Your $350,000 a year income is about 6 times the average family income in this country. SIX times the average.
Get over it…you are wealthy.
You also have $1.9 million in assets…but clearly you don’t want to part with those assets to fund college for your kids. Choices, choices.
It is a shame you didn’t really take away anything from the threads from over a year ago. IMO there is no reason for the petulance. There should be zero surprises here. Being from OS, the US college system is a bit of shock that you usually process a year or 4 in advance. Do you pay for private high school?
Even if you don’t think it is fair, the formula is the formula and people with EFCs of $107 do not get need based aid. You have a lot of options if you don’t want to pay the full $75k per year but getting need based FA is not one of those options. It just won’t happen. Even if you know people who say they received merit aid from Ivies or a break because they pay $1000/mo as an insurance premium (and really MANY people do), I think you will be disappointed when you try to get that same deal.
You asked a simple question, is the $107 per child or for the family. It’s per child.
I am not shocked. I am a bit disappointed by higher EFC than I expected. My twins though were shocked when they got our EFC in their email.
Our kids go to public school. We live rather simple life, no particular luxuries. Never had a new car, mow our lawn, fix our house, cook our food, pack our lunches. Our kids don’t know what our income is or how much assets we have.
@Al73 We, too, live modestly and have the assets you have. We buy previously used cars and drive them until they die. We bought a smaller house in a pricey neighborhood with great schools (and yes with very high taxes!). We even buy refurbished iPhones! But yet we then have the money to spend on college if we like.
Most of our neighbors in their $2MM houses are noticeably NOT sending their kids to full priced private schools. And I hear them all complain about the price of college and how they are so glad for X school where their kids got merit or the state schools where the price is lower. So, they either don’t think college is worth $75k per year or they don’t have the funds because they’ve spent so much on their stuff. Perhaps your neighbors who you think have all kinds of money really do not.
it’s a personal decision. You part with your money or you do not. I hope your kids have schools on their list that are more reasonably priced or you’ll have two choices - pay full freight or the kids take a gap year and you reevaluate.
Well…time to plan for college costs. As I said a year ago (check your older threads), the single most important thing for parents to do is let their kids know the annual college budget. Sure, apply wherever…but the kids need to know that if the money is not forthcoming from the college…the school will need to be jettisoned.
Are you prepared to do that? In 3 years more, you will gross $1,000,000 more income. Can’t you take $150,000 a year out of your $1.9 million to pay for college? That would be $600,000 out of the assets over 4 years. You would still have $1.3 million, not including anything you can add out of current earnings. And you would still be able to add to your assets once your kids are out of college.
If not, then you need to have a very serious talk with your kids. NOW.
If your retired teacher had $40k annual pension and retired at 65 he or she is already worth $1 mil. Most of teachers and police officers in saburbian NJ retire with annual pension close go 100% of their pre-retirement salary and they become eligible for full pension after 30 years or service. They are also eligible for the same health insurance they have when they work with no premiums. Medean salary of a teacher in my school district is close to $80k. So do the math how much they are worth and who is truly wealthy…
I work in NJ and have several friends who are retiring. No…they are not worth 3-4 million right now, and they are definitely not getting the same health insurance that they received while employed.
The public schools in NJ changed the health insurance for retirees. Yes …there are no premiums once retired, but the health insurance is different and not as good as what they had while employed.
This is getting off topic. Your $350,000 income is over four times that of the median teacher in your district. Get over it.
In addition, don’t generalize. Teachers near you might get health insurance for life, but that is not true everywhere. When I retired, if i had wanted my district insurance, it would have cost me over $9000 a year. Not free. Oh…and I doubt I would have gotten a rebate from any college.
But this isn’t about policemen…or teachers. If you think these jobs are so fabulous…get your certification and take a HUGE cut in pay and join the ranks.
This is about YOUR income and assets, and that you won’t qualify for need based aid, or merit aid that considers financial need.
You don’t have financial need. At all.
I believe your income is in the top 5% maybe higher. @ucbalumnus where would a $350,000 annual income place this family?
ETA…you probably should have consulted a financial planner and put some of your $1.9 million into qualified retirement accounts. You do know that teachers and policemen pay into their retirement funds. Right?
