That is not what I said. I did however say that NO ONE, rich, poor or middle class “deserves” to go to any particular college more or less than an equally qualified applicant. Different schools will have their own criteria of how they mold their class & that is their prerogative. It is harmful to kids to place too much of their self-worth or view (self-imposed usually ) of what they will be able to accomplish in the future based upon if they are or are not accepted into a certain tier college.
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I hear you on this front. I am a much bigger believer in nature than nurture. I have 3 kids, and despite raising them the same, they are very different.
My middle, is having an existential crisis right now because she is afraid she is spoiled and doesn’t know enough difficulty in life. She knows I grew up the son of a construction worker, had to work and pay for my car and gas, and figure my own college path out because my parents had no money, and no real interest.
I am pleased with her perspective on this, awareness that she grew up in a upper middle neighborhood, with a family around her, a car or money if she needed it. She saves all her money, and is frugal. She feels bad about us spending any money on her college, but also says she is willing to pay loans to get what she wants out of it. She’s very level headed. My oldest, has some blind spots around this stuff, but as I said, they were raised the same.
Like you, I have seen different family members do well or poorly based on decisions, or options. My super smart brother-in-law went to Yale, almost on a free ride via financial aid, and he is essentially unemployed and has had odd random jobs for many years.
My younger brother skipped college and partied at ski mountains to age 30, but then decided with his first kid to do something and 15 years later he owns a chain of restaurants and is wealthy. It’s a bit random.
In the end though, I do think genetics plays the largest role.
This is where I think America is broken. Our kids college path depends too much on their parents, and not nearly enough on the actual kids. Each kids should have a shot, and have a chance to get decent education and have a chance to graduate without huge debt.
In some ways, middle class (and lower middle class) kids have it the worst. There is a lot of financial aid for poor kids, and wealthy kids have lots of power and options as well. There are a lot of middle class kids who have parents that made too much money for their kids to get any aid, but not enough to help them pay for college, and they end up with a higher EFC, and more loans.
The process needs to start before college, however, because here by the time the poor kid reaches HS their education is already insufficient for them to have the chance at performing. My freshman roommate in college was on a special inner city program that put urban poor kids into college for free. The problem is that he barely understood algebra, had about an 8th grade reading level. He had no chance, he failed out after one year (or he may have chosen to drop out from the embarrassment of it, I will never know), and went into the Marines instead.
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Agreed; you didn’t type that when you wrote your post. But that’s what I got out of it (you know, “connotation” and all that).
Agee 100%
If so, then wouldn’t it make sense for parents who have money to conserve it by living in low cost (typically poor) areas, believing that their kids’ inherent intellect will get them through whatever low quality K-12 schools and limited opportunities that are likely to exist there, and pay only for the lowest cost college (or combination of community college and transfer to university) that has suitable academic programs and majors, if the kid goes to college?
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Yeah, I hear you on that. I do agree that financial education is key. Also agency. Ultimately, it’s their life and different people have to learn different ways. The smart ones do so from the experience of others.
Actually, there is probably much less financial aid for kids from poor families than most people on these forums think there is. Yes, the kid from the poor family may get excellent financial aid from Harvard and the like, but those are the colleges that are very hard to get into (and if the kid’s parents are divorced and uncooperative, that shuts the kid out of financial aid at most of those colleges). In some states, the in-state publics may have sufficient financial aid for kids from poor families, but not so much in other states. Net price calculators can be revealing on this aspect (try putting in parent income of $25,000).
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This is a fair point, and I don’t have a big argument against it. I still do stand by what I said about it being a bit of a nightmare for lower middle or middle class kids who have parents that show a decent amount of income on a transparent W2 (they can’t hide it).
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Well, that is why I said “largest” and “bigger” and not “all”. There are certainly other factors that come in to play, ranging from trauma to environment, but I still think that your innate abilities are the larger portion of the pie. The genes I refer to aren’t simply your SAT scores, either. I mean your work ethic, ingenuity, communication skills, resilience.
For any parent with 3 or more kids, you know what I mean. You provide them with virtually the same variables, and they will turn out quite different.
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Yes, plenty of poor kids have other obstacles.
The nature vs. nurture question is tough to answer. My two are almost exact opposites in personality. Then again, while we tried to raise them the same, their experiences would be different simply because of birth order. The first would have had the undivided attention of both his parents the first 3 years of his life. The second couldn’t have. The first wouldn’t have had an older brother to push him around when young (mostly inadvertently). So is it innate nature that makes the first sweet, sensitive, and more of a reader who’s good at languages and the second a fighter (for good and bad), fearless, and builder/maker/drawer who’s bad at languages or their life experience?
