<p>Semantics are interesting, aren’t they? Especially since the point of the conversation with my in laws was how incredibly smart so & so’s grandkid is, because not only did she get into an ivy … but she got a full ride. :)</p>
<p>Agree. Our local paper reported about a boy who received a “full scholarship” to play football at Harvard. While I’m sure most of the readership was duly impressed, I felt bad for the student! They had in fact disclosed that this student’s family’s income was less than $60,000.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Ain’t that the truth. I have a lot of close friends, but I don’t have any friends who show me their income tax returns, and I have very few friends who are close enough to show me their award letters from colleges. (I’ve seen a few of those at high school graduation parties, but not all the time.) </p>
<p>On “full scholarship,” to an Ivy League college, a lot of the ambiguity comes from the word “full.” Once back in the olden days I was in the home of a scientist, who lived in a nice house in the suburbs in Ohio, and I was told his son got a “full scholarship” to Harvard. Even way back then Harvard scholarships were based on financial need. I’m sure the meaning was that the family’s demonstrated financial need, which may not have been a particularly large percentage of cost of attendance, was fully met. Any scholarship is full if you aren’t gapped.</p>
<p>These days the ivies are so competitive that people will still beat down the doors if they doubled the cost of attendance - they don’t need to give scholarships to get who they want.</p>
<p>One of the great shames of our education system is the inadequacy of the state schools to provide even the EFC for all of their students. Though many complain about having to cough up $20K with a $90K salary, my sympathies and indignation is more for the family with an EFC of zero, or, say, $5K who do not get need met, who have to come up somehow with the entire $20K COA or $15K after the Pell kicks in. Yes, they get loans too, but not enough to meet the cost of attendence and for a family making an income low enough to to qualify for Pell, taking out that amount of loans is a terrible financial move, even if a lender is willing to let them borrow. So, Jadeli, it is really a privilege to even qualify for loans, which many families do NOT do. The kids are allowed to get the Stafford loans, but they will not cover UC cost of attendence. Maybe if the students commute, it would be affordable, but these are the very kids who often need to be moved from their environment for them to have the best chance to succeed at school. </p>
<p>The very top students are the ones who most often have the best options with merit money and more generous financial aid packages. Even then, full scholarships are few and far between. Especially for the state school, and CA is not generous in this regard.</p>
<p>I don’t know why you guys ignore the fact at hand after I stated several times that me, and a “poor person” are in the exact same financial situation.</p>
<p>Both of us have zero money for college.</p>
<p>One of us is going to get “free money,” by essentially freeloading.</p>
<p>And yes, schools do pay in full, I know UCLA does because I have talked to and seen how these things work. The UCs in particular have a special system for students that grew up in impoverished conditions to receive all the money they could ever need. Furthermore, students also receive more than enough “need based” private scholarship. My high school alone, almost all of the scholarships were need based. </p>
<p>Enough with the intellectual dishonesty, please!</p>
<p>^^Nope, by state policy the UCs require nearly every student to contribute $9k in self help, which includes loans and work study. Those exempted are recruited athletes on scholarship and Regent’ scholars. Outside scholarships are outside scholarships. Your high school policy is not a state issue.</p>
<p>The fact is that FAFSA has determined that you do have more than ZERO money for college. It is a family decision. You have an alternative to attend a commuinity college for little money.</p>
<p>A poor person is not in the same financial situation as you. Even if you hold every thing else even, a richer family can afford to pay back PLUS or private loans easy. A family’s high EFC is likely to remain high. It’s unlikely a low EFC rises much. Not in 4 years and probably not in the 10 years required to pay back most loans.</p>
<p>However, things are not even. Richer families have greater ability to save more for college. Richer families can qualify for loans and better interest rates. Richer families have better contacts that their kids can tap into for graduation gifts ($), internships and employment opportunities.</p>
<p>The latter is exactly why financial aid exists. Colleges want diversity and governments believe in granting the poor opportunities access to a college education and all its benefits.</p>
