My D was recently accepted to MHC. She is turning down MHC due to the (lack of much) financial aid offer. While I had nothing to do with her application or her ultimate choice of college, I have observed this process as a typical (?) parent. My comments are reflection of my observations and from conversations my D and I have had as this process has wrapped up. I hold no ill will (or positive feelings) towards MHC. I had never heard of MHC prior to her application; doubt I will ever hear of it again.
Her biography. Academically, D ACT/SAT is well above the profile listed on MHC webpage, extensive AP background, typical to above average extracurricular activities from an academically rigorous school in a geographically way under represented (at MHC) part of the USA. Parents are upper middle-class (household income <$150,000). She applied to 12 colleges ranging from Ivy League to regional Liberal Arts schools. She was accepted at 8. So, in short, other than the very high ACT/SAT a pretty typical to above average applicant at MHC and at most of the colleges the typical MHC student is applying to.
D was offered regular admission with a financial aid offer that was between 21st Century ($25,000) and Trustee Scholar ($47,000). What caught her eye was the expected loans by D were going to be nearing $100,000 for 4 years of college. As you go down the application process, realize MHC costs at least $64,658 (https://www.mtholyoke.edu/sfs/cost) which ignores spending money and travel costs. The school’s idea of “Family Contribution” was way, way outside the profile we received from other well regarding schools. (Aside: Realize too that the way MHC reports its financial aid offers it reports “loans” as awards. Wow MHC! That is unethical! That is not a MHC award that is a federally provided benefit.)
Summary thoughts: As we’ve wrapped up her application process my daughter sent me two links: (https://www.mtholyoke.edu/admission/class_profile) and (https://www.mtholyoke.edu/admission/staff/admission-staff) which we found interesting. For the first link, note that 49% of the undergraduates come from New England and Middle States. An amazing 31% come from New England alone and 29% are international. Just 22% comes from the West, Midwest, South and Southwestern. OK……that constitutes around 80% of high school graduates in the USA. The second link is for the admissions officers. Note that admissions officers assigned to PARTS of Massachusetts, Long Island, NYC boroughs while entire states in the South, West and Midwest are ignored.
In short, my comments are that as an outsider looking in I found MHC not really interested in recruiting out of its Northeastern base of wealthy kids. There is nothing wrong with that, but if you are not rich and from that area: be prepared. We were knocked over how poor the financial aid offer was. A true outlier.
Was the financial aid offer you got commensurate with the NPC results?
I’ve got the NPC results for 37 schools handy, and MHC’s result is about $2,000 higher than the mean of [tuition + room and board] less grants. (Every school’s NPC breaks stuff up differently, so I do my own schedule with just billed costs less grants so I’m comparing like to like.) So they’re a bit less generous than average, but not hugely so.
@mathprodigy If I understand you correctly, MHC was going to provide approximately 40K in financial/merit aid, with you covering the balance of 25K annually out of income/loans?
If that is correct, for a family income of $150K+, that does not seem like a “true outlier,” assuming it is consistent with the number the NPC produced and there aren’t any unusual financial circumstances that need to be taken into account. It’s about what you’d expect to pay at many in-state options.
With 8 acceptances, hopefully your daughter has attractive options for both fit and price and will happy with her choice.
The alligator mouth is on the other side of $150,000. Income is LESS than $150,000. LESS! (Given the 2 posts read like people from the admissions/financial aid “response team” I assume you work for MHC…maybe her lack of financial aid resulted from math problems at your end?..just a joke…kinda)
No idea what NPC results are. Honestly, don’t care. I posted simply to make an observation that her offer at MHC was so much different and the experience was so much different. Just wanted perspective students know. She is happy with her plans and how things have turned out and very, very happy with her financial aid offers. MHC was just the odd outcome for her. As she looks back at it, from the data on your own webpage, it certainly looks like there is not much recruitment/effort made out of NE-region. Again, that is not a knock. There is nothing wrong with it.
NPC is the net price calculator on every college website. You or your kid should have run them on all her schools before applying to see what the FA packages were likely to look like before applying. If you were “knocked over”, it sounds like you skipped a due diligence step. Surprising for a “math prodigy”.