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The way college list prices are now, private college costs are a concern for the bottom 95% income families (probably bottom 85% income for in-state public costs). I.e. nearly all families considering sending their kid(s) to college must be concerned about costs and financial aid / scholarship discounts.
In general, the less money the family has, the more constrained the kid’s college choices will be.
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That is in a way what my parents did do (although they did not have much money - they lived in lowest cost area possible). They felt that once a kid was 18 their job was done & they were on their own. I did go to the lowest cost college option - cc to cheapest state school. I was able to go to a school that charged the same price for tuition once you were over 12 credits & so took 21 credits/semester for the price of 12 & was able to graduate in 3 years. This was before AP credits were a thing but the same thing could be done today using AP credits. I strongly believe that showing I could succeed in this course load is why I was admitted to med school. Necessity will drive a motivated person to find a way. That is the thing about living in a free country, every parent/family can make these decisions for themselves and what they feel is right for their family. I am choosing to give my kids some other options because I am able to do so. You can choose what is best for your family.
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Absolutely true. Low income students may receive a lot of aid from T30 universities, but not from the other 3500+ colleges in America.
The reality is, not having money is almost always an obstacle, not a boon. There are no options. When Loyola offers an upper middle class student $20K and a low-income student $40, the doubling of the amount means absolutely nothing to the low-income student because she’s still $20K short of being able to afford Loyola.
Not to mention that while schools like Wake Forest say it meets 100% of need, it, like 99% of colleges in America, is also a need-aware school. Thus many admit-ready applicants are denied admission if their need is too high because the school wants to protect its yield. WFU is not alone in this. IMO, this is the real donut-hole dilemma - low-income students who qualify for admission but are denied because need-aware schools know they cannot afford the cost.
The reality is, low-income students have far fewer options than students from higher SES categories.
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I do have an issue with the way colleges assess financial fitness with little regard to past choices or behavior. A few examples that pop into my head:
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with fafsa only schools: The exclusion of primary residence equity always struck me as odd. Say a family received a nice inheritance. If the family uses the inheritance to buy a big house, that equity / asset doesn’t need to be declared on the fafsa. If that same family decided, instead, to invest the money, that portfolio is disclosed on fafsa, leading to a smaller potential aid package.
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we know a family with two kids heavily involved in a very expensive sport. When I say they spent $25,000 per year- for 10 years- I am not exaggerating. This family was very happy when they received a generous need-based aid package from their first kid’s school. I couldn’t help but wonder what their aid package package would look like had they saved the $25,000 per year.
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I know many families who have one stay-at-home parent (or parent that works part-time) by choice. These are personal family choices that keep earnings lower. It always bothered me that families who go this route stand to get a better aid package than families who maximize their earning potential.
I whole heartedly support generous aid packages for low income families. For me, the fuzzy-ness comes in with families in the middle income brackets, some of whom live conservatively and some of whom live more extravagantly.
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The number of schools who meet full need is a small one. Most colleges don’t care about the families supporting an extravagant sport- invested the money, stuffed it in a mattress, spent the money- doesn’t matter. They are going to gap you regardless. You can’t pay? Oh well, on to the next kid.
If you are going to blow an inheritance (or decide to live on one income, or an income and a half) you better hope your kid is going to get into one of the mega generous schools (Princeton looks fun! Harvard might be nice…) Because the vast majority don’t care about your “need”.
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Few FAFSA only schools offer significant FA. Besides, the family can only exclude one primary residence. They have to live in it. They have to pay property tax (which may be significant if it’s a large and luxurious house) for it.
I believe many schools take this into consideration. That’s why they ask for parent’s age, education background and occupation. @kelsmom may be able to clarify.
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The way the FAFSA formula works, a two parent - one income family ends up with the same EFC as a two parent -two income family with a relatively low wage earner. So in a way, a family with two parents & one income is actually sort of penalized. But not nearly as much as the formula penalizes a single parent family. Look, the formula isn’t perfect. Based on research, Federal Student Aid has determined that the formula is the most fair to the most people. Sometimes, you just have to accept what is.