<p>
Do you know why FAFSA said $29,000 EFC? Can you give us the details of why you think $29,000 is wrong? Is there a special circumstance FAFSA did not consider?</p>
<p>OP, you and the poor student (and the majority of UC students, for that matter) are in the same situation of having no money. Your families, on the other hand, are in totally different circumstances. EFC stands for expected FAMILY contribution, not expected STUDENT contribution. If the only criterion for getting need-based aid was how much money a student had, then shoot, I’d disown my own kids pronto. Then they’d have no money, and they’d be able to freeload, even though our family’s EFC is substantial. Unfortunately for me and every other parent, colleges and the government have twigged to that little dodge. </p>
<p>I understand that your parents are recent immigrants, and that there wasn’t much time to save for your college education. At the same time, they have apparently prospered enough to now have a significant family income, and have apparently managed to save enough to buy a house. That puts more of a financial burden on you to pay for college. No, it’s not fair. As I tell my kids all the time, life’s not fair. It’s not fair that my kids will have an easier time paying for college than you because they were lucky enough to be born into a family where the immigrant heavy lifting was done a few generations back. At the same time, it’s not fair that my kids won’t be able to choose any school regardless of cost because they weren’t lucky enough to be born into a wealthier family. Them’s the breaks. </p>
<p>I am concerned about the amount of debt you’re taking on. Even with a lot of AP credits, it is entirely possible that you could take 5 years to finish. An increase in UC fees, a bump-up in cost of living, and you could be looking at much more than $80k. Are you planning on graduate school or professional school? If so, you might want to ask the experts here about ways to cut your undergrad debt, perhaps by transferring to a school that will offer you a better combination of merit and need-based aid.</p>
<p>My whole point is that the EFC system is flawed. My parents can’t contribute anything, and neither can his. Under this system, the poor person was given money, I was given none. I guess we have switched roles now! </p>
<p>Also, I find it offensive that you’re telling me to go to a community college. Why should I have to go to a community college while a “poorer” person goes to a four year school? I find this highly offensive and nonsensical.</p>
<p>The key issue here is that you bought a house… Isn’t that considered an asset that you can sell to get money to fund your education with? That is the only rationale I can see to explain the little financial aid you got…</p>
<p>Its quite simply like storing money into your 401K, or buying a house, or investing in stocks or bonds. Its valued asset that can be converted into money that can supplement your education. There is absolutely no reason why the financial aid office should give YOU aid because your family decides to get themselves into debt by purchasing a house. The logistics of this is simple. You shouldn’t have purchased a house. Save yourself the debt, hide the money, and you could have gotten more financial aid.</p>
<p>Most poor people don’t even own houses. They either pay rent apartments or live in government subsized cheap housing. You are vastly different from a poor person if a) you own a house, and b) your EFC was *that *high for a state school like UCLA which simply implies, your family income was high or your family asset value was high. Your statement on purchasing a house seems to corruborate with this story about high asset value which is an quite likely reason why your financial aid was so low.</p>
<p>I’ve not had time to read this entire thread, and frankly, do not care to read it. </p>
<p>Dearest JadeLi.</p>
<p>Your parents have a home. By the amount of your EFC, obviously a very NICE home. Do you realize many persons that have a low EFC, or are receiving a full ride based on need, do not have a home at all? They live with relatives or in virtual squalor? The student has to work to help make ends meet, and constant worry if it’s going to be enough. </p>
<p>At my daughter’s school…those having full financial need met are given a set allotment for meal plans and dorm rooms. If they choose a more expensive plan, OR through no fault of their own, get placed in a more expensive dorm, they are responsible for meeting the difference. Same for meal plans…chose a more expensive plan than the aid allows, pay the difference. Most often, one isn’t told what plan is covered until it’s too late.</p>
<p>Be thankful what you do have in life…not for what someone else has.</p>
<p>read it an weep and tell us that you have a problem with this.</p>
