The numbers are astronomical.
DD just got accepted to a well-regarded private college, whose annual total cost is (according to the statement they sent with her acceptance) 75,000/year. We are not eligible for need-based FA, and she was not awarded any merit (which is something we were hoping for). We have quite a bit of money saved (hence no FA), but not 300K. We can pay some from current income, but not enough to avoid a large amount of debt. She is sad that this school is now out of reach (as are we)
Thankfully, she has acceptances to a number of schools who did award significant merit, so she will end up somewhere that fits.
The opaque way that merit is awarded at many schools makes the process more difficult–IF she had gotten a merit award at that school, it would have made it an option for her, but there was no way to know for sure until she actually got the letter. It is hard to make financial plans when you are unaware of the numbers…necessitating plans B, C and D to cover all possibilities.
Remember when we were all shocked by the cost of daycare? We lived through that.
@15J1217 - I can understand your initial shock. When Happykid was in about 8th grade I ran the calculators that existed at that time (pre-NPC) and was so appalled that I didn’t look at college tuition figures for two years. I found College Confidential when looking for a way to make college affordable. Happykid ended up at our local community college for the first two years, and then at a perfectly decent in-state public U for the last two. She graduated with only the junior and senior year student loans. We have no parent debt.
Hang in there. You will figure this out.
We are in a similar situation with a high efc and many kids to put thru college.
We decided up front how much we were willing to spend each year and only allowed ds to apply to schools that were in that price range or had a good chance of coming within range.
Ds applied and was accepted to 8 schools. 2 came back out of price range (1 private, 1 OOS) and weren’t considered further. So in the end, he had 6 good, affordable schools to choose from. The application process has been happy and angst free.
My advice is to set a budget and encourage your kids to get excited about schools that are affordable.
@twoinanddone The high cost of daycare ended up being a sort of plus for us — we had a pretax account for it, and took almost all the reimbursement checks and slugged then into their 529s. We lived on less, but the payoff when college time came was huge.
OP, your first sounds like a kid with some grit who will bloom where planted. This is good, and makes your in state public flagship make sense. You are lucky that you also have St Mary’s College of Maryland as a public LAC-type school if you have another kid who prefers a LAC type school, and UMBC is yet another solid choice.
My husb and I both work at private catholic colleges and from speaking with students and parents over the years, as well as our own D’s experience, it seems that both colleges consistently offer significantly more merit aid than the nearby state universities. Husb’s employer is highly selective school with tremendous endowment, so that helps to have more merit aid available to students. Our state flagship university attracts the majority of the good students from our state and that school seem to offer the least merit aid (although the sticker price is less than a private university, thus it is a good option for many). So, research private schools with high endowments - if your student is a good/great student with good test scores, your student will likely get plenty of merit awards.
^ Agree with the above. Ones off the very tippy-top. Ideally out of the Northeast.
A place like Lake Forest has automatic scholarships:
https://www.lakeforest.edu/admissions/scholarships/
I think plans CAN be made. Your family discusses your college budget with the student. You let them know…they can apply wherever, but any college that comes in over your budget will need to be dropped from consideration. Let your student know that up front.
Let them also know that unless the merit awards are guaranteed by stats they have, they have to view that school as a reach financially.
Then make sure they cast a broad net…which it seems your student did…as the student has at least one affordable acceptance to a school they will be happy to attend.
Those private schools might give more merit aid…but their costs of attendance are likely at least double what an instate public university would cost.
The net cost is really what matters for most people…what they will be paying each year.
Despite having a large merit award, most private schools end up costing more per year than instate publics…because most private school do not guarantee to meet full need for all.
Thanks for the suggestions. One challenge I foresee in all this is my spouse who I think will want to say it will all work out and our daughter should try for “the best.” I see the attraction to this (especially when a university’s website talks about 100% affordability and no debt without mentioning the $50k per year EFC).
By the way, this is partly how I was lead down the garden path as to affordability. Reading this cheery page, e.g., makes it sound like if you get in all financial issues will be taken care of. https://www.princeton.edu/admission-aid/affordable-all
You also read the “best value” rankings and those really seem now like a bunch of malarkey. E.g. https://www.usnews.com/best-colleges/rankings/national-universities/best-value Their numbers are nowhere close to what we see when doing the calculations.
I wonder now if this is because they have a barbell admitted class with good chunk of students paying full freight and another tranche getting close to full financial aid but less who are in the middle (neither wealthy enough to pay without aid nor low income enough to have most costs defrayed by grants).
