Thanks, this was my point. I know families run the net price calculator, but I don’t think it’s easy as people think to get out of ED if the costs don’t come back as expected. It’s a big hurdle that’s getting bigger and bigger for lower- and middle-income families.
You’re right, that’s not what it says. It gives NO contingency to get out of the agreement. The NPC is a courtesy so you know what you are agreeing to.
Early decision is binding. My kid had to sign the agreement, we had to sign it, and the counselor at his school had to sign it. Schools are not going to sue you if you back out, and some will release you if you call and explain the circumstances, but it is a matter of honesty and integrity. It can also reflect really badly on the high school and affect admission chances for other students.
If the ED agreement means nothing, everyone would apply that way to increase their odds of admission.
There is a LOT of bad information about ED and Financial Aid in this thread… so I really think it’s helpful for folks to go and read this article:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/18/your-money/paying-for-college/early-decision-binding-nyu.html
Some quotes from the article… from a writer who focuses on selective (highly rejective) schools and financial aid and student debt and a host of other related subjects
Here’s a news flash: These supposedly binding offers do not, in fact, oblige you to attend. If you can’t afford to go at the price that the college has asked you to pay, you can back out.
N.Y.U. isn’t the only school providing incorrect or opaque information about early decision. Some say they’ll work with you if your aid offer is insufficient but aren’t clear that you can walk away. Others compose their early decision websites without ever acknowledging that any such thing could happen or that it might be worthy of a Q in an F.A.Q.
If you’re in the thick of it now, with acceptance letter in hand but a troubling financial aid offer, consider two things.
First, and most importantly, you must do what is right for you — and only for you. But there is a right way to ask for more money (or walk away): assume a demeanor of humble inquiry, not entitlement.
… use schools’ net price calculators before applying to see what kind of aid they estimate that you will get if you get in. If the actual offer matches and your family circumstances haven’t changed since applying, it isn’t ethical to walk away because of the price. After all, you were warned.
Fortunately, most people know better. There have been so many people just here on this board who ran the NPC and did not apply ED because they couldn’t take the chance that another school could have come back with a better financial package.
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That was my point above. If a family can afford to attend but doesn’t want to pay that much, they will not be released from the ED agreement.
Ah. Ethics gets in the way.
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There was one student in a prior admission cycle who broke the ED agreement. It was really bad for the high school and the subsequent year, no student was admitted to that school. It really hurt the students the juniors at that time. This student was admitted to MIT after applying ED to another school and broke the ED agreement in order to attend MIT. In this case, the student just changed their mind and it didn’t have anything to do with finances.
My son’s friend had a very low estimated financial contribution. He got a ton of financial aid from USC and a scholarship foundation made up the difference. I think it’s more the people in the middle that get squeezed out - too much to qualify for aid; not enough to afford it.
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I would be curious to see what they have on their actual ED contract. My guess is it is the boilerplate that I quoted, not this verbiage from their website.
Regardless, they can put whatever they want and the fact remains there is absolutely nothing legally binding about any ED contract.
Ethically, you are agreeing to not apply anywhere else ED. You are also agreeing to respond within a certain amount of time of receiving your financial aid package. Your response can be to accept, appeal, or decline. Once you exhaust your appeal, you have to respond. You cannot wait until May 1 and “shop around.”
The meeting you would have with U Penn would be to see if they can reasonably make it work. They let you in ED and do not want to lose you. But in the end, they cannot force you to attend or pay what they say you can pay.
It is also important to note that as an Ivy, U Penn does not offer any merit aid, so it would be especially foolish to apply without checking that the NPC works. That said, NPCs vary widely in accuracy, depending on the college and your circumstances.
My daughter’s top choice was unrestricted early action so, this is kind of moot for us, however, they had two NPC’s. The results of each calculator was $20,000 apart. Her actual financial aid package came out $7000 lower than the lower one. This is a school that does not give merit.
