<p>Hey everyone,
After visiting Vassar and Tufts this summer, I feel a stronger personal connection to Vassar and would like to apply ED there in November.
However, as I read the Tufts admissions blogs and Jumbo mag, I'm falling more and more in love with Tufts.</p>
<p>I'm taking the ACT next month, and my gap is 4.0 UW (strong rigor, URM, and leadership roles).
My family's EFC is around 8,000 and almost every school on my list has outstanding financial aid (the list has changed since my last post and is about 10 schools). </p>
<p>Ideally, I would apply RD to all schools. But the application fees and CSS profile costs quickly add up to close to 1,000. Applying ED would hopefully give me a boost, but I want to be sure that I'm picking the right school as it's binding. Don't get me wrong, Vassar is absolutely my first choice, but I am normally not the type to dive in all the way. </p>
<p>The only real risk I have heard of with ED applications is the potential lack of financial aid. But in this case, isn't it possible to break the binding agreement? Has anyone had to do this at a school like Vassar where they pledge to meet 100% of demonstrated need? </p>
<p>Any and all advice regarding ED/RD applications is welcome. Thank you! </p>
<p>Have you run the net price calculators on Vassar and the other schools to see whether their pledges to “meet 100% of demonstrated need” actually mean affordable net prices for you? Different schools calculate their EFCs differently (most with good financial aid use their own calculation of EFC rather than the FAFSA EFC formula).</p>
<p>Then you know what to expect when you apply ED. If it doesn’t pan out you can ask them to reevaluate or you decline it. Of course you pass up the chance that you will get something better somewhere else either need based or some merit thrown in. That’s the chance you take. It’s not fair for lower income but that’s the situation. Ideally you would get admittances and get to think it over and see where else you get in, that’s what mine got to do with EA. Nice. </p>
<p>Just to give an example, for a student this year with 0 EFC, offers ran from 2k per year to 12k–all meets need schools (student had some assets) and at most of them additional health insurance of about 2k a year not covered by aid, not in COA, had to be paid. Plus the travel allowance really wasn’t sufficient many places for the longer distance the student was going to have to travel.</p>
<p>The problem with applying ED is not that you can’t turn down a too-low financial aid offer (you can), it’s that it may be hard to tell if it’s the best offer you’ll get. For instance, if the ED school’s FA offer is under what you expected, you can turn it down for financial reasons. But what if you then apply to RD schools only to find that their offers are all less generous than that of the ED school you’ve turned down? Not trying to dissuade you, just adding that to the conversation.</p>
<p>For what it’s worth - both my kids applied RD to Vassar along with roughly 7 or 8 other schools. The FA at Vassar was the best of the bunch (different schools for the most part, only Vassar in common) for both kids so both ended up attending (of course, they liked the school as well). I recognize that is only relevant in comparison to those other schools, but in retrospect it would have been a good bet for both kids to apply ED to Vassar. This was not in comparison to ivies, but to other lacs.</p>
<p>Keep in mind that 100% of need means the need as the college determines it, not your FAFSA EFC. These schol will require you to submit CSS Profile and may vary in what sort of information they ask for, and what they consider. If your parents own the home you live in, then home equity can be a wild card that can easily result in dissimilar financial aid awards. </p>
<p>When my daughter applied to colleges, my FAFSA EFC was under $6000. Of two guaranteed 100% need schools, the financial aid award at one was built around a family contribution of $18,000 – and another expected us to be able to pay around $26,000. There were complicating factors in my case-- but the point is that your EFC does NOT equate to “what you will have to pay for college”. Rather the EFC is the number that tells you whether you will be eligible for a subsidized loan, work study, or a Pell Grant. </p>