No one who has posted so far on this thread is from MHC. And people wouldn’t usually use the less sign in this situation — it makes the info you have unusable to determine if the award makes sense. If you make $145k or you make $10K, both are under $150K. Also, MHC draws students from all over the country. My kids from the Midwest both applied —neither attended for various reasons. MHC is one of the “7 sisters” women’s college and are quite well known and respected, so your ignorance is showing.
Not sure why you are so bitter. Did your kid need 9 acceptances with flawless aid packages instead of 8? I know posters who needed quite a lot of aid who got into MHC and got good aid packages. Did you appeal the aid package to see if it could be improved? Or are you just spouting off even though your D wouldn’t attend with a better aid package?
My D is a sophomore at MHC and is not from the Northeast. And she has friends there from all over, Louisiana, Florida, Michigan, Oregon, Washington, etc, in addition to the New Englanders. We have observed that many athletes are from New England and we envy those parents who get to see their daughters compete more regularly. At any school I have seen, the regional bent of a school is more a result the desire of many kids to attend school near home than the school’s interest in recruiting close to home.
IME, loans were definitely part of the packages we have seen from different schools. I don’t think that is unusual or “unethical”, just part of the full picture for families looking at expenses.
If you have other children who will be applying in the future, you really may want to check out net price calculators at the schools they are planning to apply to. They are great tool that the Federal government has required colleges make accessible to families in the college process. https://collegecost.ed.gov/netpricecenter.aspx
Good luck to your daughter and congrats on great results!
I ran the NPC for us ($120k/ yr income) and our EFC was about $30k. I would be thrilled with the aid you received.
Most aid offers I’ve seen include $4000/yr in student loans. It’s right there in the NPC.
- My daughter is a firstie and loves Mount Holyoke.
- I ranted at least once or twice at schools that listed loans as financial aid, so I understand the point, but many other colleges did the same, maybe it’s a New England school thing, we became accustomed to it.
My wife simply made a chart, that listed the Financial Aid Grant, Loan, Merit and what we would pay. And then we compared apples to apples. - We are exactly middle class, and with her financial aid, it is about $3,000 more than U-Mass, where 37 of her high school class mates attend, and where my wife and I attended. We feel very fortunate for the opportunity she has there.
- Mount Holyoke kicks Smith’s butt in financial aid, check out their thread.
Mt. Holyoke gave my daughter a weirdly generous package of scholarships and need-based grants, with no loans and no work study. In fact, one of the “con” factors when we analyzed it was that we couldn’t even guess at what she would get for the second year because the “need based” aid just didn’t tie to anything including our EFC and the NPC. I guess my point is that our experience was not consistent with what you are reporting, but it was similar in that it wasn’t what we expected. Sadly for my wallet, she felt more comfortable at Smith, and that’s where she is (doing very well) today.
Most Moho students and alums we have run into say the school is worth it, regardless of what they are paying.
My colleague’s daughter just got a huge scholarship from MHC. Schools have to make a decision about who they are going to spend their money on. It seems like your child wasn’t a priority for MHC. Luckily she’s gotten excellent deals elsewhere so what’s the problem?
@Akqj10 A student I know got a full ride from Smith. They really wanted her so they paid.
I’m not sure of your point. You state your daughter would be a “pretty typical to above average” MH applicant. And yet you are upset at a package that was “only” somewhere between 1/2 to full tuition?
Was this a full merit aid award?
My daughter was accepted to 8 colleges.
Received merit awards of $25,000-$30,000 at 4 colleges; $10,000 at one college; a full ride at one university; and zero at two schools that do not give merit aid to any students.
We are NOT from New England.
Our experience is that MH is right in line with most of the other schools DD was admitted to.
The total costs of MH were also within a few thousand of every other private LAC she applied to.
I’m sorry your experience was not positive for your family…but it has been positve for many.
My D and I found Moho to be on point for financial aid, actually a bit more generous than like schools. Smith didn’t come close although she was an early write.
@pauler80020 your answer is preferential packaging. There was a reason they wanted your daughter. You may never know the reason or maybe you already know the answer. Either way, its a more common practice than some are aware.
We don’t qualify for financial aid outside of a federal student loan. In every “financial award” letter my daughter received (she applied to and was accepted at more schools than yours). The student loan was listed in the letter along with merit aid and only 3 of her schools were in New England. My impression is this is a common practice. I will say Mt Holyoke was incredible generous with merit aid for which we are extremely grateful. She received more there than anywhere else and the majority of schools are peer institutions.
