Do you feel guilty when your high achieving child admitted to elite schools cannot attend because you are a donut family and his/her friends will attend on FA?
No.
No need to feel guilty at all. You should have had your student apply to schools that offer merit aid.
My student has affordable options as well. I would like to hear from another donut parents who had to make a choice.
Intellectually, no. Emotionally, yes. Just being honest.
No, I honestly don’t feel guilty. We were disappointed, in the very beginning, after the excitement of her acceptances and then the realization we were too optimistic re: estimated four year net COA.
Was it easy to see our child disappointed? Of course not. But we’re not bad parents because we can’t afford ~$150K for undergrad. What’s there to feel guilty about? It’s not like we had a fortune and squandered it somehow.
We try to love them and give them what they need. We can’t give them everything they want.
Cultivate gratitude, if you can.
Almost all of us have to make a choice. This is why it’s so important to talk about the budget before applications are sent out. Some schools that D was interested in came off of the app list after running the NPC. Other schools remained, but she understood that an acceptance was not enough - it had to be affordable as well. I don’t feel guilty about this.
Teaching our children that there is no shame in living within one’s means, is just one of many lessons in this process.
"Do you feel guilty when your high achieving child admitted to elite schools cannot attend because you are a donut family and his/her friends will attend on FA? "
- I did not feel guilty when my D. who graduated at the top of her private HS class did NOT even apply to any Elite colleges, she applied only to those that our research showed would offer her great Merit scholarship. She ended up attending on full tuition Merit award and we paid for her medical school instead. Family is happy and debt free.
I don’t feel guilty at all because I have never bought into the notion that a student must attend an elite school to get an excellent education . I guess it helps that my son never bought into that motion either. I agree with @Cheeringsection that part of job as parents Is teach our kids that there’s no shame in living within ones means. If life there will always be things that you want but cannot have. Might as well learn that lesson early .
I didn’t feel guilty when my son received an acceptance to a school he really wanted to attend. Now it was not an Ivy but it was out of state and another $15,000 more then we could afford to pay. He was sad for a day and quickly got over it 
There are probably a lot of opportunities available to the ‘donut hole’ family than to the full financial aid families. I don’t feel guilty that I earned more than minimum wage because over the years my kids got to participate in sports, go to camp, explore musical instruments, go camping, visit some state and national parks. Money wasn’t falling out of my pockets, but they had opportunities. Many of their friends, both wealthier and financially not so well off, had other choices for college that I couldn’t pay for, but I don’t feel guilty about my kids having to stay within a budget. We’ve had to stay within a budget for all other purchases too, including those camps and sports travel teams and cars and the 8th grade trip to Washington DC (mine didn’t go).
No guilt.
What is a “donut” family?
@Robomama, think it refers to a family that makes too much to receive need-based aid but for whom paying full fare is difficult
The only guilt would be if you had previously set him/her up with an expectation that you would pay for the expensive college but are now backing out. If you had said before application season that s/he can only go if the net price was affordable enough, then there should be no guilt or other issue.
Thanks to CC, I knew going into this that we’d be a donut hole family so I planned accordingly. Thankfully two of my three are very high stats and NM will give them great options, the third is unknown since he’s still homeschooled but hopes to start 9th grade in public school next year. He could be a high stats kid too but he’ll have to work for it.
I do feel a twinge of guilt when I hear other parents saying they are making extra sacrifices (working two jobs, cutting out younger kids travel sports, taking on huge loans) to pay for prestigious schools. We just can’t do it, we’ve been robbing Peter to pay Paul for years to allow me to stay home and homeschool the kids and we’ll actually be saving money when D16 starts school which will allow us to pay off existing debt and be in a much better position to help with grad school.
I also think kids get a great deal of pride, satisfaction, accomplishment -not sure of the best word here- knowing that they earned their way through college through merit scholarships, savings and part time jobs.
Guilt is when you feel bad about something you did wrong.
I wish we could afford to send both girls to whatever school they would like to attend, debt-free.
I wish many colleges weren’t so RIDICULOUSLY EXPENSIVE.
I wish I had a unicorn that lived in my backyard.
Looking at where we are now, even if we had never gone to WDW, Washington DC, or any vacations with the girls, even if we were still living in the same $119k house that was our first house in 1995, I still don’t think we’d be ok with shelling out $60K/year/x2 for the girls.
We were both able to become successful and debt-free by going to school at night, and by going to colleges that were not prestigious (at the time, some are now) on academic scholarships. We just can’t get past the fact that the two of us are doing much better than most of our peers, and it had nothing to do with what college we attended. At least 50% of our peers are ivy/USNWR top 50 graduates.
In fact, the people who are about our equals in terms of life satisfaction, debt to net asset ratio, and personal accomplishments both turned down pre-meds at Ivies. This couple chose a state flagship over an ivy, and a nursing degree over a pre-med degree.
Breaking up with prestige is very freeing.
We recognized very early on that we would probably be a family in this situation, and made the decision to prepare then by saving hard. It was really difficult some years. We set aside roughly $250 to $300 per month for 16 years, and at various times would much rather have had a nicer vacation, or a newer car. But my wife was insistent.
Saving regularly and early–combined with some merit money–meant that D was able to choose among all of the schools she was accepted to. But she knows full well how much effort it took to get her into that position.
Yes, I feel guilt. My children deserved better than we were able to afford. They are going to do fine but I wish we could have given them more options.