<p>[With</a> curiosity, confidence, he’s poised to enter Penn | Philadelphia Inquirer | 07/01/2008](<a href=“http://www.philly.com/philly/news/homepage/22751424.html]With”>http://www.philly.com/philly/news/homepage/22751424.html)</p>
<p>With curiosity, confidence, he’s poised to enter Penn
Homeless as a child, he passed one test after another.</p>
<p>By Kia Gregory</p>
<p>Inquirer Staff Writer
Steven Vaughn-Lewis is tall and lanky and sometimes stammers. But any first impressions of awkwardness vanish as he exudes a quiet confidence, often punctuated by a warm grin.</p>
<p>It is a confidence that has grown over his 18 years, as he overcame homelessness, months of missing grade school, and stints in foster care.</p>
<p>After his grandmother rescued him at age 8, he grew up in a Strawberry Mansion neighborhood where poverty runs deep, few have better than a high school diploma, and gunshots turn young black men like him into casualties of petty violence.</p>
<p>Now, with high school over, Steven nervously awaits his next hurdle.</p>
<p>With a full four-year academic scholarship, he’s heading to the University of Pennsylvania, an Ivy League school where African American students are twice as likely as white students to drop out.</p>
<p>It is his first stop in becoming a surgeon.</p>
<p>As he prepares for the arduous journey, Steven is humbled by thoughts of what if?</p>
<p>“There are a lot of people like me who just weren’t that fortunate,” he says. “What if my grandma hadn’t taken me out of foster care? What if I wasn’t fortunate enough to have gone to Masterman? I don’t know where I’d be now.”</p>
<p>Steven doesn’t like to linger on his childhood. What he will say is that he and his brother were often hostage to his mother’s mental illness, which sometimes turned emotionally abusive. The family moved abruptly and often - from Los Angeles, where he was born, to Miami, Ohio, to Texas, to Philadelphia.</p>
<p>“I looked at them like adventures,” he says of the long bus rides to nowhere. Before landing with his grandmother, he went to eight schools. In every one he’d make a best friend, only to leave each behind.</p>
<p>The last time Steven remembers seeing his father, he was about 10. They were in court over what he believes was a custody dispute.</p>
<p>His mother appeared in fits and starts.</p>
<p>Reading, he says, became his refuge.</p>
<p>When Steven was about 3, his grandmother remembers her daughter calling to say he was reading the newspaper comics.</p>
<p>“He always could read,” says his grandmother, Loretta Ford. “I don’t remember a time when he couldn’t read.”</p>
<p>And he had a thirsty mind, asking so many questions.</p>
<p>In raising Steven, the 64-year-old former nurse relied on her old-school values - values she learned growing up in a family that didn’t have much, but at a time when “children were cared for.”</p>
<p>"It’s called ‘everyday living,’ " she explains. “You do what you can.”</p>
<p>For her grandsons, that meant no “bed hugging.” They were up and dressed by 8 a.m., even in summer.</p>
<p>Rooms had to be clean. Homework had to be done.</p>
<p>For Steven’s brother, who is a year younger, things were strained, and at age 12, he left to live with his uncle; he has struggled with school.</p>
<p>Steven, though, didn’t want to do anything to burden his grandmother or somehow end up back in foster care.</p>
<p>Until graduation, he got up at 6 a.m. for his 45-minute commute to Masterman, then worked three hours after school before coming home at 7:30 to do homework.</p>
<p>He still works the same office job, now full-time. In his free time, he listens to music - from Biggie Smalls to Phantom of the Opera, and talks on the phone with school friends. Or plays Scrabble with his grandmother, who he admits is overprotective.</p>
<p>Growing up, he wasn’t allowed off their tidy block, not even to the nearby playground. “And the two times I could go there to run ball, I had ridiculous restrictions. I had to call every 15 minutes.”</p>
<p>Even now, when he goes out, he has to write down the address and phone number of where he’s going. And he had best be home by 11 p.m.</p>
<p>“I don’t see it as unreasonable,” he says. “She knows what’s out there in the world, and she doesn’t want anything to happen to me.”</p>
<p>Just last year, he remembers, their block was sealed off by yellow police tape - another person shot and killed.</p>
<p>When Steven passes the guys idling on the corner, he offers a simple nod.</p>
<p>For some, “there are no other opportunities other than fast money,” he explains.</p>
<p>But for Steven, one door after another opened as others, beyond his grandmother, saw his potential.</p>
<p>At Leslie P. Hill Elementary School, where few fifth graders performed at grade level, Steven shined.</p>
<p>One day, a school counselor phoned his grandmother and urged her to get Steven on the list for Masterman. She remembers him saying Steven “deserved” to be there.</p>
<p>He started the academically rigorous Masterman in sixth grade, and in ninth caught the attention of his honors biology teacher.</p>
