@socaldad2002 I think there are not just “some” parents but many who definitely believe providing a college education for their kids is not an obligation.
@socaldad2002 So you really don’t have any issues with kids accepting full rides? Whew. Glad to hear that! I was puzzled there for a bit- see, we saved for college for our kids and gave them a budget that included zero loans from student or parents and they ended up with one full ride and one almost full ride. I was trying to puzzle through why I’d feel guilty about that.
If I’m reading between the lines correctly, you don’t like the idea that folks who have had significant financial difficulties - or even just those poor people- may be offered things like pell grants or financial aid to cover their costs while other people - who work hard- have to cover the costs for themselves and others. If I’m reading between the lines incorrectly then I do apologize.
@gallentjill the OP didn’t say she saved some money for college but had to use those funds for a financial hardship. She said she “didn’t save a dime”. So my question was “do you feel that it’s a parent’s responsibity to fund at least part of their kid’s college education?” Some may not feel that it is?
I think personal financial strategies are irrelevant now and are not part of this conversation. And this is coming from someone who is paying full price for elite private vs free ride at lesser ranked school or instate for CA public Ivys. I absolutely don’t think parents need to have a skin in the game paying for college if they can avoid it. My taxes are paying for instate opportunities that my DD decided not to take advantage of. I would have absolutely no guilt if she took free ride at Alabama or few others that was offered to her as NMF. This is marketing strategy for those schools if they attract students that otherwise will not even look at those schools.
@socaldad2002 Agreeing with @gallentjill
We had $6K set aside for college for D1. Nothing set aside for college for D2 because we used what little we had saved for private high school (which she attended on scholarship at a great discount).
D1 went community college to state flagship. D2 went to an OOS public on full academic scholarship. We are so lucky we were able to manage.
People might find it hard to believe, but we were not paying any attention to soaring college costs. Too busy with what life was throwing at us! How are we going to pay for those braces, x2?! I had it stuck in my head the days gone by when one could work their way through college. I was absolutely shocked that our in-state option was $30K per year for tuition, room and board. That’s affordable?!
So, yes, I can completely understand the OP thinking her kid would attend a NE school and then find out, late in the game, what the actual cost will be & the challenges to coming up with that kind of money, later in life.
@socaldad2002 I’m confused. Are you really suggesting that there is something wrong with not paying for college if you don’t have to? I just can’t understand that thinking. The OP’s kid will have full ride opportunities by virtue of being NMF. There is no reason for her to feel guilty in taking the full ride.
To the OP -Congratulations to you and your daughter on her academic success. You are not a bad parent or wrong in any way to encourage your child to seriously look at the merit. It is about return on investment and even if you had the money many of the big merit schools are still a better fit and a great value. Figure out what you can afford and build a list from there. Add in those big merit schools - keeping an open mind since we found they had a lot to offer- and also some reach schools that might be able to meet your financial need if she gets in. But make sure that she loves her safety and doesn’t see it as a last resort or participation prize. Your dd will find brilliant peers at those big merit schools.
Personally we are from the northeast and my dd is a freshman Alabama. Despite what some of the posters here believe ( @socaldad2002 ) she is not doomed and it is not poor child whose parents made her go to a “lesser” school…oh the shame it is “so sad” to see. My dd is thriving, made the choice on her own to go south to UA, and has met amazing top students like herself. What started out as “take a look and keep an open mind” ended with her deciding to NOT apply to tippy tops at all - although her stats and ECS would warrent an application and put her in the pool. She has landed an exclusive, limited internship back in the northeast for the summer and she feels that being from an underrepresented school/state it gave her an edge - or at the very least a second look. Her skills sealed the deal and UA on the resume did not hinder her. For the posters questioning where all those great students are who are at Alabama when their rankings are in the 100s, it just shows how meaningless the rankings are and how insignificant the differences are between 30 and 120 when you are talking about 4,000+ colleges. There are over 2,900 students in her freshman class (40%) who came in with over a 30 ACT, a larger number of students than the entire freshman class at Harvard. There are more than 500 National Merit Scholars at UA. I am not implying that Alabama is in the league of Penn and Harvard but it IS filled with amazing students and should not be dismissed without at least exploring what it has to offer. The same can be said for all of the large “big merit” schools.
It is so frustrating to read threads like this where people condemn and judge parents for not financing prestige or do not have the means to finance the out of control costs of college. Finances are a very personal thing with 1,000 different scenerios. We would have qualified for “some” institutional aid at Penn (the only Ivy my dd considered) it would have still been almost $150,000 more than Alabama (where we pay R&B and travel). We are in the situation where we HAVE saved for our children and did have a budget for them. Most of our friends/relatives who are in our income bracket have not been here long. When I plug in our home equity, salaries, and savings from 3 years ago we would have qualified for more aid and plugging in our financials from 5 years ago MUCH more. We have worked our way up over the past 25 years with 2 working parents but the early years we were in no place to be saving at a rate to make the $150,000 insignificant. We have saved since the day they have been born and we have enough to send each of our kids to our state flagships. This still leaves a large gap to be funded for “prestigious” schools and we were struggling with determining what was fair and reasonable to pay. It is worth it to pay 32k/year to pay for Pitt or Penn State vs. $14K/year at Alabama? Is Villanova worth 65K/year and large loans when Alabama is tuition free.Turns out we didn’t need to make that decision. Instead our dd made the decision herself to take the money and attend an amazing school. She hasn’t looked back. It certainly doesn’t mean that we don’t love our daughter or that we have failed her in anyway by not discouraging her from going to a “lesser” school. The OP may find that her daughter LOVES one of those safety merit schools and good for her, she’s earned it!
