<p>Again, as I’ve posted earlier, I’m all for tweaking the need-based formulas, rooting out the cheaters, making strides to a more equitable situation for us 'tweeners (between adequate FA and being able to pay without committing economic suicide). </p>
<p>For all of my career here on cc, I’ve been the champion (or at least tried to be) for middle-class parents who feel slighted by the current FA system. I haven’t changed. I still believe that. My kid didn’t feel that the top schools she was admitted to treated us fairly in the FA process, so she opted for merit aid at a less elite school. We also sent pointed suggestions to Yale and Amherst addressing middle-class inequities and how they ruled out a wide swath of kids in her SES “band” or strata. I’m not denying the stratification exists. A few Pell grant level poor kids, 50-60% from the top 5%, a smattering of internationals, and a few 'tweeners who sell their kidneys, or have grandparents to help. </p>
<p>What I find appalling is the idea that somehow our middle class kids have it worse than that lower SES kid has it. We could pay our FAFSA EFC (but not our Profile EFC) and with that and her in-state valedictorian scholarships and Fed loans meant she didn’t have to worry about going to a good quality college. She knew she could go to Texas or Texas A+M or Texas Tech (her choice between them as she was an auto-admit, auto-scholarship), live on campus, buy her books and supplies, and we could “afford” it. With some pain. Lower SES kids don’t have that built-in safety at that quality level. Or maybe any quality level.</p>
<p>I wouldn’t trade places. Nor would I trade her small-ish, un-prestigious but safe high school for some inner-city nightmare. Did we have what the Sewickley kids had? No. Did we have it as bad as the migrant-workers kids? Not by a long-shot. </p>
<p>curm, the problem is that some instate public schools, depending upon state, have sticker prices that are beyond a middle class EFC. If a 100,000 salary by school standards means that you are upper middle class, and that is what it takes to have an EFC of 25,000 (assuming little assets), and instate COA is now about 23,000, the middle class kid with B/B+ grades (no merit aid at our instate publics for this group) is beginning to get squeezed out of those public schools (esp. where there are few grant dollars to go around).</p>
<p>northeastmom, I’m a big supporter of programs like Georgia’s and Florida’s that make state school possible for those kids. I wish Texas had them, too.</p>
<p>BTW, I do support tax credits for all families for education expenses.</p>
<p>And most state schools around here have horrible need-based aid. As unaffordable as those schools are for 'tweeners, they are probably even less possible for those in the lower SES groups. At least, that’s the case for Texas publics.</p>
<p>I’m helping a kid this app cycle whose mom is in prison and whose dad is a dead-beat. Money is dang near impossible to find for total COA. Good GPA but low test scores and a pedestrian course-load. It’s community college for her, unless I can pull a rabbit out of my hat. (There is a slight chance that one of directional state U’s will come through for her.)</p>
<p>I wonder when someone is going to wake up and see what this doing long term to our country, and be able do something about it other than putting more loan options on the backs of middle class, upper middle class, and lower income kids. JMO.</p>
<p>Curm, that is very sad. That kid, and the middle class, and the upper class kid all deserve an education beyond 12th grade. For us, cc is not even a solution for many students. Where we live you’d need a car and auto insurance and gas $$, on top of the 5,500/year plus cost of books to attend.</p>
<p>Well, cc is only possible because a generous benefactor has set up scholarship in our county for kids like her. 100’s of kids benefit from this very generous family. That and she lives with relatives while mom is in the joint and they are willing to let her stay a while longer rent-free. They took her in middle-school when mom went down.</p>
<p>Until we see some FA grants, this is not a solution for us yet, but 2 private schools, prior to FA offers, have made their COA equal to that of our instate public U. This shows how expensive our public instate option is! My son is a B+ kid with just good, not great ACT scores, and 2 schools have offered enough merit aid to bring the cost down to what our instate is charging without FA (have not seen a package, and do not know what they might offer other than loans). In fact, one of the private schools is about 1,000 less, but we have to factor in plane tickets and our hotel costs, and that adds a good 2,000 to our annual bill.</p>
<p>We felt good about D’s choices when she found auto-merit at a small Indiana LAC that was the same price after merit as UT was. She wanted something smaller than 40,000 kids. :eek: </p>
<p>It’s hard work. I know your kid appreciates your efforts. Keep working it.</p>