Janwel, Mount Holyoke offers 3 times as many full rides as Smith, just one student doesn’t tell the whole story.
When standing in the middle of Mount Holyoke’s Campus, I would be hard pressed to think of a more diverse group of people anywhere in New England other than maybe Harvard Square. It’s one of the few colleges where the brochure photos match the reality of the student population.
I was bummed to read you negative post because we are such big fan’s of Mount Holyoke from our experience. Maybe you can write them so they can avoid any confusion in the future.
MHC fans fancy themselves as being tolerant…but they are really not open to any (even faint) criticism of the school. They seem to always attack the messenger instead of admitting that there is room for improvement.
@Akqj10 -“When standing in the middle of Mount Holyoke’s Campus, I would be hard pressed to think of a more diverse group of people anywhere in New England other than maybe Harvard Square. It’s one of the few colleges where the brochure photos match the reality of the student population.”
That was our impression too. My D plays a sport that is generally considered a very “white” sport. One of the things she loves about MHC is that her team is not only warm and welcoming but notably diverse. We really see it when they play other schools.
@CollSearchSite, there is always room for improvement in any human enterprise. Insert shrugging emoji here.
I think most people have had a positive experience with Mt Holyoke which they shared in this thread. The OP did not. Not sure anyone was being intolerant as one poster suggested.
CollSearchSite “Maybe you can write them so they can avoid any confusion in the future” isn’t that admitting that there is room for improvement, thats what I mean, if it can across different, my bad.
I don’t mind paying a little extra for URM students, and I don’t mind paying for some full rides for some students who would have gone to Harvard if not for a full ride, but I don’t want to pay some of the OP’s tuition so my daughter can sit next to a classmate from Ohio, or where ever from the midwest they are. The money has to come from somewhere, the professors need to get paid somehow. It seems as if we were expected to pay about the same, and if they want to pay less, we would have to pay more.
We never looked at any colleges outside of New England and New York. We can not afford to fly for visits, or travel back and forth. That’s why most students go to college with in 4 hours of their home. When Kenyon wait listed her ( only school we did not visit ) I never thought, oh they picked on her because she is from New England, I know they didn’t let her in because she needed financial aid. I never thought, they should give her more financial aid since she isn’t from that region, am I missing something? They can give preference to geography in admitting students, but should they make it cheaper just because of where you live?
I was wondering if the OP can list her students results to help others on this site learn what similar school offered to help them in the future.
OP here. Sorry I have not posted a follow up, but summer is busy and until I visited my D last weekend, I had not thought about this post. Responses to me original post above fall into 3 types.
- Clearly MHC admissions people monitoring boards and trying to sweep away any questions. I will ignore them.
- Comments from MHC parents that were generally happy with their aid and a few that seemed more reflective and basically said they observed that same thing we did. Namely, financial aid seems like a crap shoot. In my case, I think its an implicit desire by MHC to not recruit the wrong kind of kid. But, whatever the cause, as I noted in OP, MHC aid was a real outlier for us. My OP speaks for itself.
- Most interesting comments were basically (as Akqj10 and LeftofPisa directly above say) “No, MHC is super diverse and you’re wrong” Akqj10 (directly above) basically says, I am willing to pay for some kinds of diversity, just not others. I find this reasoning the most interesting because it: Ignores the CITED data from the MHC own admissions office that clearly states MHC draws 22% of its students from the South, Midwest and West COMBINED!
A quick google search shows why this lack of diversity shocked us: New England area graduated about 162,000 seniors in 2016 (NE Board Higher Ed) while the state of Texas graduated 350,000 (TX Ed Authority).
You tell me to “look around the campus and see the diversity”…ok. I will tell you that you have a student body that in no way is diverse and does NOT look like America now or where it is going. You don’t want to pay for some kid from Ohio? Fine, but your kid is going to become an adult and never have talked with a working class kid from the Midwest that worked for the Trump campaign. While I am sure many of the readers first thought when they read that was “Good!” , I would respond that you really do NOT value diversity of view points and you want confirmation of your world view. You want something, but it certainly is not diversity.