Not all NPCs are equal and they do not constitute an offer so there is no valid contract in a financial sense, only in that you will not ED elsewhere and will withdraw other applications/not open new ones when you get your financial answer.
At a school that does give merit, but does not include merit in the NPC, you can estimate based on the percent of students who receive merit and the average Merit awards. There is nothing I have to go about doing that.
At the end of the day, you should definitely run the NPC. If you do not, you are setting your child up for heartbreak. But the contract cannot be legally (or even ethically) binding because the NPC is not an actual offer.
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It says clearly that:
Should a student who applies for financial aid not be offered an award that makes attendance possible, the student may decline the offer of admission and be released from the Early Decision commitment.
Lawyers have been over this exhaustively. This is not legally binding. There is no meeting of the minds to make it ethically binding either. Not every NPC is equally accurate. An NPC is not an offer…so there is no meeting of the minds
It does mean something…just not what many think. It means you cannot ED or REA elsewhere. It also means that you will have a short amount of time to respond. It means that you will not be able to shop around and compare offers and wait until May 1.
It also means that you run the risk of hurting your child if they get in and you decide you cannot afford it and meanwhile they lost other opportunities.
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Not worthless. You cannot apply anywhere else ED or REA while you have an ED application out. You must appeal or respond within a couple of weeks of receiving your financial aid package.
You will not be able to wait for other offers and comparison-shop and hold off on responding until May 1.
It is just that it is not a binding financial contract. And the NPC doesn’t make it so, There is no mention of the NPC on the ED contract.
Since the NPC is a rough estimate, which often does not include merit for schools that offer merit, and can vary from very accurate to wildly inaccurate, there is no actual offer.
I gave the example above of a school that had two different calculators, and they came in $20,000 apart. The actual financial aid package, at a school that does not give merit, $7000 less than the lowest NPC.
I have seen NPC’s that used information that was several years out of date.
Yes, run the NPC AND look up average merit…to get a rough idea if the school might be doable. Otherwise, you are setting your child up for heartbreak.
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Besides all of this really useful and accurate info that Nemesis_Artemis has kindly posted about ED (thank you, again), the other takeaway is that it isn’t anyone’s place on this thread to tell anyone else under what conditions their child should or should not apply ED or any other path they want to consider. PERIOD.
I agree that it isn’t legally binding, but I disagree with the ethics. You sign your name to an agreement that says I agree to enroll in this school and withdraw all other applications if accepted, that should mean something.
If you ran the NPC, did all your due diligence in making sure you had a good idea of what you are agreeing to, and the school falls short of their own NPC, that’s different.
Nobody should be submitting an ED application with the mindset that they will only live up to the agreement if it matches the number THEY decided and disregard the resources the school offered to make an informed decision.
Otherwise, why wouldn’t everyone just apply ED to their favorite school and hope for the best? That defeats the purpose of ED.
If you had run the NPR, and it came back with a number you knew you could not afford and were not willing to pay, would you have still applied ED hoping it would be more?
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You agree to enroll…if you can afford it.
As I mentioned NPCs vary wildly in quality. Some include merit. Some do not. Some schools offer fairly reliable merit. Others offer only tiny merit. Some offer huge but highly competitive merit. Still others offer no merit.
I believe you would be foolish to apply to a college that you almost definitely cannot afford. You would also be preventing the student from applying to other options that are more likely to work out. You are possibly setting the child up for heartbreak this way. That is the real reason why it is foolish to apply ED to college if you likely cannot afford it.
At the same time, everybody has their own level of risk tolerance. I have a very low level personally.
I used to joke with my granny, who played the lotto that the lotto is a tax on people who are bad at math.
There is a huge range from the school has an extremely accurate NPC that either accounts for merit or the school offers no merit all the way up to wildly inaccurate, basic, out of date NPCs for a school where you have a good chance of getting the merit you need to attend. Some families do not even know what an NPC is.