And there is no way a family with a good income is not better off than one with a low income. Ignore the few who get money from parents, the few who take vacations, the few who spend money on activities instead of saving … that you may believe are getting more than they deserve. If a few people seem to get advantages you don’t, c’est la vie. Get past it. If you can afford to send your kid to college, you are way ahead of most. Be thankful.
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Deleted post as I feel I responded in haste and want to ponder my words a bit…sorry 
You make some interesting points. I agree and disagree with some.
As parents, we decided at a young age that having a stay at home parent was a key ingredient to long term family success. I think this is a long running debate that has existed for far longer than our thread here, and there are plenty of people who feel that in America, we penalize families who try to make family a priority, or even force both parents to work to pay the bills at the expense of kids, who may end up raised by nannies and babysitters, or worse, no one until after 6 pm. On the flip side, giving financial advantages to single income (two parent) families can be seen as unfair to some (as you were posting here). I do know out government provides tax breaks for families who have a stay at home parents, since they feel that this leads to better citizens in more cases. This is a messy debate, but all I will say is that this is why I feel we need to STOP making college something that is dependent on the choices of the parents, and instead focus on a clean slate and even approach to all kids, regardless of what their parents did (or failed to do).
That 25K per year in sports - seems insane to me. We pay about 3-4K per year for our daughters to have played in Premier soccer programs, and many others feel even that amount is entirely foolish. We don’t count the travel. Although we have to travel to say Boston or NJ and stay in hotels, eat on the go, and this does add up, we count that as our personal spending and not part of the sport program. If the family you are referring to truly does spend 25K per year, what the heck can that even be for? Is it sailing, or alpine skiing? It must be something that comes with a freakish amount of paid 1 on 1 coaching time, or needing to “buy your own sailboat” to be on the team.
But your argument of the saver being penalized versus the spender (showing fewer assets) being rewarded is correct. Again, this is why the child’s college options in this country should be irrespective of the parents. This can really only be accomplished through government subsidized college education for all. In our current model, the private colleges are actually incentivized to prey upon and target families with more money. The ONLY reason they care at all about the student quality is so they can pad their stats (SATs, GPAs). Mostly they just want the fatted calf of parent bank accounts to go after. They print brochures, make videos, and talk about how great their students are, but it would be awesome if someone made a parody video where a school talks about how great their students parents were, at forking over 120K per kid.
Here are 2 other things that irks me about the financial aid process, to go along with yours:
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If you live in a high cost of living area, you are treated as if you are a wealthy land Barron. Even if you aren’t. As an example, we live in an area where the salaries are very high, but so are the housing prices, the cost of milk and gas. We are in SW Connecticut, where a tiny little cape can cost anywhere from 300K to 1 million depending on the town you live in. For that price, I can buy a mansion in other parts of the country. Meanwhile, we own a Hyundai and a Honda (we aren’t driving around in Alfa Romeo and Land Rovers). Our house is modest. We try to go on one vacation as a family per year, but some years couldn’t afford to. But yet, on the FAFSA, they look at your income on a national level, and say “this person makes X, so that means they have Y available to spend”. Our EFC a few years back when our first started was 78K per year. I almost passed out … as if we had anything close to that “available” for extra college costs per year. Our real number was more like 7K after paying bills, mortgage, insurances, groceries, gas, auto, etc
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This is more of a country income/tax issue, but it affects college too. America really tries to help entrepreneurs, which in spirit I can appreciate. But what this ends up being is a game of tax evasion. I know many small (and medium) business owners. Half of us are working for a company, and we have a W-2. We can’t hide any income, and us middle class or upper middle folk pay a lion share of taxes. Meanwhile, we have friends and associates who are running their own sole proprietorship, or cafe, or construction business, and they essentially have the ability to hide most of their income. They buy and work in cash, go on lavish vacations, have nice cars and houses (nicer than mine), yet when it comes to college, they get a larger financial aid package. I know this is true because I once benefitted from it. My father ran his own small construction company, and he claimed about 20% of the income he really made. Between write offs (which were not legit, i.e. any gas he bought for a family drive he wrote off as a business drive) and working in cash with many of his employers and workers, he was able to do this. So when it came time or FAFSA, we looked dirt poor. Of course, 30 years ago, college wasn’t that expensive anyway so it didn’t help then as much as it would now. Now I am on the other side of this. I have a W-2 and am considered wealthy, while a fellow who makes more than I do sent his daughter to school and only had to pay 7K per year after the financial aid package.
These are just two more reasons why I think the system is fairly broken, to go along with yours.
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