<p>Nabeehah Parker remembers that whenever she asked a question, one particular student would throw his hand in the air and leave it there until finally, exhausting all possibilities, she called him.</p>
<p>Steven Vaughn-Lewis.</p>
<p>He would answer thoroughly, and offer connections and examples beyond anything Parker had taught in class.</p>
<p>She finally asked him: “How do you know all of this?”</p>
<p>“I like to read.”</p>
<p>“Reading was sort of an escape for him,” she says, “and that made him a powerful participant in the classroom.”</p>
<p>Steven calls Parker his mentor. She calls him brilliant.</p>
<p>"I think Steven has an inner voice that tells him, ‘Education can take me places I want to go,’ " Parker explains. “A lot of students don’t understand that. He seems to have gotten that message at an early age. And he has an inner drive that’s phenomenal.”</p>
<p>In 10th grade, when Steven needed a job, she called Rosalind Chivis, head of the school district’s office of secondary education, who hired him as her administrative assistant.</p>
<p>Parker also urged his science teacher to challenge him, knowing his interest in medicine.</p>
<p>When Steven was little, his brother’s asthma often put him in the hospital. The doctors’ kind words and hard candy convinced Steven he wanted to become one of them. More recently, his great-grandmother was saved by emergency surgery.</p>
<p>That sophomore year, Steven and two other students conducted a four-month experiment at Penn on a part of the brain related to memory. It involved LED receptors, optical mapping and oxygenation levels.</p>
<p>Parker will never forget how Steven burst into her classroom and yelled: “I think I know why people forget things!”</p>
<p>His team won gold medals in citywide science fairs, and Steven returned from Penn determined to go there. He had no idea it was so prestigious, nor how he would pay for it.</p>
<p>At Masterman, he’d maintained a 4.0 average, while finding time to be president of the school’s African American Cultural Committee, a saxophone player in the jazz band, and a tutoring coordinator for fifth and sixth graders.</p>
<p>“I never thought I was Ivy League material,” he says. “Then I thought: Why shouldn’t I?”</p>
<p>Parker wrote him a letter of recommendation:</p>
<p>“Although he may not offer all the ‘extras’ that other students present in their admissions package,” such as an abundance of AP classes, “his genius manifests in his ability to overcome adversity and focus on achievement.”</p>
<p>When Steven told his grandmother he’d gotten in, with a scholarship, she told him, “Let me take your temperature.”</p>
<p>"He’s the epitome of ‘against all odds,’ " says his boss, Chivis. “He’s an example of what a young person can aspire to when they’re surrounded by caring adults.”</p>
<p>Steven puts it more modestly. “I just did what I was good at. I just focused on that, and it led me to where I am.”</p>
<p>For his senior project, Steven wanted to shadow a trauma team. Parker again picked up the phone.</p>
<p>She called Temple University Hospital’s trauma outreach coordinator, Scott Charles, who, moved by her urging and Steven’s poise, allowed the teen in.</p>
<p>For two weeks, Steven wore scrubs and a pager, which went off whenever a trauma patient barreled through the emergency-room doors.</p>
<p>Charles often teased, “Don’t faint, Steven. Don’t let me down.”</p>
<p>There were car crashes, motorcycle accidents, falls - and 23 gunshot patients, more than one a day.</p>
<p>“The list of gunshot patients were exclusively young black males like myself,” Steven remembers. “That impacted me the most.”</p>
<p>Steven describes a gunshot as “a wrecking ball slamming into a building.” He saw the results firsthand: open abdomens, brain damage, paralysis.</p>
<p>Often, he and Charles would visit the rooms of gunshot patients. Charles hoped to enroll them in an intervention program - maybe to get a GED or a job.</p>
<p>“When people leave the hospital,” Steven later told his classmates during his senior-project presentation, “they go right back to the streets that sent them there. We have to do what we can to keep them from coming back.”</p>
<p>Steven, said Charles, carried himself "like he belonged there. He’s able to go into that room and look that kid in the eye and say, ‘Hey, man, what’s going on? Talk to me,’ as someone they can relate to.</p>
<p>“But until he walks with the college diploma,” Charles added, “it’s all about hope. It’s all about potential, but we have to get him there.”</p>
<p>Charles quickly recruited his wife, who happens to run a Penn program to help prepare African and African American freshmen for university life.</p>
<p>“Black students have a hard time at Penn,” says Camille Charles, a sociology professor and associate director of the Center for Africana Studies. “No matter how academically or socially prepared they are.”</p>