<p>Many of those middle class kids don’t <em>have</em> to take out loans. They could go to a lower-cost school, which either has a lower sticker price or where there’s significant merit aid. But let’s ignore that option, and consider only those schools which are 1) so expensive that a middle-class kid’s family may not be able to meet the EFC, but 2)have enough money to offer no-loans aid to low-income families. Which is to say, many highly selective reachy schools with significant endowments. Look at less selective schools, or schools with less money for grants, and both the middle class and lower income students are forced into borrowing. There are many more schools of this type than of the selective, well-off kind. The scenario above really affects a limited number of kids.</p>
<p>I have no idea what the average loan burden would be if schools with no-loans-for-low-income students changed their FA policies so that every student’s aid package started with the same dollar amount of loans, and then filled up afterwards with grants. I suspect that many low-income kids would end up with larger amounts of debt because they or their families would still need loans to cover their EFC. Anyone have these kinds of numbers?</p>
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<p>So true, curmudgeon. I’m sure berry^2 would agree that a school like Sewickley also succeeds in its mission because of its emphasis on moral principles. I like how they emphasize that they are a community of respect, and how their honor code embraces activities both at the school and in extracurricular activities.</p>
<p>How many schools actually don’t have any loans for low-income families only? I found a list [url=<a href=“http://www.finaid.org/questions/noloansforlowincome.phtml]here[/url”>http://www.finaid.org/questions/noloansforlowincome.phtml]here[/url</a>] and I noticed a really interesting tidbit. It turns out that, according to that article, schools like Yale, Williams, University of Virginia, Davidson, Haverford, University of Pennsylvania, Swarthmore, Stanford, and Bowdoin do not incorporate loans into their financial aid packages for any students. The article also says that 72 colleges have no-loan policies for anyone, including a sizeable chunk of those really expensive private colleges this forum is so taken with.</p>
<p>Curmudgeon- I’m glad you brought up Sewickley Academy. I live rather close by and was accepted to attend there for high school(along with Shady Side Academy and Winchester Thurston, all wonderful privates with immense resources). Unfortunately, we simply couldn’t make the tuition work. I’m not complaining about that, but can’t help but wonder where I would be headed if I had gone to such top notch high schools?</p>
<p>I was still able to achieve at a decent public high school, but do feel like the environment I’m in is not guided towards going to college. Very few kids go to anywhere besides community and local publics. My GCs don’t know things about the common app, the CSS Profile, or just general info about top schools. There is a HUGE class difference, and that can account for soo much of those kids’s sucess</p>
<p>lol. I did it yesterday without a typo when I was explaining the loading mechanism of a pump shotgun on the UA-H shooting thread. :eek: Dang near spit up on the screen.</p>
<p>I guess Sewickley is getting some good advertising here as representative of quality private preps. Sounds impressive</p>
<p>Something I think the private preps offer is a high premium on faculty/staff/coaches serving as community role models, generally aspiring to develop citizens devoted to “the greater good”. They are privates, so they can “teach morals” – call it the Marshal Dillon factor if you will.</p>
<p>On another thread, I have emphasized the importance of background checks in screening business relationships; of course, all the more important in teaching communities where the well-being of children is entrusted. </p>
<p>Given the mission of these preps and colleges to develop students to the greater good, and the generosity reflected in the founding endowment of these institutions, the occasional carping of the (relatively) affluent fall flat to my ears.</p>
<p>Had to laugh when I saw your typo - !
Just a side thought, and maybe it veers a bit off topic some but still does come into play. There is one thing that helps even out the field $-wise giving the disadvantage to those high-achieving kids from entire states where the educational system is top notch. IMHO the whole National Merit Scholarship program highly favors low performing states, in that the colleges who award full-tuition scholarships and the like for NMF do so without regard to what the cutoff for the state actually was. Thus, for example, a 210 NM Commended student from New Jersey gets nothing while that same 210 would be eligible to compete for Finalist status in AR, AZ, WY etc…</p>
<p>I just plucked that name out of thin air after I realized how similar it was to posts that berryberry61 had made about his school. Really, it was a completely out of character submissive overture on my part to mend fences but I don’t want it to become the dominant theme of this thread.</p>
<p>Well, I need to go help my sister check on her houseboat. I’m not much in to watersports, but it’ll be that time of year again before we know it. Different strokes for different folks and who am I to judge what others do to relax?</p>