

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Beebee3- excellent post. I am a generation older than you, so my own kids experience in HS and college was a bit of an eye opener. It’s not enough to say- with a dose of humility-- “well maybe my incredible kid has some competition out there”. It’s also to understand that a college with a 10% acceptance rate has a 90% rejection rate, and a very significant percentage of those rejected had phenomenal stats and great essays and all that jazz.

Many parents I know in real life assume that the 90% is comprised of the “hail mary pass” applicants- i.e. don’t have a chance of a snow ball in hell. Not true. Or they assume that the 90% is comprised of the lopsided (high scores, lowish grades) or the kids with a felony or other serious disciplinary charge. There is that- but it is a tiny percentage overall of the kids who are getting rejected.

I had just one kid get into Brown over many, many years of alumni interviewing. This kid was so exceptional that I started making phone calls the minute the interview ended- I just couldn’t risk the adcom’s somehow overlooking his application or not understanding the very disadvantaged circumstances under which he had grown up and yet had somehow blossomed into a lovely, modest, kind, respectful intellectual (a home with no books- and yet one of the most erudite and well read young kids I had ever interviewed). Every year I would grind my teeth when I heard from the regional director that all my kids had been rejected-- until that year. And then I realized that after interviewing dozens of these bright and accomplished kids who grew up with parents who drove them to activities and helped them with homework and made sure they visited colleges before applying-- wow, talk about starting on third plate and thinking you’ve hit a triple.

Do these “normally” bright kids get into the mega competitive colleges? Of course. But it ain’t like the good old days, and although we can grind our teeth when our own special kids have to ratchet their expectations down a notch, I applaud the colleges which are working aggressively to find these kids who are first Gen and have achieved so much without the legacy advantage, or the two educated parent advantage, etc.

OP’s kid will do great wherever she lands because she’s smart and talented and hard-working and grew up knowing that she was expected to go to college and do well there.

And again- for every Adcom who thinks it’s cool and unconventional that the kid took the SAT’s after graduating from HS, there will be an Adcom who thinks it’s a red flag for something else. Illness, depression, eating disorder. What one person thinks is unconventional reads “problematic” to someone else.

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@blossom yup understanding numbers…what those 5%, 8%, 10% acceptance rates truly mean is really hard for a lot of people I know in real life as well. Innumeracy in general leads to a lot of pain and disappointment, I have found.

I’ve always tried to live with a “run your own race” philosophy, so I was surprised at how happy I am that each of my children has been involved in very competitive activities. Before I had children, I would never have thought it would be so good for them, but now I see every victory (and more importantly, defeat) as a chance for them to learn that sometimes you win and sometimes you lose. It is an important lesson to really understand. And that often, you can lose not because you weren’t excellent, but because someone else was better, even if only on that day.

As my children have gone further in their activities, they’ve all reached the point where “everyone at this level is really good”…there is no more ‘cannon fodder’. And there are still so. many. competitors. Even when we’ve attended “nationals” at one of my children’s activities - you realize that there are literally hundreds of talented, hard working, passionate competitors who have just as much chance of ‘winning’ that day as most others. Yes, 1 or 2 of these competitors are always so much better than most of the competition…but watching those competitors feels almost like watching an exhibition of talent and brilliance that doesn’t even come close to be part of the competition. They are in their own class.

Unfortunately, too many people seem to believe their child is that 1 child out of hundreds in the competition. Even many of the people watching the competitions (whose child clearly isn’t the one who wins by such a huge margin, it wasn’t even close) seem to believe that something happened to cheat their child out of victory. It is almost bizarre to listen to a parent of a very talented, smart, driven child try to explain how a top 25% finish in competition is exactly the same as the #1 finish, and how if only x, y, z hadn’t happened - their child would “have gotten what they deserved”. The anger shown in the aftermath of competition is the only clue that perhaps they understand there is a difference between 10th out of 30 (in their division), and 1st out of 300 (across all divisions).

At this point, I sort of assume college admissions to be very much like these competitions. Most applicants are very good to excellent and it really becomes a “who hit that day” in terms of acceptances to individual colleges. And very few applicants are so transcendent, so above the rest of the competition that they always win unless something goes terribly wrong. But that relative percentage is pretty low, just like at these competitions.

Unfortunately, as my math professor told me on my first math class at university, “It doesn’t matter how smart all of you are coming into this class - there’s going to be a bottom 25% of students here…and this might be the first time you’ve ever been at the bottom”. If we have a hard time accepting statistics when they are played out in a class of 30 - how hard is it for people to wrap their head around discovering their child may be in the bottom 25% of the top 1% of all high school students (3 million+ per year)?

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BeeBee, and that “transcendent” isn’t just the way an adcom views a 4.x with some club titles on Thursday vs how she thinks of them on Friday. Or whether they’re tired when they get to the umpteenth stu gov leader.

The kid is responsible for an app/supp that forms a self presentation. He who settles on the bare bones laurels, thinks that’s all it takes, misses the rest.

I use the regional debate example. Doesn’t matter how good you are in your own hs, how your coach sees you, your gpa or you also do something no one else does. You still have to stand up there on stage and answer on point, as those judges expect. No one says, super, he’s tops in that hs, let’s rubber stamp him winner.

100

Bee- excellent post. As a neighbor commented to me not long ago, “You keep telling us we should look at Rice for little Jonny. But why should he have to go all the way to Texas with Harvard and Yale within a quick Amtrak ride?”

Well- because little Jonny isn’t getting in to Harvard or Yale, unless the parents (who are quite candid about their kids achievements and accomplishments and scores and grades) have been holding back on some major piece of news about Jonny (not likely. I know how much they pay his SAT tutor for god’s sake). Not that Rice needs yet another suburban kid from the Northeast- but at least he’s playing a bit against type, AND would be one of a handful (maybe the only) kid from his HS to apply to Rice this year. And I think would love it but that’s besides the point.

If Jonny has grown up hearing about Harvard and Yale then yes- it requires a major mindshift to start thinking about Rice and Reed. But the kids from this particular HS who get into Harvard and Yale are really and truly exceptional. And Jonny is a nice, smart, dutiful kid who managed to raise his SAT score by 200 points via major coaching and lots of test taking and I’m sure his teachers will write nice recommendations. But from where I sit, Rice is a nice but realistic reach. Not a waste of a few hundred bucks like some of his other applications…