Sick over "award" package

Paying for College
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<p>You should have been a more realistic parent. You did not do your homework. Sorry you should have spoken to schools ahead of time to see their postiion regarding your son’s program at his age.</p>

<p>Even if they allowed it, what about for the following 3 years when older son wasn’t in trade school. Did you expect that yoiur financial aid would remain the same?</p>

<p>Schools will tell you whether they use and EFC calculation or whether they recalculate using their own formulas.</p>

<p>You also assumed that a school would meet your full need. But, as you have learned, that is not the case either.</p>

<p>For all the hard work and effort you clearly put into making this happen for your D, it was misdirected. As a fulll pay parent, sure I wish things were different. Of course I would not ask to pay more money for college than others. But reality is reality. Face it now and move on. Either tell your D now that you cannot afford her dream school, or somehow make it work through a combination of a re-distribution of your available income and some loans.</p>

<p>Good luck!</p>

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<p>I doubt that. Look at your package again. If your FAFSA EFC is $21K, then there ought to be a $3500 subsidized stafford loan in there. Your kid can also borrow an additional $2K unsubsidized, and if she’s lucky, there should be a work study grant of at least $1000, likely more. </p>

<p>Oh, and your daughter is free to apply for private scholarships from any source. </p>

<p>The FAFSA EFC is a system for determining eligibility for federal aid. It has nothing to do with how the colleges allocate their own grant or scholarship aid. </p>

<p>As I said before, a college grant is an act of CHARITY. </p>

<p>If you were to accept CHARITY, then it would cancel out whatever CHARITY you were giving. Kind of like carbon offsets.</p>

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<p>It doesn’t matter what you should have done differently. It only matters what you do now. </p>

<p>The first place the word choice ever appears in written words is in Abraham story in the bible. Making a choice is always challenging. Good luck.</p>

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<p>Did the school require the CSS Profile? if so, what you should have done was read up on financial aid and run a rough calculation using “institutional methodology” with an online calclulator at a site like collegeboard.com or finaid.org. You said you paid off your home and that it is worth $375K (I think) – that’s +$21K a year in EFC right there, on top of the $21K your income yields (which is a little odd, because the streamlined FAFSA calculator at finaid.org suggests that a family of 4 with $150K income would have a $37K EFC – if I run it for a family of 7 I get $31K EFC)</p>

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<p>"The school came back with an EFC of $44K.</p>

<p>So, again…aside from NOT BEING A MIND READER OR HAVING A TIME MACHINE AT MY DISPOSAL - what should I have done differently?"</p>

<p>Well you couldn’t have done anything differently in the planning process. It is not your fault that you could not predict accurately what this institution was going to expect you to be able to pay.</p>

<p>What you can do now, is accept that this institution is unaffordable. And move on.</p>

<p>Yes your daughter is sad. Yes she worked hard for all those years. Yes she can be proud that she was accepted there. But none of that changes the numbers. If your family can’t pay this bill, it can’t. Grieve the loss. Then get up, wash your faces, blow your noses, and get on with life.</p>

<p>Post #63 in dumbparent’s thread <a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/financial-aid-scholarships/1121952-fafsa-efc-47k.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/financial-aid-scholarships/1121952-fafsa-efc-47k.html&lt;/a&gt; details the stages of grief as related to college financial aid. I’d copy it all here, but that is beyond my skill level. But if you go to that thread, you’ll find it near the top of page 5.</p>

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<p>The school ignored FAFSA and said they think I should be able to pay $44K.</p>

<p>Most schools only use FAFSA- that is often the best choice for an affordable option.
& personally if my spouse decided he was going to work almost 11 hrs a day for several years I would ask * for what*?
Are our spending habits so out of whack that we need the money?
Is spending that much time away from your family worth it?
I think we can whittle our living expenses down so that we don’t need at least double the median national salary to make ends meet.
Life doesn’t wait to happen until you " are ready".</p>

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<p>OP, what you should have done is adopt a more typical American lifestyle. Work much less than 75 hours per week, buy new cars every few years, eat out on a regular basis, maybe send your kids to private schools for K-12, don’t save, do not pay off your house (in fact, keep taking out equity loans out to fund this lifestyle, etc.)</p>

<p>That way you’ll look needy on paper and qualify for aid.</p>

<p>Like I said before. Some choices get rewarded and others don’t.</p>

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<p>FAFSA-only schools do not promise to meet full need of their students. Not a one, as far as I know. Any college that is willing to promise to put a dime of its own financial aid budget toward subsidizing a student will also want the right to set its own standards for how that aid is calculated.</p>

<p>It is true that family that is savvy can shield assets from FAFSA consideration – such as home equity – and some may also get lucky and get a full need award from a school – but it is equally possible and far more likely that the family will be gapped-- often with the gap amount far exceeding their EFC. </p>

<p>Simple example: my d. applied to NYU. (ha, ha). The year she applied, FAFSA EFC was $5500. NYU gave her a $8K grant, work study, loans. They offered to fill the remaining need with a $30K parent PLUS loan (ha, ha.) </p>

<p>My d. was much better off with the schools that looked at the full financial picture, including home equity and NCP income.</p>

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<p>Yup, I ran the institutional examples. I called the school and was told “don’t worry, we will work with you”.</p>

<p>Very little in life has gotten past me as far as financial planning matters go. </p>

<p>Sure, I admit I was probably stupid about this – but having gotten a FAFSA $21K EFC and planning on a contingency of 66% above that number, I was surprised that the school felt as though we should be able to pay $44K and that $8K of the bridge to their $60K cost was in the form of loans. Loans? As an award? What next, a kick in the face as a thank-you?</p>

