<p>Yup, it’s scary to look at a $20K/year scholarship offer and still not be able to afford the school! The offer looks great, until you see the $55K COA.</p>
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<p>Yabbut… a vehicle purchase is something you can educate yourself about when you’re ready to go buy a car. You didn’t have to have educated yourself 15 or more years prior to the purchase in order to make the best choices and plans, in most cases, the way you do with a college education.</p>
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True, but I’m not so sure that colleges were driving the “everyone can attend” propaganda train quite so hard 15 years ago either.</p>
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<p>That is NOT the way the FAFSA formula works. My guess is that she did not fill out the official FAFSA or she made a huge mistake (or two) in doing so. Every student has at least $5K in income protection allowance and $5K in assets would have given her, at most, an EFC of $1,000. She would have been Pell eligible. What type of counselor did she see? I would recommend that she actually talk with a financial aid professional at her college of interest.</p>
<p>YOU cannot receive Pell grants because you are not an undergrad. There are generally no federal grants for grad students in master’s programs. Your college may have some limited grant aid, but it would probably be tied to an assistantship or other such position. You will be eligible for Stafford loans up to around $20K/year, $8500 of which may be subsidized if the FAFSA shows that you have financial need.</p>
<p>But let’s take my cousin. On taxes, which are filed separately from her partner, she is a single mother with three kids, seriously under-employed, far below the poverty level. But her meager 5k/year income plus 5k in savings eliminates her</p>
<p>Does your cousin have a BA/BS degree? If so, that is why she won’t get grants.</p>
<p>while it would be nice, this country doesn’t have the money to be giving money away for grad degrees.</p>
<p>Pell Grants are VERY REAL…and they do exist. But, they are for undergrads with LOW EFCs.</p>
<p>Getting back to the OP: teachmom, as others have said, the first look at the FAFSA EFC is a shocker. I remember thinking “surely this must be for four years!” </p>
<p>There is good news and bad news. Good news: a student like your son, with an excellent GPA, a rigorous schedule, a healthy list of EC involvment and, we’ll assume, standardized test scores to match, can find a school that will fit your family budget. Merit aid can be highly competitive; it is certainly NOT awarded to all and sundry. If you can find a school where your son’s stats put him in the top percentiles of applicants, or a school where he’s a rare commodity, you increase his odds of receiving money. The bad news is that he might not have applied to any of those schools. Many of the schools that high-stats kids most want to attend offer no merit aid, or very limited merit aid. </p>
<p>Your family has several options at this point. First, proceed with the applications for the schools he’s chosen, and (if necessary) he can take on some debt. As others have said, $20k debt for an undergrad degree is not unreasonable. </p>
<p>Another option is to immediately start asking for help on this forum and the Parents Forum for other schools that may offer your son significant merit money AND which are still accepting applications. Start new threads, put his general stats (GPA and SAT or ACT) in the title, and lay out any other restrictions such as geography or a specific desired major. </p>
<p>The third “nuclear” option would be to have your son take a gap year next year, and go through the applications process next year using a well-researched list of schools that will keep his (and your) loans to a minimum, if not eliminate them altogether. He could use the year to earn and save money, further reducing any need for loans. This option can wait to be deployed, since you are probably still waiting on admissions decisions and financial aid packages. </p>
<p>We all know how frustrating this is. Please keep reading, and ask questions–there is tremendous knowledge and help here.</p>
<p>Best of luck.</p>
<p>Sylvan-so you are saying that in this day and age, a student should go to a school that is hostile to his/her background? I don’t think so! I don’t want my D going to school that might be dangerous because of who she is.</p>
<p>Well, if no one pays sticker price and everyone gets a scholarship, I guess the OP’s student will get a scholarship and a reduced price too.</p>
<p>I paid full freight for my oldest. I’m still paying for it. My second one went to a state school. He did get some merit awards but the largest one was for $5K. Yes, it was a discount, but given the cost of some of those schools was over $50K, it was still way up there. Our third one does have a merit award, but he is not going to well known college. He picked a small school more than half way across the country, and had very high SAT scores. Had he picked any of the schools that are popular with kids in this area, we would have had to pay full freight. I expect to pay full price for the fourth and fifth. We are not going get any financial aid, I know. </p>