Who am I to say what percentage risk another family should take? If 30% of students get merit and the average award is $15K and that would make it affordable…is that reasonable risk or unreasonable?
And while I might think a certain percentage of risk is foolish, I would not say it is unethical.
ED has a very high yield—but not 100%. That is because most people apply ED to schools that are their top choice and they are very likely to be able to afford. But if they miscalculated that last part, the agreement clearly accounts for that.
No one said that ED is legally binding. You will not be arrested or sued by the college if you walk away from it. It is a moral/ethical agreement. Mentioning that is interpreted by soma as being judgmental.
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It is ethically binding to not apply elsewhere ED/REA. It is also ethically binding that you must withdraw your other applications once you have a satisfactory financial aid package. It would be unethical to sit on that and wait for other offers to come in.
However, it is not unethical to back out if you feel you cannot afford it (as determined by you).
There is no financial agreement until you have an actual financial aid package.
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I was talking about the last day to switch to ED but that being the case you’re probably still right
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We were able to do the financial pre-read to apply ED1. Keeping this NE specific, I think they do a good job of making sure you know what you can expect. The financial aid offer was pretty spot on.
They are also very clear that merit aid does not stack on top of financial aid. So having an idea of the financial package, nobody should expect that they will get more on top of what the financial package predictions are.
I don’t think it’s just bad for your kid to set them up for disappointment. I think it’s unethical all around to apply ED if you haven’t acted in good faith to understand the financials. It’s unfair to the school, it’s WAY unfair to the families who did not apply ED because they knew they needed more money to make that commitment.
I am not directing this at anyone in particular because I do not know how or why they approached their application decision, but there is an admissions advantage to applying Early Decision. It would be hugely unethical to try to gain an admissions advantage if you are already thinking you would violate the agreement if you don’t get more money than the school’s best resource indicated.
I understand some people do not know there is an NPC or how to approach all of this. That is a different conversation. Operating out of a lack of information is different. I teach at a large public high school and I have students who don’t even know they have to write an essay.
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No, NU only offered these financial aid pre-reads for ED applicants if they submitted their financial info by a certain date (in October as I recall.) (I cannot recall if they allowed for any pre-reads for ED2 folks but def NOT for folks who switched from EA/RD to ED2.)
My sense is that they will share what their total offer may be. If a student receives merit aid, then FA need would be used to fill in the gap but the total aid will not likely go over what they consider your need to be. Merit aid is awarded by Admissions, need based aid is awarded by FA.
In a way, it is almost better to get NU need based aid, because that will increase the same percentage as tuition increases as per the NU Promise. Merit aid does not increase each year.
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Many here are talking about families that do not receive financial aid, or at least not significant financial aid. In that case, the merit aid would be very important to know. Northeastern does offer some fairly significant merit awards.
I don’t really buy the idea that anything in this process is unfair to the college. The college is the more sophisticated party in this. They have all sorts of information and tools at their disposal that he even the more savvy among us do not.
I absolutely applaud Northeastern for taking a step to offer this pre-read, which is presumably more reliable than the NPC. Unless they are including merit aid, it is still going to be somewhat of a black box, however. Some colleges do include merit in their estimations. I think to make any argument that a family has an ethical obligation, the college first has an ethical obligation to accurately estimate the cost.
When you apply ED, you are giving up the right to shop around. If the family wants to be able to shop around and hold off on making a decision, then they cannot ED.
However, I do think it is reasonable to apply if you can reasonably expect enough merit for it to work. The issue is, what might seem reasonable to one group of people may not seem reasonable to another. It really isn’t up to me to draw the line for other families.
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I totally agree and would add that if you turn down a binding ED offer, that school can also contact other schools you have applied to to notify them of this. It can possibly affect other schools from accepting a student as they all operate under the same binding ED process.
I agree that it is unethical. I know for our family, we did not allow our children to apply ED because we knew we had to see all the offers, and know what we could afford the best.
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