<p>Newfaith, do not forget you do not need to pay two lump sum payments for two different semesters! Most schools use Tuition Management Systems or similiar, where you may pay tuition for 10 months out of the year, sometimes 8 months, depending on the school. The enrollment fee for this is about $60.00 for the school year. </p>
<p>My D’s school has their own online system for this & I get an electronic bill & I pay online every month. With my S’s school we use Tuition Management Systems, receive a paper snail mail bill, can pay by mail or online. It spreads it out & it does help, we used TMS for the two older children as well. It is like making budget payments for oil heat that are used in different parts of the country.</p>
<p>We are very lucky as MN has agreements with WI and ND and I believe Iowa?? Very early in the looking stage but daughter would love to go to U of MN Twin Cities. I want her to look at U of WI at Eu Claire and U of ND at Grand Forks. I love the way MN state at Moorehead looks on paper. Will have to see which of these and a couple others are the best choice for her major (English). Also D really wants to study abroad (Japan), have no idea why but shes only a freshman so will see down the road. Thanks to an other board here on CC we are saving money to let her attend two weeks at Concordia Language camp next year. She is already looking forward to spending two weeks in “Japan”. lol</p>
<p>But that’s not true. The FASFA provides an asset allowance scaled to parental age, and only asses 5.6% of assets towards EFC for amounts over and above the allowance. So, for example, if you have $100K in savings and your family’s asset allowance is $50K, then your EFC is increased by $2800. I would think you could pay that money out and still have some left over for kid #2.</p>
<p>The bigger problem with EFC is simply that the the <em>income allowance</em> is unreasonably low for most families, especially given the fact that higher income families tend to have a lifestyle with higher fixed expenses. That is, there are families earning $60K who get along fine – but a family with an income of $120K is unlikely to be able to make ends meet if their income is suddenly reduced to $60K. Not because it is impossible to live on $60K, but because that $120K earning family owns a home with a higher monthly mortgage payment, or they have to worry about private school tuitions whereas the lower earning family has been sending their kids to public school all along. </p>
<p>That being said, the goal of the FAFSA system and of financial aid has never been to make college expenses easily manageable for families who are financially well-off. The goal of FAFSA is to set some standards for the distribution of federal dollars to support students at the low end of the economic spectrum, to enable them to have the funds to attend public colleges they would otherwise be unable to attend. The educational benefits can be used for private colleges as well, but the money available through Pell grants and subsidized loans is scaled to public college levels – you can’t pay a private tuition with a Pell grant, but that is enough to cover or at least make a big dent in the tuition for in-state residents at many public colleges. So the Pell-eligible student who opts to attend a local community college for 2 years, then transfer to a nearby state college is doing exactly what the system was create to enable. </p>
<p>Private colleges have played a game over the years of combining raised tuitions with discounts labeled as “financial aid” so that they are able to maximize income while at the same time keep their doors open to students from upper middle class backgrounds – and unfortunately this leads to an expectation among the upper middle class that college will be “affordable” to them. So then they experience sticker shock when they look at their EFC, because they are mistaking a federal program intended to help students from poor and lower middle class families for some sort of guarantee that college costs will fit into every family’s budget.</p>
<p>Most, but not all, public schools and less selective privates fit in that category. Those schools do NOT promise to meet full need of students. </p>
<p>CSS is simply the instrument that expensive college use to support the “fiction” that they are meeting “full need” of any of their students. That is, my daughter attended a college for 4 years that met “full need”. According to the FAFSA, our EFC fluctuated from year to year from about $3500-$8000. According to the college, our ability to pay fluctuated from year to year from about $15,000-$26,000, and financial aid was awarded accordingly. </p>
<p>Without the CSS that college – and many others - would either have to admit that they are unable to come up with grant money to meet the full need of many of their students, or they would have to allocate a lot more money to financial aid. </p>
<p>So you aren’t going to find colleges that waive the CSS and the information that flows in it from them, but will meet the full need of all or most of their students simply because the money isn’t there. A FAFSA-only list isn’t going to be all that useful for financial aid purposes.</p>
<p>Go to the College Board website and look for the 300 or so colleges that DO use the Profile. If your school isn’t there…then they probably don’t accept it.</p>
<p>BUT do check the school website too…because sometimes they change the required forms. </p>
<p>Also, check to see if your school requires a school financial aid form. Many of those forms ask for similar information to the Profile.</p>
<p>But I note that FAFSA (or whatever formula is used by FinAid.org’s calculator) also expects 25% of my income. Since, for practical purposes, I don’t actually have that 25% uncommitted to any other expense, that part comes out of savings, too.</p>
<p>I’m very glad I found out the hard facts about financial aid before we started the college search process.</p>
<p>Newfaith, if your D is interested in English, both U of Iowa and U of Wisconsin have superb English departments. UMN isn’t bad either, though not quite as good as the other two.</p>