<p>Are we wealthy? I guess we are, but it’s not easy for us to meet those payments. We have made college payments by using savings, cutting back so that we pay some out of current income, and by borrowing. We also expect our kids to do the same, tapping all three sources. They, too, have been saving from gift money and summer earnings. My youngest have worked since they were in elementary school doing jobs in the neighborhood. So they have some savings. They will continue to work, part time at school, and during vacations and summers. They also will borrow. So a $60K price take can be split into $15K increments and then reshifted according to what is available. </p>
<p>How did you pay for high school? Do you have a local public college around? Those are usually very reasonably priced. If you child is going to a public high school, why suddenly is a private, sleep away college so essential? </p>
<p>We pay for our high schooler to go a private school. If he continued at a private college nearby and commuted, the cost would be doubled, but still doable. That is an option. A public OOS school would cost a bit more. A state school would be the least expensive choice even if he boarded. For him to go away to a private school would be double his current tuition cost and then whatever his away living expenses would be. And that’s what it would cost if he went away to live on his own without college, really the cost in the dorms is less.</p>
<p>but I’m not so sure that colleges were driving the “everyone can attend” propaganda train quite so hard 15 years ago either.</p>
<p>I don’t see the colleges as the ones pushing " everyone can attend a school with 50K COA".</p>
<p>I didn’t know a thing about applying to college, like I said neither my husband or I had ever attended a 4-yr school, I was a high school dropout & my kids were " twice-gifted" besides.</p>
<p>I didn’t hear from * anyone* that the COA was going to be covered by anyone but ourselves. Isn’t that why new parents are encouraged to buy savings bonds?</p>
<p>Perhaps those people who have always assumed that they can afford whatever they set their mind to, are more likely to feel that a brand name university is just another purchase to put in their Dooney & Bourke tote.</p>
<p>But I am from the socio-economic class that has to prioritize any spending very carefully & a college education, is well worth taking out $20,000 in loans - total.</p>
<p>You always have the option not to.
I don’t see a big rush of people to do that however.
;)</p>
<p>@emeraldkity: You raise a very legitimate point. I was arguing within the assumptions of mathmomvt’s post #48.</p>
<p>I think the myth of affordability for everyone has multiple points of origin. College recruiters don’t come to your kids school talking about how expensive their schools are - they talk about the opportunity, the ammenities etc. When your kids ask about cost they say things about the family as the primary source of funds etc. - but most kids don’t know what their parents have saved or expect to pay so it all seems doable at the get go. Add to that the talk among parents of high performing kids who have embraced the idea of students being desireable - they assume that their high stats kid will get good offers (and many do) and in addition that schools will come up with funding to keep desireable students. It’s not fair to say that the school doesn’t want to fund every student at 100% of need - the reality is that there are a lot of students with need, there are a lot of students with high stats and there is only so much money to go around.</p>
<p>Too many parents have a conception of their ability to pay as simply "the amount of money I have left over after my house payment, car payments, etc. with no concept that they were expected to drive an older car or live in a smaller house in order to afford college - any college - for their kids.</p>
<p>I do think that the cost of college is reaching dangerous levels for our society to remain competitive - but the affordabiltiy myth has been fueled by glossy brochures and dreams for a long time. We are moving past the point where any discussion of romantic notions of “fit” can be entertained by most families.</p>
<p>But let’s take my cousin. On taxes, which are filed separately from her partner, she is a single mother with three kids, seriously under-employed, far below the poverty level. But her meager 5k/year income plus 5k in savings eliminates her.</p>
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<p>This is untrue. Sorry. This person would qualify for a Pell grant, assuming no prior bachelors degree. The income is low enough for 0 EFC, and the $5k savings is not going to put the student out of the running for Pell. Do a manual calculation yourself. You will see that this results in a Pell grant.</p>
<p>And the majority of schools do not offer grants for 2nd bachelors degrees, post bachelors degrees/certification programs, or grad degrees. They just don’t have the money.</p>
<p>*the reality is that there are a lot of students with need, there are a lot of students with high stats and there is only so much money to go around.