It does work for some people. I have a family member- two wage earning parents, in an area where home prices, salaries, cost of living, etc. is at about the national average. Their financial picture is pretty simple (except for no consumer debt, which is a-typical in our country for someone at their income level) and the main asset is a modest house with a mortgage. Small college savings, consistent with their salaries, and retirement savings also consistent with their savings.
The financial aid (according to them) came in within 1% of what the NPC’s told them it would, and Princeton’s (where one kid ended up) was only $5 off the calculator (which they found amazing).
You live in a “starter home” in Menlo Park or Scarsdale? You have some business deductions? Divorced? All bets are off. But the calculators aren’t designed to tailor aid to people living in very high cost of living areas, nor do they distinguish between someone who has been earning less than $80K per year since graduating from college, but three years ago got a new job and is now making $200K (an assistant professor of finance at a community college who gets hired by a hedge fund, for example). That person has assets consistent with the 80K salary, not the 200K salary and probably used the extra dough to keep the roof on the house from blowing away (i.e. all the deferred maintenance that they couldn’t afford at the lower salary). So still no savings to speak of- but the 200K salary is what shows up on the financial aid forms.
I don’t think it’s malarky- it’s just that people’s financial lives are complicated, and the financial aid system is designed to make something that isn’t quite as complicated as the tax code, or the pricing scheme on an MRI (if you don’t think that’s complicated, you haven’t had an MRI recently).
I’m not sure what you are implying with the Princeton link. The school has amongst THE most generous need based aid in the country. They meet full need for all accepted students. No, they won’t pay what theyncalcukate your fami,y can pay…but if you are deemed full pay at a place like Princeton, your annual income is north of $200,000 a year or you have very significant assets.
Every…every college expects the parents to pay their calculated amount…unless the student gets a merit award that exceeds that amount. Princeton doesn’t give merit awards.
You are smart to be doing the net price calculators for an estimate.
Yes, your daughter can try for the “best” but you can make it clear what the financial realities are and can be. Too many kids (and parents) believe that it will all work out and then are sitting there with admissions to schools that are unaffordable without parent involved loans that are financially irresponsible.
Schools and articles try to get as many people as possible to apply because, yes, there often are possibilities that families do not consider. I remember my brother’s best friend back in the day whose family, and actually anyone in their circles, could not fathom applying to anything other than in state local schools because the parents were well below poverty level with a lot of kids. He actually gave some of his pay, as did his brothers towards family expenses while he was in high school. Helped out as long as he could remember. Who would guess that MIT would offer him more money than the State flagship and even the local community college? I don’t think the local schools even had anything more than the federal entitlement money for him. Depending on circumstances that could be complicated, it’s can be difficult to assess what you might get from certain colleges.
On a personal note, my youngest son got far more in merit money than the NPCs back in that day estimated for him as he ended up getting some of the small pool of scholarships some of his schools offered to just a handful of students. But it was not something to count on. Totally a lottery ticket as to who would get that bounty. He was also in the pool for more merit possibilities in the spring, something we did not pursue because he had committed ED to a school and that ended his process. So it is possible for a strong applicant to get a generous merit award regardless of finanicial need or a merit within need award that bucks the EFC an NPC predictions. Those are the lottery tickets, however, and not something that anyone should count on.
Are you in Maryland? Then you have lots of decent options.
I am in Montgomery County. If you are familiar with the high schools in that county, you might be surprised to learn this fast fact: for all four years that Happykid was at Walter Johnson High School, almost twice as many graduating students went to Montgomery College as went to UM-CP. The third largest group of graduates (about half of the number headed to UM-CP) went to other Maryland publics including PGCC, UMBC, Towson, Salisbury, St. Mary’s, etc. Their families made in-state choices for the very same reasons you are contemplating. Happykid and her BFF both started at MC, finished at Towson, worked for a few years, and now are in fully funded MFA programs. Other friends who went straight to Salisbury (chemistry major) and St. Mary’s (experimental psychology major) are now in PhD programs at major research universities. None of them have opted for medicine or law so I can’t speak to those outcomes from this particular age cohort.
“The best” don’t give merit aid. So if the NPC looks unaffordable, it probably is. I think you need to sit down with your wife to go over the NPCs, what you have in savings for each kid, and what you can pay out of current income. If you have a small business or rental property or are divorced, assume the NPC is showing more aid than you will really get.