Yes, you’re crazy–crazy smart to look at those NMF full rides! (Two of my kids have taken them.) Since your kid wants to go into medicine, she will be taking on debt later. Don’t add to it now. Also, her gpa may likely be higher at the less prestigious school, where she could be top of the class --rather than middle of the pack at the more competitive school.
Fwiw, I know some upper middle class and even wealthy parents who make their kids pay for college. The parents can easily afford to pay, but it is their idea that once the kid is 18, their parental financial duty is finished. Also, they believe it builds character/responsibility and makes the kid invest in his/her own career. The parents paid for their own college, and they think their kids should do the same. (I disagree with this–H and I paid for our own schooling with work study, summer jobs, scholarships, and loans. We didn’t want our kids to struggle or have any debt, so we are paying. I don’t think some of these parents realize how much harder it is for kids today to put themselves through school.)
Did I miss something? OP’s daughter is still a junior and is merely trying to come up with a list of colleges to apply later this year. A lot of posters here sound like they are helping OP decide between full ride vs full pay. Keep in mind OP does NOT have offers in hand yet; but rather she is putting together a list. I don’t see any harm of applying to a range of schools from Harvard to Bama that will later offer all of those options. The only downsides are extra effort and application fees, but in the context of $100k savings those are small costs.
@socaldad2002 I don’t see the OP saying they think their kid should be able to go to a highly ranked school for free or almost free. We get people out here with no savings (and no great excuse from what I can tell in some cases) who are angry that their kids can’t go to a high priced school. I share a bit of your frustration with that complaint. But this OP is looking for ways to leverage a kid’s good stats at lower ranked schools to cover the cost of the education. I see no issue with the OP’s approach to this. I think you are beating the wrong horse.
@jzducol the other downside beyond the effort and fees is that dd falls in love with Harvard or other schools that might be out of reach financially for the OP and is unable to fall in love with her safeties. OP needs to run the NPC and then build the list from there. When I was house hunting, I figured out what I could afford first before house hunting and then
built our wish list from there. I didn’t start at the McMansions that were being newly built and think that it didn’t really matter to just look and the see how much I could afford. That would have made the slightly older, much smaller, colonial that we could afford seem so disappointing and lacking. As it stands, I have had a great ROI and the house has more then met our needs with no envy or regret over not being on those oversized, overpriced prestigious houses (that have not risen in value as much as our more modest neighborhood over the last 18 years). Would we have been happy in one of those houses - I’m sure, but we couldn’t afford it and no lender was going to lend us the money to get into a $800,000+house on our salaries. We have also been very happy in our much less expensive house.
It is smart of the OP to be tackling this now instead of this time next year like so many of the students posting here about how to afford their dream schools. The OP’s daughter is in a great position in that she will have more affordable options if she is a NMF.
There is no dream college. There is no dream spouse. There is no dream career or job.
The sooner teenagers come to grips with reality, the happier and easier their path will be. Life is a series of trade-offs; the dream career means living overseas for three years-- and not in Paris, but in some dumpy town 50 miles from a decent restaurant. The dream spouse is handsome (or gorgeous) and talented and loving and hard-working- but his parents are on the verge of their third bankruptcy. You know where I am going with this.
It’s not a dream college if you get in and can’t afford it.
It’s still unclear to me. What is your financial strategy to pay for your kids college education when they are young? Or are there so many other costs of living that college tuition is the least of your worries and you will cross that bridge when you get there?
I look at my divorced parents situation (both college dropouts) who didn’t have a lot of money but mom set aside a small amount of money when she could to help fund our college. She wanted to make sure to give us what she didn’t achieve, a college degree. Unfortunately, my sister only ended up at a community college with an AA degree and i was the only one in my immediate family to graduate from college. My mom paid my tuition and books, i paid for room and board with a part time job. Granted this was the early 90’s and In state school tuition was MUCH cheaper than today but even so, my mom had the foresight to set some money aside for college and I have done the same with my kids. This is why i ask the question as i did.
@socaldad2002, why do you care?
Some people have strategies. Some don’t. But nobody is forcing anybody to provide merit scholarships or institutional fin aid. And nobody is forcing any family to go scholarship hunting or not. If schools/donors want to provide scholarships/fin aid, that’s their prerogative, and if parents want to save or spend, that’s their’s. It’s a free country (as of now).
And yes, that means that kids in different families will experience different situations, but that is true about everything. No two kids in different families will have the same family resources, family warmth, family contraints, family culture, etc.