*</p>
<p>Which is why you see kids whose parents are CEOs of top national companies attending in-state public schools as well as other kids who don’t intend to stop with a B.A., and are considering how much debt to take on over all- not just for four years.</p>
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<p>There’s more to a college education that just learning some material, and I do think that “fit” is part of it, and I don’t think it’s just a romantic notion that should be thrown away in favor or pragmatic concerns, although those too must be considered!</p>
<p>What do we want for our kids in a college education? For my husband and me it is excellence of curriculum (which we could get from MIT open course-ware for free!) but also in-class and project interactions with academic peers. We want a school that has a good enough reputation in our child’s area of study that they will be competitive for jobs in a very competitive market, or for the grad schools that will get them there. </p>
<p>And frankly we want a school where our child will be happy, where he will find friends and enjoy his classes and extra-curricular activities. I don’t see any point in sending a child to a school where he will be miserable (or bullied or otherwise unsafe!) or a school where he is unlikely to succeed (a student who thrives with a small teacher-student ratio probably shouldn’t attend a huge school where they may get lost in the crowd), etc. And while some student may thrive on being pioneers (such as the first females in all-male institutions) other will not, and should find somewhere where they will be more welcome. </p>
<p>And yes, fit has to be found within the constraints of affordability and other practical issues. And often compromise is required.</p>
<p>We visited three schools (out of 8) that my son thought (and I agreed) were poor fits for him. One just seemed too huge and too general. He could have probably been happy there but there wasn’t really any reason to continue pursuing it since it didn’t offer a particularly low cost or other advantages. At the second, a very small school, he met with a professor who tried to talk him out of pursuing a certain program because he would have to take 2 years of calculus, the horror! There were only handful of kids in the program and they were clearly seen as freaks, even by most of the faculty! The third had an odd arrangement of programs in his areas of interest that didn’t look like they’d work out well for him, and the students we met at the honors college were extremely apathetic. He probably wouldn’t have been happy at either of the latter two schools. The last one would have given him a full ride as a NMF and if that were the only way we could have afforded to send him to college, he’d have sucked it up and made it work. So I’m not saying that “fit” is the be-all and end-all here, just that it’s a reasonable consideration. If we can find a way to make it happen (and I believe we can, to some degree) we want a school that not only can we afford, but also offers a good “fit”, or at least an approximation thereto, for our kid.</p>
<p>*There’s more to a college education that just learning some material, and I do think that “fit” is part of it, and I don’t think it’s just a romantic notion that should be thrown away in favor or pragmatic concerns, although those too must be considered!
*</p>
<p>I think what the point is that some use “fit” as a way to “stamp one’s foot” to get one’s own way. A child can insist on a more prestigous or pricey school by playing the “fit card”. I’m not saying that any school will work…I’m saying that there are more than a few schools that will work for most kids.</p>
<p>Really, the FAFSA isn’t about making college affordable. Its a tool used to determine whether or not your child qualifies for federal need-based aid, and it is also used by most colleges to determine eligibility for need-based aid as well. Need based aid, as its name suggests, is just a limited amount of aid that is given to the needy. </p>
<p>The reality is that can be very expensive. My parents were also shocked by the FAFSA. The truth is that college costs are inflated. All the stuff about affordable college is a joke. Students are only “affording” college by taking on more loans. Expensive private schools remain the domain of the rich, plus a few lucky scholarship recipients.</p>
<p>Eventually, the higher education bubble will burst as people find themselves unable to repay their loans, much like the housing crisis. Then, the market will sink and prices will go down. Until then, perhaps it’s not a good idea to “invest in education” too much.</p>
<p>Ultimately, there is something inherently unfair about fin aid and the FAFSA. What is unfair is that parents don’t apply to college, students do. An 18 year old just beginning his or her adult life should not have college cost determined by their parent income. What about the children of parents who made bad financial choices, or those whose parents refuse flat out to help with college? Colleges (at least claim) they choose applicants without regard to their parents finances, yet they expect them to pay depending on parents’ finances.</p>
<p>What else is wrong is price discrimination. In any other business, it would be considered wrong to force customers to fully disclose their financial situation before making an offer. What if a store charged prices based on income (Apples $3.50 a piece for those earning over 120,000 per year gross)?</p>
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I’m saying that should not keep the student from going where he or she really wants to go or doing the things they want to do. Where is there a school that would be “dangerous” for your D because of who she is anyways?</p>
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Well, first you’ll need to write an essay explaining why you need apples in the first place, and what you plan to do with the apples once you have them… …:)</p>
<p>Yes, I was trying to figure out the “dangerous” comment as well. Could you elaborate, upstatemom? What colleges/state are we talking about? What is meant by “hostility to a student’s background”? That seems like a very remote possibility at today’s colleges.</p>
<p>mathmomvt- once again you said it beautifully and perfectly!!!</p>