<p>I think we are going to start shopping for a $700K house. Having a $5K/month mortgage ought to be the perfect elixir to this dilemma.</p>

<p>It’s been fun; you guys can enjoy what will probably be another 12 pages of speculation about me…take care :-)</p>

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Leaving out the state schools, seven of the nine schools still in contention for my D require CSS Profile. One of the two that don’t require CSS requires, in addition to FAFSA, a school form. Maybe our list is aberrant.</p>

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<p>horsefeathers–</p>

<p>To quote in a box: [ quote ] text

[/quote]
</p>

<p>but no spaces between the brackets and the word quote.</p>

<p>Great screen name by the way.</p>

<p>You can find a lot of this stuff in the faqs section under replying to posts. You have to use a few links to get there, but it’s all there.</p>

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<p>Actually, I disagree. All schools publish their full COA figures somewhere on their web site. When my 1st kid was applying to colleges, I looked up that information. I told him that there was no way that I could afford to pay as much as any of the colleges charge, but he was free to apply and see what he could get in financial aid. He read up a little himself and came up with the idea that he should apply to a lot of mid-range LAC’s - not the very top schools but reasonably good schools where he was pretty sure to be admitted – and then see which one offered the best aid. </p>

<p>That seemed like a reasonable approach at the time & it worked out fine for my son. If it hadn’t, then he would have attended an in-state public. End of story.</p>

<p>I would note that the LAC that did offer my son the most generous aid very appropriately called it their grant “gift” aid.</p>

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<p>Calmom: I think we are saying the same thing. (I applaud the profile schools for looking at the whole picture). You just said it better than I did! :slight_smile: </p>

<p>I was trying to give the OP some kudos for putting himself out there on this board by acknowledging that there are many variables that FAFSA doesn’t take into account (hence the initially lower EFC), but the profile schools do (hence the resulting higher EFC) in their efforts to be holistic. However, most people applying to schools only hear about the FAFSA system and see those color glossy brochures promising affordability. Where I come from, the profile system is rarely discussed. It never came up in one college meeting, so it’s easy to see how someone could be shocked by the profile EFC results.</p>

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<p>Maybe our list is aberrant</p>

<p>Possibly- my oldest only applied to one private school & our youngest to none.
We made a list of schools we could afford.</p>

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<p>Loans are generally part of all financial aid packages. My son took loans, my daughter took loans, I took loans. My son paid off his loans, and after that he paid off his wife’s loans. My d. has a take home pay of less than $2400 /month and loan payments of roughly $200. She lives in Manhattan. </p>

<p>Loans and work study are sometimes called “self-help”. The reason that “self-help” is at the foundation of the need-based aid system is the idea that students should start by contributing their own resources, before expecting outside charity. For an 18 or 19 year old, that means perhaps 10-15 hours a week of work and the willingness to take on a moderate loan burden.</p>

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<p>Calmom- if I am right, it was your posts, a few years ago, about your D’s finaid, that first clued me in to reality. If that was you, many thanks.</p>

<p>MisterK- if we were all plumbers, there’d be too much competition to make 150k. And, we’d be missing other valuable services.</p>

<p>Really, I think colleges are too expensive, sure. I also think there is far too much emotion involved in the process of a naive, inexperienced 17 year old picking a college, too many parents who fall prey to the notion that only a few schools are “the best” for their Suzy or Billy- usually based on the obvious media reputation or the simple “fact” that Suzy or Billy has “fallen in love” with the place. </p>

<p>Many of these parents can’t guide their kids through this naive, emotional stage. They don’t lay groundwork for the kids to understand the family’s financial priorities and needs. They don’t educate themselves about finaid. Then, after the fact, they want to assign blame. </p>

<p>OP may be off this thread now. But, we have all noted, EFC is fed only. There is NO calculator that can predict how a Profile school will judge your ability to pay. If it was calmom’s posts, a few years ago, one point was how two different schools came up with two different “family contributions,” thousands of dollars apart. Some Profile schools max out home equity per a formula, some count the value of your cars, some look at extra retirement contributions over x amount. They can do whatever they want.</p>

<p>Bluntly put, after you get the EFC, you don’t guess what a college might offer you in aid. You have a nice talk with your kids. You make sure you have aggressively educated yourself- if finaid is important. You ensure your kids understand, X may be your top choice, but the finaid has to make the school affordable to this family. </p>

<p>Can we also note that this 1 out of 15 colleges that OP’s daughter now finds acceptable, has a 25% admit rate. Its not Harvard. Sorry.</p>

<p>Btw, as a family with two in college, we can’t afford a plumber. Add that to the list of sacrifices. I (the mom) can replace a washer, repair/replace a toilet, install a french drain and do all sorts of other things you don’t want to know about.</p>

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Yes, but when we apply for aid and actually fill out the CSS Profile, I think it probably also occurs to us that we are being asked all of the questions about home equity and how much money is in our retirement accounts and how much money is in our other kid’s bank accounts for a reason.</p>

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<p>LOL! Sometimes there isn’t a choice. You really don’t want to know what happened the time that I decided to save money on a plumber by replacing the garbage disposal by myself. Suffice it to say that the plumber was needed to fix what I’d broken, but he did reassure me that I had gotten a better price on the disposal at Home Depot than what he would have charged.</p>

<p>According to [PayScale</a> - Journeyman Plumber Wages, Hourly Wage Rate](<a href=“http://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Journeyman_Plumber/Hourly_Rate]PayScale”>Journeyman Plumber Hourly Pay in 2024 | PayScale) - a journeyman plumber typically earns between $37-$58K annually.</p>

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<p>You have complete destroyed my romantic image of the lifestyle of the full pay plumber. :(</p>

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<p>I dunno – my plumber lives down the block from me!</p>