@bamamom2021 The similarities between buying a house and getting accepted to selective programs are next to none; in buying a house you are in control of making an offer but in college admission you are lucky to get an offer. Savvy people like OP and her daughter know how difficult the process is and how foolish falling in love with a school/program without an offer would be.
Lots of times what you think college admissions should be turns out quite different when results are in; nobody can predict where she will end up without seeing her whole application package including LoRs. Its better to make decisions when you have options than limiting your options before results are in.
@socaldad2002 I’ve been saving money in my kids’ 529 accounts since they were two years old. What’s in there is a mere drop in the bucket of what college tuition costs. It’s silly to hammer on people who don’t have what you perceive to be the ‘correct’ amount of college savings. There are a million reasons why a family can’t entirely fund a college education. If you’ve had everything go right in your life, so that you are able to fully fund it, congrats to you! Fortunately there are some opportunities for people who haven’t been so fortunate (and spare me the spiel about old cars and small houses that I hear so often on CC, because I did all that and still didn’t make enough money to save any more than I have).
Now that my kids are working in their real careers, done with their 20’s and grad school and have settled down… and I see where their HS friends have landed and what they are doing, I have a different perspective than I did when my kids were in HS.
I know people who did not save for college. They had nice lives- traveled, the kids saw all sorts of neat places, one family has not one vacation property but two (beach and mountains) and they qualified for zero need based aid. For the most part- their kids figured it out. Lived at home and commuted to a non-flagship public U; took the bus, kept the HS job at the mall or restaurant to fill the gap between what their parents could swing every month and what it costs. One kid went overseas- a college nobody has EVER heard of, but it was cheap and she did get into a semi respectable grad program. One kid did college on the 6 year plan- worked almost full time, went to college either part time or semi part time, and is doing fine professionally. One got accepted to one of the military academies and has had a stellar career-- fulfilled his obligation two years ago but is staying as a career officer even though he’s had multiple deployments in some awful, dangerous places. One borrowed to the max-- but has an incredible job and is paying it back on an accelerated time frame.
My point is that even though these kids didn’t have optimal situations from a financial perspective- and for SURE their parents didn’t prioritize education the way I did (living beneath my means, always focused on saving for my kids education) that doesn’t mean the kids are doomed to a life of poverty or homelessness. In fact- these kids are fine. One of the mom’s confessed to me that she feels some level of guilt that her kid had so few options for college but that “giving them everything” meant so much to her when they were growing up since she’d been raised by a single mom and there was never enough.
So I get it. Whether someone just never has enough cash every month to fund a college account, or whether illness, divorce, special needs child, breadwinner getting disabled… life happens. Or- living large.
But it really doesn’t matter. The incredible versatility and strength of our higher ed system means that a kid who is hellbent on getting a college degree can get one. And the rest of us can help the OP by laying off the guilt (it’s late in the game to develop an 18 year funding plan) and just come up with some practical strategies for moving ahead.
@jzducol Everyone is well aware of the competitive nature of college admissions and stark the difference to any other savings draining purchase like buying a home. However, the fundamental advice of knowing what you can afford before shopping is the same. I was not responding at all to the difficulty of top students earning one of those top seats, but rather the costs. You implied that there was little to no downside to keeping all options open and “applying to see what you get”. This strategy has a very big downside that shows itself on the boards this time of year with students and families having to turn down the amazing offer because they can’t make the finances work. Heartbreaking and frustrating to others who had the finances worked out but were not given the chance. The OP is already second guessing themselves. Imagine the conflict when their dd gets the golden ticket to Ivy U. and then can’t afford their EFC. Of course her dd knows not to fall in love with Harvard, but what happens when that application turns into an acceptance and they have to say no, you are headed to Ole Miss or Alabama or directional state U- that is the danger. Why would anyone even spend the time, effort, and hope when it is not an option even if you “win”. The schools have the tools available to everyone to predict the individual family costs and the OP knows their own financials. Even if they are not full pay at the highest ranked schools, the OP indicated that they could not afford their EFC. It makes no sense when there is NO money set aside and no fairy Godmother or rich relative to pay to put the heart, work, and time into those reach admits when you know can’t afford them, even with generous aid. If this changes or the OP finds something different, of course they can reach for the stars.
The costs limit the options, not the student’s application – that is a whole different conversation that also begins and ends with LOVE your Safeties!
@bamamom2021 You are assuming full ride Bama is much more of a sure thing than Harvard. The fact is college admission can turn out to be full of surprises. I have seen kids being turned down for flagship scholarships while being offered other options including at tippy tops, then the choice becomes full pay public vs private (perhaps with some FA), a whole different set of considerations from initial OP’s concerns. I don’t think there is anything “crazy to push a full ride over other more “prestigious” schools” but I do think its too early to eliminate options for the kid.
@jzducol For most competitive schools, there is no need to apply to see what you are offered. If you sit down with your financial information and spend time filling out NPCs accurately, you have a fairly decent guesstimate of what you will receive. Merit is different. That takes applying strategically for competitive and matching the student for automatic.