Thanks all for the time you have put in to respond. Much appreciated.
@chipperd The colored chart is found at the posted link: https://www.road2college.com/thinking-about-how-to-pay-for-college/
Fwiw, the majority of the high dollar scholarship deadlines are long past, but UAH’s is still available and your ds would be essentially full ride (books and food are not covered.) https://www.uah.edu/admissions/undergraduate/financial-aid/scholarships Honestly, for families where costs are the driving factor, these are the types of scholarships/schools that should be the initial focus of the students’ apps. After those apps are completed and students know that they have solid financial options, then those more competitive scholarships and less transparent total cost schools should take priority. And fewer with highly targeted and well-prepared applications is usually a better approach than applying to more but applying with application fatigue.
The conversation about the what’s tha will be influencing final options should take place before the applications are started. Some families have the luxury of students being able to choose the best school accepted to. Some don’t. Some have to draw a line in the sand and say this is the financial boundary. Way less disappointment if kids have choices in the spring.
@mommdc or anyone else: Can you share, in your experience, which LACs and Catholic colleges you have found to be generous with merit (and/or need) aid?
I have to say I have found this whole thread very informative and have learned from it.
Mine won’t be choosing where to apply until next year, but this gives me a lot of food for thought. It sounds like you really have to research each school to see what they consider in terms of home equity, retirement accounts, etc.
How they come up with the number does not matter. What matters is how much does it cost to you. The same way when you are shopping, you don’t know why/how they determine the price. You just know the price of an item and you decide whether you want to buy it.
I am a little confused in what you were getting at in post #41. Is that how much you will have to pay in direct costs or are transportation, books etc in there too? You are comparing oranges to tangerines with your actual letter and the NPC. The NPC is not gong to be based off of the upcoming year’s cost just as your actual letter is an estimate of cost for the upcoming year (most likely they haven’t set their prices yet.) The questions on the NPC are designed to give you a ball park figure. It isn’t nearly as detailed as the CSS Profile.
I guess if you want full transparency, they would need you to fill out the Profile BEFORE you apply which is illogical. At least with Northeastern you only have to fill out the CSS once unless your finances take a turn for the worse.
@Mom2aphysicsgeek : Thanks for that info. Can you tell me how you found out about schools that offer large scholarships like the one you listed? To late for this first one, but two more coming along. Thanks
It is not too late to apply for UAH’s. At this point they don’t guarantee it, but lots of kids with your child’s stats do still receive it when they apply around this time. I have read the same is true for UA Birmingham (not as familiar with that one.) Huntsville is an awesome town with the 2nd largest research park in the country, Cummings. The university has an excellent relationship with the companies and there are a lot of internship opportunities. It would have been one of our dd’s top choices if it had been able to meet her academic needs. (she graduated from high school at a very high level of language proficiency in one language in particular that she wanted to continue studying. When we meet with the head of that dept, he told her that they didn’t have anything to offer her.)
At this late date, I’m not sure what else is out there. But there is a link on the FA forum that has a list of scholarships at various schools. I also purchased this: http://www.mykidscollegechoice.com/full-scholarship-list/. I have spent hours upon hours researching scholarships. We have 8 kids. 5 of them are now post-high school and we have been able to provide all of them with the opportunity to pursue their post-high school goals and without loans or debt. Merit-based scholarships have been their goal during their college application season. It has been a successful approach for our kids. BUT, their application lists have not come close to resembling your child’s (and I learn more about the process with each subsequent child.)
Fwiw, for your younger kids, I would approach applications with the mindset that deadlines are Oct 15 to Nov15 bc those are pretty common deadlines for competitive merit.
@chipperd - It is not “Too late” for the first one. The kid can take a gap year, and make a new list, or root through the thread of automatic scholarships in the Financial Aid forum and quickly apply to places like UAH and UAB that have a history of handing out their automatic awards after the usual cut-off date. Heck, nothing is stopping the kid from contacting all of the places on that list and asking whether it truly is too late to apply!
“Can you share, in your experience, which LACs and Catholic colleges you have found to be generous with merit (and/or need) aid?”
There’s a separate big thread on merit aid elsewhere here on CC.
But one simple tool to shop for merit aid and need aid is Kiplinger’s best college values database. Includes about 300 colleges.
Most helpful feature for merit aid is that you can search/sort by (i) how much the average merit award is and (ii) what percentage of kids get merit awards. You really need both of those to identify the amount of merit aid that is actually in play.
Notre Dame has a high sounding average merit award of $28k, but only 2% of students get merit awards. Given how high ND’s admit standards are, it really isn’t a reliable merit money school for even very smart kids. But ND is one of the few Catholic schools (along with BC, Gtown and HC) that meet full need and probably has the fat-est need aid available from any Catholic.
Whereas Fordham has a lower $16k average merit award, but 27% of students get awards. A kid with 75th percentile stats at Fordham will get a good merit deal, especially since Fordham gives full tuition schollies to NMFs and NMSFs.
That info can be gleaned from each school’s common data set too.
Yes, Fordham gives full tuition to NMF, but their room and board costs are expensive. (We estimated our costs would be around $20,000/yr.) UDallas and Benedictine College are others that offer large merit.
One problem we have run into with the smaller Catholic colleges is that the number of majors and/or advanced coursework options are often limited. If your student is entering with a only AP type credit and wants a popular LAC type major, then it is probably not an issue. If your student is engineering focused, wanting a less common major, or entering with advanced courses beyond APs, many of the smaller Catholic colleges will not be a good option.