<p>Yes, I’ve heard that. But if some portion is supposed to come out of savings, that is in addition to the 5.6% of savings that is deemed available, right?</p>
<p>And if the family is expected to take out loans just to come up with the EFC…that would be in addition to loans taken out to fill in the rest of the COA.</p>
<p>So, realistically, I find that, yes, we will wind up draning out MUCH more than 5.6% (or a cumulative 24%) from the non-IRA savings. </p>
<p>But now that I’ve figured that out…I’m prepared.</p>
<p>What college-planning family who has never heard how financial aid works would ever dream that the EFC could be >25% of gross income? (The relationship of this number to my NET income is even more mind-boggling to contemplate.)</p>
<p>MN only has agreements in place for community college with Iowa. However, it does have tuition reciprocity with WI, North Dakota, South Dakota and the Canadian province of Manitoba.</p>
<p>Additionally, MN participates in the Midwest Student Exchange Program. For certain majors students at participating universities pay 150% of instate rates. This includes schools in Kansas, Nebraska, Indiana, Missouri and a few schools in Michigan besides WI and ND. Below is a link.</p>
<p>I think the assumption is that you have a choice. Keep in mind that the whole system is backed up by the Parent PLUS loan system, that guarantees that parents with decent credit will be able to borrow whatever they need to meet the COA, regardless of income. So on top of a system of grants and subsidized loans for the student, the feds are also providing an additional source of non-need based funding.</p>
<p>Personally, I have never had any problem with the numbers on FAFSA. That is… if I only had to pay the amount on the FAFSA that was my EFC for my kids to attend college, it would have been pretty easy to manage. So – at least in my income/asset bracket, FAFSA looks pretty cool. My problem was that I had to pay much more than my EFC, because my kids opted for private colleges that defined need differently – but even the public colleges that accepted them would not have met 100% of need. </p>
<p>Now I realize that for many higher earners there is more of a sense of sticker shock. It is one thing for someone like me with a ~$45K range income to get a piece of paper saying my EFC is, say, $6000 – that some of money doesn’t look all that crazy. It’s probably a lot different when you get a piece of paper telling you your EFC is $48,000. </p>
<p>Now lets say hypothetically that you earn $110K – I might argue that your income is $65K more than mine, but the FAFSA EFC calculated for you is only $42K higher than mine – you are coming out $23K ahead of me. (*Note: the math won’t work for my figures based on income alone - I just made them up for the example – so you will have to assume that we each have asset balances that account for the differences). You would likely respond to that argument by pointing out your higher tax burden, your expenses, etc. The reality is that your annual living expenses are probably already significantly more than my income. </p>
<p>But the point is, the FAFSA system wan not intended ever to benefit higher earning families. The government is NOT in the business of subsidizing all of those years higher earners sent their younger kids to private schools through a discounted college education - rather, the government program is aimed at those of us who fit into median income categories and below. </p>
<p>Again, you have to keep in mind that EFC has nothing whatsoever to do with how much you pay – it is a system that establishes entitlement to student benefits. If you are upset at the number, then instead of complaining about the cost of college, you should be posting about how disappointed you are that your child won’t be eligible for a work study job or able to get a $4500 subsidized loan for his freshman year. But if your EFC is high because of my hypothesized $110K annual income, then you probably aren’t really likely to fret about the cost of a year’s interest on a $4500 loan (after all, your kid can still take out a $5500 unsubsidized loan) — or be upset that your kid isn’t going to be able to spend 15 hours a week doing menial work at college. Rather – the high EFC parents are upset over the costs of prestige private colleges that are rendered unaffordable by their need-only aid policies. </p>
<p>I guess I have to go back to asking: how much of your savings would you have to tap into in order to send your child to an in-state public? THAT is what FAFSA is looking at with your EFC. Yes, the figure may come out to be $48K on the form… but the system and formulae that support it are pretty much based on the assumption that a year of college can be had for $25K or less. Anything you are spending beyond that really is your choice, not something imposed on you by a system designed to help middle and lower income students meet the basic costs to get an education.</p>
<p>EFC is bogus. It’s completely unfair tho those of us who have worked for our success, and thus are in the position that we are in.</p>
<p>I am a student, entering college, in the fall, and because my parents work harder for a living than most people in the world, we get stuck with an astronomically high EFC. I believe we calculated it out be about $90,000. By no means do I feel that we are wealthy. We are just as normal as any other family, and live on fairly modest means. In fact, there are plenty of times that I feel like we don’t have as much money as most of my peers, but that is because my parents save their money. They understand what it means to prepare for the future, and we get punished for it?</p>
<p>Is it fair that then I get no aid from anyone? I thought in the United States, we are all born equal? Then why is it that those of us who happen to find success in life are the ones that get stuck with the unjust end of the deal?</p>