Figure out a dollar amount you can pay. I have no idea what your lifestyle is, but what if you cut back on vacations, replace next car with a cheaper model, stop paying someone if you do now for cleaning or yard work? This has to be a joint couple conversation, or it just won’t work. Come up with a number. (Can you start some of the cutbacks now to beef up savings a bit, too?)
Might you have more than one kid in college at once? You might get more aid in those years, depending on the schools they attend. You can run the NPCs with those scenarios, too.
Decide on your tolerance for kids taking loans. My take is, don’t have kid take out more than their federal loans ($5,500 frosh year, slightly more later years, total of $27,000 over 4 years). And I’d discourage loans beyond that altogether.
Assume kid can work summers for pay, and possibly part time during school year (no more than 10 hours/week, I’d say) to help cover some costs. Our kids covered spending money & books, and any costs associated with unpaid internships. Let your kid know soon that they will own something like this, don’t spring it on them as they go out the door.
At the end of this, you’ll have a budget, hopefully one you agree on. Communicate it to your kid. THEN start visiting schools and investigating which ones fit the budget. We can help, too, once you know that budget number.
“I wonder now if this is because they have a barbell admitted class with good chunk of students paying full freight and another tranche getting close to full financial aid”.
Something like that. Roughly half the class at private elites are full-pay and of the half that require fin aid, the average fin aid amount at meet-full-need schools tends to be more than 2/3rds of COA, I believe.
“Those private schools might give more merit aid…but their costs of attendance are likely at least double what an instate public university would cost.”
Yes, but especially lower down below the tippy-tops, privates are often competing with in-state publics for good students, so for schools like that (such as LFC listed above), DePaul, Butler, etc., it tends to be very easy for good students to get enough merit/discount to make them competitive with the in-state price of publics.
Here’s a list worth looking at:
https://www.road2college.com/top-30-colleges-largests-merit-based-scholarships/
She may want to consider W&L, Richmond, Tulane, Hendrix, Rhodes, Beloit.
She could also try for merit at Macalester, Whitman, St. Olaf, Miami, Tulsa, etc.
Is her PSAT score high enough for National Merit?
I don’t think it is clear that the OP is even able/willing to pay for schools like Mac with merit. You can knock $20K off if your kid is really strong, but that still may not be on the balllark. We should probably hold off on recommending until the OP gives some idea of what they can pay.
Well, I feel your pain. No matter how pedantic and scolding people can be here, it is a plain fact that when “we” went to school, in the early 80s in my case, tuition at a top private cost about the same as a brand new Subaru. Today that same Subaru is $25,000 ish, and that same college is somewhere in the $50-60 K range before room and board. That IS shocking to MANY people. When I first came in here, stung and stunned by our own EFC and the fact that an Ivy that “guaranteed” that if you get in, you CAN attend…was actually not going to make that possible, well , yeah, the finger-wagging wasn’t helpful. Not everyone runs NPC. Maybe you are the type that does, good for you, but to me that sounded like doing your taxes “just for kicks” at each school. I didn’t have all the info at my fingertips and honestly believed the marketing materials from the colleges.
The “best Value” rankings ARE a bunch of malarkey, in that they are based on what the “average” student “actually pays” after aid. I agree that at the stated prices these universities are probably an excellent value- but it means nothing if you pay full price. And it DOES often lead to the perception that you can expect to pay “about” the average. Which isn’t true.
Painful Fact: most people can’t afford to pay full price for private schools for all their kids, especially if they have more than 2
kids. PainfulFact #2: Sometimes you cant go to the “best school you can get into”.
At least you are finding out early, and hopefully you will avoid the tears and drama. You won’t get merit aid from HYPSD…there is very limited merit aid at many other schools, and it may be very nichey, like “for demonstrated leadership in building bridges between communities” or some such nonsense.
But some schools do give big chunks of merit aid to big chunks of admitted students - not tippy top, but schools you have heard of, that you eldest may like. Remember- you are setting a precedent. If you “make it work” for your eldest, you will be MUCH less able to “make it work” for the other ones. I’m not going to tell you what you “should” have done 18 years ago, or how you “could have” chosen to live your family life - when to pay off mortgages and how many kids to have and if one spouse can stay home or not. Those decisions are long made, and were yours to make. But they do determine in part the options available to your kids now. And trust me, you have a lot of company out there, although this site can sometimes make you feel like you missed the memo.