<p>Has anyone successfully negotiated discounts or additional Merit Money with schools? If yes, any advice to what has worked/what has not?</p>
<p>Many working parents that are also homeowners will not qualify for any aid. Frankly what the FASFA EFC states we can pay is ridiculous. We have saved and most likely D will need to take out the standard Federal Loan but I am hoping not to take anything else. While it may sound silly even an additional 2-3K can make a difference when 1 year cost will be ^$37k.</p>
<p>You can certainly contact the financial aid offices…and try. But unless you have a change in financial circumstances that was NOT reflected on the financial aid forms, you have no guarantee the schools will reconsider their offers need based offers.</p>
<p>In any event…you are not negotiating “tuition”…you are negotiating the financial aid offer your kid receives.</p>
<p>Some schools, most notably ones with larger endowments, will reconsider their need based offers IF your kid has an offer that is higher from a peer school. For example, Williams might look at an offer from Amherst. Harvard from Yale. </p>
<p>Don’t expect Yale to try to match the bottom line cost at your public university. Not likely to happen.</p>
<p>With regard to Merit aid…this is very school dependent. In our experience, schools had CRITERIA for awarding certain merit packages, and they did not budge on those criteria or awards.</p>
<p>And if U of Whats It offers your kiddo merit aid, don’t expect a school that offers ONLY need based aid to increase their need based offer based on that other merit award.</p>
<p>One of our kids applied to two peer colleges…very often students applied to both of these schools. One school was very willing to discuss her financial aid award. The other was absolutely NOT willing to discuss it. Not at all.</p>
<p>As the above posted noted, when students are accepted at “peer” Us, sometimes one of them WILL at least listen to what financial or merit awards your student received at competing U and sometimes NOT. For our S, he was accepted with generous merit at 3 Us. The one he most wanted to attend was offering slightly less merit than another peer U. We told them how much he wanted to attend their U but it would really help us parents if they could slightly increase his merit to match peer U’s offer. We faxed them a copy of the merit offer and though they said they never matched, the decided to raise his merit award another $2500 a year, essentially matching the other offer.</p>
<p>My friend’s S applied to 14 Us because the family needed lots of merit & FAid. They did try to get the best package for their S and did show other awards to the Us. They did get their S (and later D) to attend Us with nice packages. Their kids were top HS students with LOTS of financial need. The public school they attended didn’t send many students to the private OOS U they attended.</p>
<p>I have asked similar questions here in the past and the prevailing wisdom is very discouraging. I will tell you that for my son, I made a call. I explained that the merit award was very helpful but his second choice was a public and I didn’t think I would be able to swing the current net cost. I was told they couldn’t do anything. Then a week later a letter arrived informing him he was being awarded a departmental scholarship. It just happened to reduce my cost to the same as the public. </p>
<p>It is worth a try, but nothing you can count on, as it really depends upon the school, the student and a lot of individual factors. My son did get more money when he asked. But there was no special script other than it was his first choice school and he had a cost differential that was making it difficult to convince his parents. It was not a huge increase, but as you note, every bit counts, especially times four years. So you give it a try.</p>
<p>My advice regarding negotiating is that it is like any negotiating. Be prepared. Factors that may help are desire to attend ( hopefully this has been exhibited throughout the application process, if not visit the school ASAP), a comparable choice that is cheaper, something to offer to the school like interest in a specific major or music or sports or another stand out EC that makes him individually desirable.</p>
<p>Has anyone successfully negotiated discounts or additional Merit Money with schools? If yes, any advice to what has worked/what has not?</p>
<p>I have helped many students increase their merit awards and their FA pkgs, but sometimes the various schools have not budged. Some won’t even discuss the issues.</p>
<p>What has worked…</p>
<p>1) Explaining a financial hardship
2) Stating that the school is top choice, but not affordable…and give legit reasons.
3) showing the school that a PEER school has a lower net cost.
4) showing other merit awards from PEER schools that are larger awards
5) explaining why the child will be a benefit for the school…maybe a female eng’g student (I was able to help negotiate a 1/2 tuition scholarship to a full tuition scholarshp for a female eng’g student…just based on that…even tho her stats weren’t full tuition-worthy).
