I recently was accepted early decision into Boston University. Hooray! My choice was based on the fact that their very detailed calculator that was allegedly very accurate and based on their aid process. Currently with my award, I will be paying about 11 times what the calculator said I would pay and will have a lot of student loans. I have submitted an appeal and was rewarded another 1,000 dollars a year, which is nice but didn’t put a dent in the entire situation. Can anyone give some consoling information for a guy who is looking at almost 100 thousand dollars in debt?
Congrats on getting accepted to BU.
If it helps, every year it seems a fair number of other students are in a similar situation. Can you share some additional background information or reasons why the NPC was not accurate? It seems that the NPC’s are very accurate only for folks with plain vanilla earnings, e.g. without family business income, but for anyone with more complex financial situations they tend to be lacking.
I am assuming that BU uses the CSS profile? Do you have parents that are divorced? When you did the calculator, did you put both parents’ income in and any new spouses’? Did you include assets?
The calculators aren’t always accurate in the case of divorced parents, parent owning a business.
Also the aid package that you have now was it based on year 2014? Did your family have much higher income that year than this year?
The BU net price calculator has been around a long time, and is generally pretty close to accurate…but if your parents are divorced, own a business, are self employed, or own real estate other than their primary residence, it won’t be accurate.
Also, the info you enter has to be accurate. So if you made one mistake on the net price calculator, it might have given you a big wrong answer.
Also, 10 times means lots of things. Did the NPC say $1000 and you are now paying $10,000 or did it say $5000 and you are now paying $50,000?
What “lots of loans” did this include? Parent Plus loans are parent loans, not student financial aid.
What was your package?
Also did it ask for home equity? Did you fill that out correctly?
Do not even consider $100k in loans. NO school is worth that! Not even an ivy, and BU (a fine school), certainly is NOT worth that much debt.
Besides…YOU can’t borrow that much. Your parents would have to naively cosign and most won’t do that because THEY would be stuck with the debt if you can’t pay it…and usually newish grads cannot pay that much debt back.
You can borrow $5,500 for your frosh year.
And keep in mind…contributions to retirement accounts are added back in as income for financial,aid determination…so if you only assumed earned income, you family contribution would be lower.
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I will be paying about 11 times what the calculator said I would pay and will have a lot of student loans. I have submitted an appeal and was rewarded another 1,000 dollars a year, which is nice but didn’t put a dent in the entire situation. Can anyone give some consoling information for a guy who is looking at almost 100 thousand dollars in debt?
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Sounds like you expected to pay about $2k per year, but have been told that you have to pay about $23k per year.
If so, that’s a huge difference. The “devil is often in the details” when this happens.
Are your parents divorced? If so, how did you input their info into the NPC?
Does either of your parents own a business or have a career that includes “business deductions”?
Does your family own any property other than their home?
Do your parents have other income that you forgot to report (rental income? pension?)
Does their home have a lot of equity?
So BU is expecting you to pay $25,000 a year? This means you were awarded $40,000 or so in need based aid.
How much more do you need to make this school affordable? If it’s another $20,000 a year, you need to decline the ED admissions offer, and move on.
Is it that your parents cannot afford to pay or that they do not want to pay?
The othe question is what is the parent GROSS income?
PhoneMaster did you or your parents fill out the CSS Profile? Did you or your parents fill out the NPC?
Often when students fill out the NPC, they don’t know all the info to put in. Then when parents fill out the CSS Profile and are putting in accurate info, including stock investments, etc, the results can be wildly different from the NPC.
If the difference is 10 times…that could be very much because of a misplaced decimal point when you did the NPc?
Here is what I would do…take your completed Profile…and your parent information for income and such for 2015. Do that net price calculator again…and see what happens. Make sure every number is accurately entered.
BUT remember…if your parents are divorced, own a business, are self employed, own property other than your primary resident…or if you are not a U.S. citizen, the NPC will be inaccurate.
Hello? @PhoneMaster ?
Hmmm…PhoneMaster’s profile has 0 threads or replies…How is that possible?
^^He’s the master?
Do you have other options for college?
Phonemaster,
How much research, due diligence did you do before applying ED?
Every year someone complains about the amount of money that they receive from BU. BU states in their basic financial aid FAQs that they take the following into consideration:
BU also does not meet 100% demonstrated need (which means that there is going to be a gap
If you look at section H2 of their own common data set, you will see the following:
http://www.bu.edu/oir/files/2015/05/cds-2015.pdf
(i) Average % of need met for need based aid recipients 91% (freshmen) 86% (full time undergraduates)
(j) Average package (up to need) for those in “d” $39,436 (freshmen) $35,766 (full time undergraduates)
(k) Average need-based gift for those in “e” $34,004 (freshmen)
BU has also gone on the record to state while they are need blind in the admissions process, they are not talent blind when it comes to distributing aid:
What are your stats? You may find that you were not at the top of the pool and BU essentially gave you an admit-deny; you had the stats to be academically admitted, but based on the strength of the pool, you did not have the stats of a student that they wanted to financially woo in order for them to enroll.
If this school is not going to be financially feasible for your family, you need to decline the admission and move forward.