Why are you discussing teacher salaries and retirement benefits. YOUR family makes $350k a year and has assets. Period. That is what is going to determine your kids college costs, except for merit aid. Period. No discounts for asking at full pay, no merit schools. Period.
You are wealthy. Be very grateful you can afford to send your kids anywhere. I get not wanting to spend 70K each, I wouldn’t either, but if you have Ivy level kids they can get really good merit going down a tier in schools.
This is coming from someone that makes 45K/year, has no pension and has to get two through college. S20 is not Ivy material, so a low EFC does not mean much. Most schools do not meet full need so we’re still looking at about 30% of my gross income in college costs/year after need based and merit aid at state schools.
Where did you come up with such projections? We are both salaried employees. Our income in few recent years is abnormally high due to greatly appreciated sock options I had gotten before as part of my compensation. It is not feasible for my company stock to grow as rapidly. So I expect our income in few next years will gradually drop at least by 1/3.
Instead of telling our kids price limit we chose different approach.
We encouraged them to excel at school, SAT, clubs, etc. to really stand out academically and apply to best colleges with Rutgers as the only one safety college. I am pretty confident they will get into Rutgers. Regarding other colleges we don’t know. Some obviously are extremely selective like MIT or UPenn and probability of getting there is like winning a lottery. So there is no point to discuss how much we are willing to pay until they are accepted and get full package. And then we will sit down and evaluate all options, what is worth the price and what is not.
Despite what you are saying our friends who are in more or less similar financial situation (actually better then ours since they all have only 1 kid in college, we will have two) and whose kids got in Ivy league school, none of them pays really sticker price. I don’t know what their EFC was, but all of them got discount, some bigger, some smaller but all get some discount.
YOU said that you make $350k per year. Any reasonable person would agree that $350k x 3 = over $1 million. We’re using the information that YOU provided.
And unless you have actually SEEN their financial aid package with your own eyes and have seen their W2’s and non-retirement account balance, you don’t really know anything. Many people who have a large amount of investments have a large chunk of it in qualified retirement accounts that don’t affect their ability to get financial aid. I would definitely believe that someone who makes $100k a year and has a $1.9 million retirement account and $50k outside of retirement accounts would get some need based aid at some of the most expensive colleges, but that does not describe your situation.
As I said our income will drop in coming years. We will not gross $1mil in 3 years. Maybe in 4 years. And $250K in NJ with three kids and two of them in college is not that much. We are not poor but we are not wealthy.
With an EFC of $107k you don’t have to wait to know what your ‘full package’ is going to be, at least at need based only schools like MIT, JHU, and Penn, all of which you mentioned. Go to their websites and get the COAs for 2020/21…that’s what you are going to pay. If only 2019/20 COA is out there take that number times 3-5%.
If you aren’t going to pay those costs, why let your daughters apply there? It’s a recipe for heartbreak and resentment, especially now that they know their EFCs and could, should they want to, figure out the income and asset combinations that give that result.
If your friends are truly full pay parents for their college kids, they are not getting some magical discount from an Ivy League school. If you believe them, please PM me, I have a bridge.
You already have nearly $2 million in non-retirement assets. You most likely have some home equity. You will be making between $250k and $350k per year. You may not be Oprah Rich, but you certainly are wealthy. I’m done arguing this point. You are so ridiculously out of touch with reality with your continual insistence that “no one pays retail” in your world of non-wealthy multimillionaires who really are dirt poor if they have to use any portion of their cash flow or significant investment account balance because they live in NJ, which everyone knows is unlike every other state in the nation, with more insider information about how the NPC’s of all of these schools aren’t accurate for the working poor like yourself and how, if you had to pay anything for college, you would be risking destitution. I wish your daughters well and I hope that they get into schools that are a great fit for each of them. Despite everything else that I said in this post, I really do mean that.
Have you run the net price calculators for MIT, Penn, Hopkins, and the like? Have you? Folks have been suggesting this to you for over a year.
My understanding top private colleges rely more on CSS profile rather than FAFSA. I did not get CSS EFC so I assume it does not exist. Even CSS profile does not take into account special circumstances. For instance, we could only use “Other” option to specify that we support both of our parents in our home country and pay their rather large medical expenses.