<p>She offers myriad reasons for the disparity, including their heavy dependence on financial aid and the social pressure of being black on an overwhelmingly white campus. On one hand, there’s fear of being perceived as not black enough, she said. On the other is the burden of stereotypes.</p>
<p>“They know that their whole race is being judged on the basis of their own individual performance,” she says, “and it has a negative impact on their grades.”</p>
<p>As for Steven, she checks off added concerns: his worry for his grandmother, his need to work, Penn’s tough academics and sheer size.</p>
<p>To help, she contacted his adviser, and connected Steven to a few science professors. And she plans to help him find a job on campus, closer to his studies.</p>
<p>“He’s a resourceful kid,” she says, “but at the end of the day you don’t want the initial shock to be so great it gets him off balance and he has a hard time coming back.”</p>
<p>For Steven, hard times have been his strength.</p>
<p>“I’m nervous, I’m excited - I’m everything,” he says about college. “Becoming a surgeon is an extremely long road. But it just strengthens my resolve to succeed.”</p>
<p>Whatever happens, his grandmother says she’ll be there for him.</p>
<p>“I tell him you have to know where you stand with yourself, and I think he’s come to that point.”</p>
<p>
Thanks - I have two kids in college each with an EFC of $5000. We will have to pay more than double that for each one. </p>
<p>Honestly, JadeLi - it isn’t that your parents CAN’T pay it is that they WON’T pay. Colleges and the Government who dole out “financial aid” expect parents to be responsible to contribute toward their child’s college education. You are bound to your parents until you can become independent.</p>
<p>There are alternatives for you - none that you would probably like however.</p>
<p>
With this attitude I wonder how successful you will be in life.</p>
<p>Jade, in this society, parents are primarily responsible for paying undergraduate college education to the extent they are deemed able and to the extent there are available funds. The determination of need comes from the government and from the colleges themselves. By those definitions, your parents are considered able to pay for college, and if they don’t feel like doing it or cannot, it is a family issue. If your parents earned less money than the financial aid calculators show the ability to pay (note that ability is defined by the $ amounts, not other parameters), then there MAY be aid available. THere is no insurance or assurance that the aid will cover the need. </p>
<p>However, there are merit aids out there for the most qualified STUDENTS. If you have the stuff that attracts colleges, and work to get scholarships, you will most likely get money for college. Why should colleges pay for students who can get their way paid? In your case, it appears both your family and your abilities could get you through college financially, if either work at those routes. </p>
<p>Yes, the system is flawed, but your complaints are very low on the list , of on it at all. I feel for those families who absolutely have no way to pay for college because they do not have the money. And for those kids who do not have the calibre to get full aid. You fall in neither category.</p>
<p>JadeLi,</p>
<p>Do your parents live close enough to any UC campus that you could attend and live at home? If you were admitted to UCLA, it is likely you could be admitted to any of the UC campuses. This would significantly cut down on the expense, and you would still get a UC education.</p>
<p>I think the UC system is one of the closest to what I feel would be a good model for the state university system that exists in this country. The big problem is cost. A lot of it has to do with the high cost of housing and living in CA, as the UC tuition seems to be pretty much in line. Bay’s suggest is a good one for you, Jade. </p>
<p>I sympathize with you and with all kids whose parents make enough according to FA standards to pay for college, but they will not or cannot pay the amounts. It puts you in a very unfair category. In my opinion it is absolutely unfair as you can no more choose parents willing to pay for college, than you can choose parents who are financially capable of paying. It is an inherent flaw in the system, and to me an outrage that colleges can make kids dependent on parental resources when they are adults in just about every other way under the law. </p>
<p>However, I do not think it is unfair that those who do not have the funds are first in line for them. You see, there is no way to determine who truly will not pay for college and who will say so to get the funds. There just is not enough money to pay for everyone. A student who has the academic credentials to get into a UC is likely to find a schools somewhere to pay for his/her way. THe kids really left in the lurch are those who can do not have such credentials , and no way to pay either.</p>
<p>^^^ Excellent post!</p>