6) never use the word negotiate…use review.</p>
<p>Wash U reviewed my son’s case a few years ago and gave him a few thousand more dollars. Unfortunately, we still couldn’t get the numbers to work, so he went elsewhere.</p>
<p>My D submitted an additional item for consideration. Instead of just asking for more money outright, she did so by drafting a letter to her admissions contact along the lines of:
~ gratitude for the generous scholarship she received
~ for our family, and OOS tuition, we are a little short of being able to accept
~ your U is by far her first choice, we had visited for two days, taken a tour, shadowed a student to class, etc., and stated that D is a vocal advocate of the school among her peers
~ her application did not require submission of a sample of her work, only the standard application materials (although one can easily tell from her test scores where her strengths lie) - any consideration of the enclosed sample would be greatly appreciated.</p>
<p>Her admissions contact replied that he had forwarded the sample to her major department. A week or two later she received a “good news” letter stating she had received an additional Achievement Award. It is a grant which may or may not be renewable (and I’ll just say it was not a nominal amount) whereas her scholarship is for four years. There was no mention of the sample or the departmental review in the letter, but I can’t imagine funds of that size simply materialized out of the blue. We fully understand it may have only been offered to get her to accept and she may not receive it again.</p>
<p>OP- it’s important not to go down the “we don’t want to take on any more loans” road. The person you will be speaking to in Financial Aid is not someone who makes a million dollars a year- and is likely someone who will need to take out loans to finance his or her own kids education (unless kids can benefit by attending this college).</p>
<p>So a stance of 'unless you give us more money we will have to take out loans" is bound to leave you empty handed. A fact based, “Here are some financial realities that the FAFSA may not have adequately highlighted” is a better way to go. That, combined with a very respectful, “We are asking you to reconsider our D’s aid in light of more generous packages from schools that she’s less interested in than yours” is better than telling them, 'listen, if you think we can pay our EFC you’re nuts. "</p>
<p>The oldest of our kids is now a junior in high school and we won’t qualify for financial aid. All the Ivies are off the table for financial reasons. The only experience we have negotiating prices has come from buying a car, so please take what I’m about to say with a grain of salt. I think you may as well let the college know your walkaway number, assuming you have one that is. (If you don’t have one, you’re kind of up a creek and need to be as solicitous as you can be while you make one last attempt to lower your price). As a general rule, I don’t see any reason you can’t treat negotiating tuition the same as any business transaction - be courteous, professional, and, as best you can, keep emotion out of it. You just need to be prepared for the school to tell you that they’ve already given you their best price. </p>
<p>Negotiating a better price is unpleasant for most of us, my husband and myself included. We’re very hopeful that we can avoid it, but the schools to which our daughter applies will have to offer her enough merit money to bring the total cost within our budget. If their initial price offering is too high for us, we’ll at least let those schools know what we’re willing to pay before we go ahead and enroll our daughter in state school.</p>
<p>Good luck! I hope you get the price down to a place where you’re more comfortable.</p>
<p>What’s different is that car dealers are not privy to the details of all your finances (savings, income, how many other kids you have in college and what you’re paying for them to attend) before they give you their “best price”. So what is in fact a negotiation over a car (you know what you are prepared to pay; they know how much they can afford to sell it for) is a very different “discussion” over financial aid. A car dealer doesn’t care that you are taking care of an elderly relative, leaving you less disposable income than is clear from your W2; a college may or may not care, but it is something you can bring up in a respectful and fact-based way, i.e. “our aid application may not have highlighted some of our financial obligations which reduce our discretionary income”.</p>
<p>But if you’re negotiating merit aid, the college doesn’t necessarily have any idea of your family’s income. It certainly won’t have any idea about ours because we have no intention of filing a FAFSA.</p>
<p>At this point I think we will evaluate all offers. We are still waiting to hear from three schools. As previous posters stated, we can ask as there is nothing to lose. Worse the school can say is no.</p>
<p>Keep in mind you run the very real risk of receiving a new offer with increased merit/aid, basing a four-year decision on this, and the following year the offer returned is what you saw originally, or not even as generous. Unless the entire package is guaranteed four year merit it is subject to change and people have found, negotiating or not, that these can shift. They are left feeling year one was a teaser and the four year total cost was not better at all. Often you can get a feel for the likelihood of this by checking with other parents (hopefully the schools forum is active). If they are prone to this there will be complaints.</p>