<p>I think that if someone -a parent here perhaps [tokenadult? hawkette?]who is good with research could put together a list of the actual # of “merit” scholarships and the # of incoming freshman /college it would help to open the eyes of parents who think there is tons of $$ floating around, and their kids are likely to receive some. At Brandeis, I counted 102 merit scholarships that are given out each year. There are 700 freshman. So that means a student has only a 14% chance of receiving a merit scholarship- about the same chances as getting into Harvard. Those are good odds? I don’t think so. </p>
<p>If information like that were available on a CC " permanent “important” thread , it would help to wake up parents and students to the realities of how unlikely it is that their child will receive a merit scholarship.</p>
<p>I just want to reiterate that the chances are increased GREATLY if one attends a school where he falls in the top percentiles of students. The count for Brandeis, at least according to the website, is substantially higher than 53 (per Curmudgeon’s count). And now I will depart.</p>
<p>Yes, I come here to advance my carefully hidden anti-merit aid agenda. I am agendaman.</p>
<p>ema, give me a pass on this one, O.K? Stick around long enough and you’ll figure out my agenda. It ain’t hard.</p>
<p>BTW it took a 1460 to break in the top 25% SAT in 2007, 43% and 41 % respectively had a 700 SAT V or M. I’ll bet you a dollar to a donut not every big merit scholarship winner was in that top 25% either. ;)</p>
<p>“Did I say that everyone gets one? How is this dangerous to let people know that these scholarships exist, and are available for top students at a given university? That’s a pretty good percentage”</p>
<p>Whoa, when is a 14% chance of receiving a scholarship a “good percentage”?</p>
<p>“I just want to reiterate that the chances are increased GREATLY if one attends a school where he falls in the top percentiles of students”
That goes without saying, but unfortunately many parents think their child is one of those in the “top percentages”. The reality is that no one knows the stats of other students applying to the same college.</p>
<p>MPMom, unfortunately, such a list would be very hard to compile and maintain. In addition, it would be impossible to get close to the real situation at many schools. Fwiw, there are many scholarships that are hardly if ever made public. Students are designated by schools as finalists for certain awards and since no application was available to the broad public, little is known about the scholarships. Often, those are very substantial scholarships. While not impossible to find or track down, it is not easy. Examples of this would be how The University of Texas handles accounts such as the Terry Foundation Scholarships and the Temple Foundation Scholarships. </p>
<p>Right now, there are two “stickied” threads regarding merit aid. It be hard to improve much.</p>
<p>Xiggi, I know it would be hard to do, and I don’t have the time, but a chart listing colleges/ # of KNOWN merit scholarships available to freshman[ as opposed to the hidden ones] / % of freshman receiving scholarships would be easier to read than looking through pages of posts.
It’s just a suggestion.</p>
<p>menloparkmom. One of my favorite books about merit aid was written by a guy Bruce Something who is now a school counselor in New Mexico (I’ll try to find his name) . It attempted to do just that. It was great but very out of date when I got B+ N to order it for me. Still it was about the best data I could find in one place.</p>
<p>Edit: Found it . Reaaaally old now. Still, it tells you what schools had merit aid then . If your library has it I’d glance through it. </p>
<p>Discounts and Deals at the Nation’s 360 Best Colleges : The Parent Soup Financial Aid and College Guide by Bruce G. Hammond (Paperback - August 20, 1999)</p>
<p>Hi Cur,
I was suggesting this [ the idea of a chart] in response to your query of what “veteran” CC parents could do to help open the eyes of “newbies” to the realities of college merit scholarships each year. An ongoing thread /chart would require work to update the figures once a year, but it’s just my opinion that the information would be seen and be more valuable to more parents/ students than any book could possibly be.</p>
<p>Heck, I agree. There is a pretty good start of one on the FA forum about “fulltuition or better scholarships”. D and I were looking for 1/2 tuition or better ourselves .</p>
<p>How about a checklist of things that families should do for college? Does that exist?</p>
<p>You know, with columns of age/yr in school and activity at the top. So some entries ( ) would be:</p>
<p>While pregnant… Evaluate 529 and pre-paid savings plans. Read about savings bonds for college expenses. Learn what a UGA account is.</p>
<p>Birth… Start college savings fund, using information gathered while pregnant. Set up automatic, regular deposits into account.</p>