@chipperd In response to the NY Times article that I linked in an earlier post, the author of the College Solution wrote a new article about home equity and financial aid. Here is the link for your review- http://www.thecollegesolution.com/home-equity-impact-financial-aid/ This article contains a link to the spreadsheet of which colleges consider home equity in your financial aid application and at what precentage. One idea suggested by Paula Bishop (the author of the spreadsheet) is to appeal your financial aid award based on your home equity issues. This might be an avenue for your to pursue if Northeastern is your son’s top choice.
Just to illustrate some numbers, here is how some colleges consider home equity:
Profile schools that do not consider home equity at all:
Bard College
California Institute of Technology
Cooper Union
DePauw University
George Washington University
Hamilton College
Harvard University
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Princeton University
University of Chicago
University of Virginia
Ursinus College
Whitman College
Schools that weight home equity heavily in determining financial aid:
American University
Babson College
Bentley College
Boston College
Emory University
Holy Cross College
Lehigh University
Loyola University Maryland
Northeastern University
Sarah Lawrence College
Tulane University
Colleges with a home-equity cap that’s tied to the family income. The home-equity caps below range from 1% to 4%.
Amherst College (1.2x)
Barnard College (1.2x)
Bucknell Univesity (2x)
Cornell University (1.2x)
Dartmouth College (1.2x)
Emerson College (3x)
Haverford College (1.2x)
Kenyon College (4x)
Lewis and Clark College (2x)
Rice University (2x)
Tufts University (2x)
University of Rochester (3x)
Vanderbilt University (2.4x)
Wake Forest University (2x)
Washington University, St. Louis (2.2x)
The above lists just illustrate how some colleges treat home equity, be sure to look at the spreadsheet for more specific information on other colleges.
@chipperd I hope this helps you in understanding your son’s financial aid awards this year and in planning for your other children.
@Mom2aphysicsgeek - I glanced at that colored chart and found it to be ridiculously off for us. At 141K AGI, it says with one kid in college we’d have an EFC of $30,651. In actuality, it was over $51,000. No second home. And no personally owned business at that time. We were prepared to spend $38,000/year for Kiddo #1 and thought that was extremely generous and still couldn’t make it work.
I’m also getting tired of seeing the “Run the NPC” comments. Have you seen the NPCs that have one option for income at $100,000 or more? They don’t even come close to giving an accurate prediction. We found the NPCs to be off a minimum of $3000/year.
@my3kiddos I was only pointing out that the OP didn’t pay much attention when the comment was made that they didn’t see the chart that the other poster said they had posted. The link was pretty obvious. I was not commenting on the accuracy of the link. I actually didn’t even look at the link, just copied and pasted it. But it does seem to indicate a level of effort.
And, yes, I have seen inaccurate NPCs. But, they are better than nothing which is what we had when our oldest was applying. I don’t think they were required by law until 2010 or 2011. Being off $3000 is at least some sort of estimate vs. nothing.
No, there is no way to know exact costs. Even after you get FA packages, you will not know exact costs. You can end up with hundreds of dollars in fees. Textbook costs can be variable. Are students going to need clickers? Different food plans, dorm costs, etc. Will the school accept the student’s health plan or require theirs to be purchased?
There is no simple answer, but if $3000 is going to make the difference between affordable and unaffordable, I would personally take the position with my kids that the school is not affordable bc costs will vary from yr to yr and it is too close to the margin to ensure affordability for 4 yrs.
@itsv wrt appealing decisions based on home equity, it’s worth a try but in a similar situation found the attempt futile and frustrating. One LAC, where my D17 had been offered their highest merit scholarship, told us to sell our home. Another LAC offered to let our daughter take a gap year in which she’d come to school and work for a year to earn money for tuition. In retrospect, best to never to apply to schools if they look at home equity (if you have any). Daughter ended up at a perfectly good state school which gave her merit scholarship and financial aid.
@Mom2aphysicsgeek - That $3000 was the minimum the NPC was off. It only went downhill from there. As for the school that was $3000 off - it did make a difference to us. When DD applied, we knew that the only way it was affordable was with parental loans on top of her loans. An extra $3000 for the first year - and I had a bad feeling it would only go up from there - was essentially the straw that broke the camel’s back. I believe we might have been able to go back to the school and show them the NPC estimate and ask them to come down to that, but at that point we’d found options within our budget and were busy talking to (ok telling) DD about how much better those other options were. 
Kiddos #73
You can’t see the disclaimer from that link, but the color code chart assumes zero assets for the parents. So it basically shows the best possible case scenario.
Good thing about that chart is that it shows how high (even on best case assumptions) the EFCs are. And also shows where the money peters out at various income levels. Also shows how the aid varies by type of school.
Not perfect, but a pretty good quick/dirty to demonstrate the point that the price is going to be higher than you probably thought it was going to be.
“The estimated EFCs in the table below do not take into account your assets, or if you make contributions to qualified retirement plans or receive any form of untaxed income. All of which will increase EFC. Color Codes. All of the EFCs are color coded to give you an idea of whether the student will qualify for need-based financial aid at four categories of colleges. The color coded EFCs in the table are based on national average costs and your income only.”
That does explain the difference. I wonder how many people have glanced at it like I did and got their hopes up that college was going to be affordable? It does give me pause and makes me wonder if we just should have blown the wad and gone on extravagant vacations, remodeled the kitchen, etc. instead of saving.
@M3Kiddos - Be glad you saved. That money will give your kids more options than they would have if you had nothing in the bank. Kids with top grades and scores who don’t care where they study can generally find affordable merit-based options no matter what their parents’ finances. Kids with regular stats whose parents don’t have significant savings, really struggle to find something affordable. Which would be why my own kid attended the local CC for two years, and then transferred to a public in-state U.
Could someone clarify. I went on the National education statistics web site after following this thread. If the scholarships percent from freshman year to all years drops, the school is “front loading the aid”?