<p>Personally, I despise need based financial aid. All aid should come from one’s personal achievements, something that can be fairly and evenly measured across all students, regardless of economic background. It is only just.</p>
Maybe I can relate something to those numbers. If <em>you</em> were going to go out and buy a new or newer used car, how much would you be comfortable spending? (assume yours is trashed and you have no choice). Probably you would spend more than $6000. But I, with my hypothetical $48K EFC and $110K income would not be looking to spend more than, say, $40K for a new car. It’s all relative.</p>
You have a totally whacked view of the world. Hopefully you are going to a school that will knock that out of you, kid. Are you mad because you don’t get food stamps too?</p>
<p>What does the calculator show if you leave off your assets? </p>
<p>If I leave off assets and run a quick and dirty calculation – for a hypothetical family of 4, one kid in college, I don’t see the EFC hitting 25% until the income is around $130K. </p>
<p>The way the formula works as to income is that it is 0 up to a certain point, an then when you exceed that point, it goes up by an amount up to about 44 cents out of every dollar. So mathematically it is going to start out as a very low percentage for people with median range income (example: for a family earning $60K, under 12%; at $90K, about 18%). </p>
<p>It seems to me that if a family is well off enough to be putting their kids in private schools during childhood, if that family also wants a private college education, they should also be planning with appropriate annual contributions to savings – not planning on a a need-based financial aid system to come in and save the day for them. I can tell you- people like me – the ones earning $50K and under annually – have been acting on the assumption that our kids would grow up an attend our state u’s. The surprise to me, in my income bracket, was that we could even consider a private college – I simply assumed that all private colleges were out of reach, and it was a very pleasant surprise to me to learn that in our income bracket, many private colleges would offer enough financial aid to make attendance a possibility. </p>
<p>I can understand the resentment a more well-to-do family might have when they see us lower-income folks taking advantage of college financial aid policies that allow us to send our kids to private schools at discounted rates, while you are seeing the full cost as being out of reach… but try to keep in mind what your lifestyle would now be and would have been for all of these years trying to live on our incomes. I mean… the envy is misplaced, because there’s more to life than simply paying for college.</p>
<p>It might come as a shock to you, but I am a staunch conservative. So no, I am not mad that I don’t get welfare, but I don’t believe anyone should be getting welfare. This is a capitalist nation in which we live in, and social welfare programs do nothing but put the burden of the poor on the shoulders of those who have the means to support themselves.</p>
<p>That being said, I understand why those programs are needed in this day and age, and that is because there is an abundance of lazy bums in this country who will not survive without help from others. There are plenty of unemployed people in this country who are satisfied collecting their unemployment checks rather than putting themselves back into the workplace. And this laziness is a plague. An epidemic that must be stopped. The first step is to wean these people from the breastmilk that sustains them.</p>
<p>In this country, anyone can support themselves and make something out of their lives if simply have the dedication to do so. My parents came from literally nothing. They arrived in this country with the clothes on their backs. So I look up to them and admire them because everything we have has been earned for through hard work and perseverance. There are plenty of cases of people who came from nothing in this country and have made it even further. Many of the greatest entrepreneurs this country has ever seen came from poor economic standing, without the help of free aid handouts. It is possible. People just need to get off their couches.</p>
<p>First off, high income does not mean that they worked harder for a living than most people. There are few people that work harder than tradesmen, factory workers, janitors, etc and most make close to minimum wage. </p>
<p>Luckily for you, no where costs $90k yet. So your cost is going to be, at the VERY most, 2/3 your EFC for an extremely costly school. </p>
<p>And if your EFC is more than most people’s yearly income and you still can’t manage to pay for a moderately priced school, then you are not living on “modest means”.</p>
<p>If you don’t feel as though you should get help- go to a school where you can get merit aid. Your parents’ money isn’t yours. You should go somewhere that you go on your own dime and merits.</p>
<p>But that’s your problem with the cost of college, not the EFC. If Oprah gives away free cars to everyone in her studio audience, it does not mean that I should be entitled to a discount on a new Prius, no matter what my income. And when I do go out shopping for cars, I don’t set my heart on a Mercedes and then freak out when I realize that the best I can afford is a Honda Civic. </p>
<p>If you can’t afford to send your kid to a $50K college, check the state U. You’ll find that the taxpayers in your state are quite willing to subsidize your kid’s education, if you are willing to take what they are offering.</p>
<p>Also, my reality is that I value college over cars, so I was willing to borrow money to send my kids to college and pay cash for clunkers - not because I wouldn’t like to drive a $15K or $20K car, but because I saved on the car thing to put money into the college thing. If you could consider paying $40K for a car, you could also consider making do with a used vehicle for $10K and putting $30K more into the college fund. </p>
<p>It’s all relative, but the equation depends on individual choices and values.</p>