<p>1st grade… Increase college fund automatic deposit. Oh, you can too afford it; just do it!</p>
<p>3rd grade… Does your child exhibit extraordinary athletic talent? If so, see supplemental checklist for athletes.</p>
<p>9th grade… Determine EFC at current income and at expected level in four years. Look at current state’s schools COA. Compare.</p>
<p>And so on.</p>
<p>I’ve been running numbers on occasion since S was young, and yeah, it’s depressing, but it’s gotta be done IMHO. Some life events have ensured that I don’t have nearly as much as I’d like in the college fund, but I’m glad for what I do have, and well aware that it’s likely to fall short of anything other than state U tuition and commuting from home, but at least it does that!</p>
<p>How many parents don’t have even that much information? (Besides my exH, I mean…)</p>
<p>MPMom, re post #104, and of course there is the situation (also explained by xiggi in post #100) where your child IS in the top percentage, and gets the great scholarship, but it does little to help since it just reduces the need-based aid. Since I qualify for need-based aid, what I thought would be a financial safety due to likelihood of receiving merit aid actually turned out to offer a slightly less attractive package than some of the other schools.</p>
<p>The danger in assuming that great stats = great merit scholarship is that great student might end up at school she really does not want to attend. I have a kid with great stats. She applied to several schools that award great merit. She ended up with quite a few merit scholarships, BUT … and this is a HUGE “but” for many people … her awards ranged from $14k/year to $19k/year … at schools with COA of $32-45k/year. It doesn’t take a financial wizard to understand that there is a whole lot of money left to pay! In our case, several of the schools ended up being right around the same bottom line … less than our FAFSA EFC, actually (nice institutional awarding!) … after all aid was awarded. A couple of the schools, though, ended up gapping us (or awarding more than the freshman Stafford in loans). For many families who cannot or will not pay EFC, this scenario is not good! Had she applied to schools where she was much above the pack, rather than simply “above the pack,” she probably would have had much better results. She chose not to do this, and we supported that. However, not every family is in our position. Families MUST understand that huge sums of free money are not easy to come by … and that they really need to aim for a lower tier school if they “need” lots of money in order for school to be a reality. That way, if the big money comes in at a higher level school, fine. If not, though, they have at least a shot at a free ride somewhere else.</p>
<p>Of course, for those who must pay full fare, $15 looks really good!</p>
<p>One more thing that people need to remember re full tuition or full ride scholarships: most require separate interviews, often with scholarship committees. Therefore, while your kids’ stats may qualify them for the scholarship, and get them the invitation to the scholarship weekend, they are not sufficient to grab the big bucks. Personality, poise, and the ability to speak well while on the spot count, too.</p>
<p>If 568 schools have agreed on certain principles and methodologies that they all adhere to, why is there not at least a basic 568 PROFILE EFC calculator out there? There is a decent bit of transparency about FAFSA numbers, but I don’t understand why it practically takes a subpoena to find out if a college used my huge medical expenses in their calculation.</p>
<p>I might be able to then figure out how our MIT EFC was less than FAFSA EFC, but Chicago says it’s way above same.</p>
<p>Back to cash balance plans: When an employer switches to a cash balance plan, you get what is the present value of your benefit at age 65. If you save that smalll bag of change, you’ll have at age 65 enough cash to pay yourself the monthly accrued benefit you had earned at the date the plan terminated. Considering most traditional pension plans earn most of their real cash payoff value late in the game, it’s a real hatchet job.</p>
<p>Thanks for your continued efforts to ensure that everyone ends up in school. The academics are more transparent for most people. The money part is more confusing, or rather, most confusing. You’re a good man, Charlie Brown.</p>
<p>People continually reinvent the wheel. As an occasional women’s studies teacher (been teaching it for 28 years, yuck!) I can tell everyone that every class starts in the same place, full of ignorance and stereotypes. You’d think the proliferation of cute girl doctors on TV would have taken care of this! (See winky face.)</p>
<p>Need-based aid needs the same informercial curm is providing for merit aid. I’ll think about that, but I don’t have his unflagging energy.</p>
<p>Yup, Curm, financial aid cut you the wrong way on all fronts but you won the big lottery: your D, a woman talented enough to qualify for really good merit money and sensible enough to be grateful for it.</p>
<p>Hm. All of you who want transparency on need-based aid formulas, it’s my suspicion that there’s a merit factor there, too, though all colleges say no. It seems that offers can be sweetened if a school really want a student. What’s the term? Preferential packaging.</p>
<p>Transparency would make this obvious.</p>
<p>Maybe I’m off base here, but that’s my suspicion.</p>
<p>Owlice,
I like your idea. There should probably be college cost predictions in maternity wards. Seriously, though, families do need to be educated/educate themselves when their children are young. I remember when S was in first grade and I mentioned something about saving for college. The response I got from some people (including teachers?!) was “he’s so smart, you don’t have to save anything. He’ll get a scholarship.” Wow. Fortunately we didn’t follow that advice. Even then, I had an idea that scholarships would be hard to come by. I also knew that by the time college rolled around, we would not be eligible for financial aid. The misconception about how easy it is to get “scholarships” seems to be pretty widespread. I always assumed that even though S had a very desirable profile to most colleges (the kind most people on CC say "you’re a shoo in, you’ll get in everywhere) that merit aid was not guaranteed. Curmudgeon, we did take some of your advice: applied to a safety school that was rolling admission (got 50% merit $ with opportunity to apply for full ride, but did not pursue after EA admit to more desired school). I think every family should operate on the assumption that their child will not get any merit aid. If it happens, it’s a pleasant surprise.</p>
<p>And actually, I have nothing against the principle of cash balance pensions. It probably should be the law of the land. Traditional pensions, along with job-based health insurance create a bond between employer and employee that is unnatural and often destructive. </p>
<p>For the employee, they often hang onto a job that they would otherwise leave because either they are uninsurable (health), or get to a point where starting over in any pension plan is a recipe for financial disaster - too little value in current plan and not enough time to get full retirement from another. They are locked away from applying themselves at other opportunities that would yield more for the economy (not to mention themselves).</p>
<p>For the employer, they often fall victim to not fully accounting for a looming pension burden, as they only account for the present value of their employee pensions. As their workforce ages, the cost of these older employees skyrocket, leading them to force early retirements (to limit damages), but thereby losing their most valuable (skilled and experienced) employees.</p>
<p>Bringing this back kinda on topic, with a mixture of pension systems in place, it adds to the perception of inequity of FA as those who have to fund their own plans. Like the FA Fairy, there is no Retirement Fairy either and neither mythical entity cares about the other’s existence.</p>
<p>Moral to the story, save for your retirement early and often. The system is rigged to reward those who do.</p>
<p>Thanks. When I was a college student, I babysat for a family in the neighborhood who had just had a baby. (Okay, I babysat for them some months after they had the baby, but the point is, she was a baby!) On their refrigerator door, the couple had a list of short-term and long-term financial goals, and one of the long-term goals was “College fund for [baby’s name].” I thought even then what a good idea it was to have these goals listed where they could see them every day, to help them shape their behavior to be compatible with their goals. </p>
<p>(Maybe if I did the same with weight, I’d rethink the ice cream, but what fun is that?! )</p>
<p>What would be on the checklist? Should there be different checklists for different ages of awareness? (Much as there are for retirement – you know… “OMG, I turned 50 and NOW I need to start saving for retirement!” Even some saving starting at age 50 is better than none at all! Even starting in 9th grade is better than doing nothing at all, though earlier is, of course, always better than late for things like this.)</p>
<p>I’ve already told my S how much support he can expect from me when he goes to college. (He’s a HS freshman.) I hope at some point he has a conversation with his dad about college finances, too. He knows he will have to find some scholarship money somewhere if he is to 1.) have a residential experience; 2.) go someplace other that State U. He’s slowly coming to the realization that indeed, some of this will be up to him!</p>
) would be:</p>
)</p>