A simple visit to the UW-Madison financial aid website can show you that an OOS student with an EFC of $14k will get $6k in free money and $5.5k in loans (including $3.5k subsidized).
At EFC $14,001 there is no free money - sorry, NJ Dan.
Time article- title says it all........"My son was accepted to a College he can't afford- now what?"
Yeah, I get UNC, where kid 1 attended. But UW clearly says on their FinAid brochure, that they don’t necessarily meet full need for instater’s:
btw: it took me all of 20 seconds to find this. I stand by my claim of ignorant. (just more of the ‘anywhere but Rutgers mentality’ of NJ residents) If the family is smart enough to search and apply to OOS schools, they can read the not-so-fine print on costs of attendance.
Also, note that the deposit was made before the FinAid award. Was UW just slow, or was the family slow to send in FAFSA, thus delaying processing?
I agree. Don’t go to a school you can’t afford. Any money given to anybody, IS or OOS, that brings down the cost of attendance, is a bonus.
Seems like a happy ending, in that he is going to a respectable less expensive college that they can afford.
My daughter attends competitive magnet school in NJ which routinely sends large numbers of kids to the elites. This year, however, a very large contingent is heading to Rutgers - some of them as bitter as the kid in the article. This is mostly for financial reasons. Apparently many parents were willing to pay full price only for top 30 schools. Thankfully, we escaped this drama - my daughter chose Rutgers after comparing the alternatives.
If my mother had posted a facebook picture of me at the University of Wisconsin with the caption “Snowflake’s a Badger!” before she had determined that I wouldn’t be able to attend, I’d be a little bitter too.
High efc* family’s probably NEVER had to think about price. About most of anything. Just thought if the kid was a strong student, it’d all work out. And most guidance counselor focus on acceptance, not financial aid, especially in high income areas.
- doesn't qualify for any aid with two in college + NJ area where basically everyone goes to 4-year college means top 1% earners.
Makes me feel even better about our summer project being to run the NPC’s on the tentative short list for my kid, a junior next year. A bit early, but I am a “no surprises” kind of person - and CC is full of my people! I know what I can afford, period, and I am assuming I will be paying it (I expect some FA and MA, but that will be icing on the cake and not the whole cake itself).
I love how the author says those mean people in the financial aid office somehow felt the parents would magically come up with the money to send the son there, putting aside their own responsibility to see what they could afford. Victim much?
And nice to slam in public the university your kid is attending - jeesh. I’ve told my kid there is no shame in being a big fish in a small pond, especially if that pond fits in every way and has the possibility of honors courses. She is probably at the higher end of the stats for the colleges she is looking at, but they have exactly what she wants and are within the radius she wants from home. If she gets into any of those and attends, I will gladly buy a “my kid goes to xyz” sticker.
I have wondered the same exact thing!
My H is from NJ originally, and wouldn’t go back and hasn’t been back in many years. But if you raised your kids there, and paid NJ taxes - why not take advantage of the IS schools?
IIRC, U Wisconsin is having some $ issues these days. Maybe they made the right decision for reasons they hadn’t even considered.
I hate to see these kinds of scenarios- the older kid gets to go OOS, then it suddenly dawns on the parents that the they need a cheaper option for the younger kid. I don’t really get the whole NJ thing about Rutgers either. But, if the kid really wanted to get out of New Jersey for college, like his brother did, it’s too bad the family didn’t focus on schools that would give them some merit aid or would meet full need.
Rutgers gives merit aid to better in-state students. According to the article this student had to attends Rutgers-NB at full price so he would stand no chance to be accepted to a meet full need college. He could only get merit aid from colleges that are much lower in admission selectivity (enough merit aid at privates to make it cheaper than Rutgers).
If you plan to work in NYC Metro area right after graduation Rutgers is a better choice than U-Wisconsin.
If her kids grew up thinking attending OOS universities was a given, that’s her fault. It was the parents’ responsibility to make sure their son knew what they were willing to spend, but they let him go into the process thinking he could go anywhere. They must be very affluent if it didn’t occur to them to check the (net cost) price before sending in a deposit.
I can’t imagine how disappointed her son must have been, and instead of coming up with a plan and talking up his alternative she took him to Rutgers and did the opposite. It sounds like her own ego was damaged. She went to college with farmers and mechanics; I think she expected her kids to attend more selective schools. But getting in is only half the battle. I feel for the children when their plans don’t work out, but this student is in a better position than most. His parents can afford to pay for him to dorm at a solid 4-year college.
I would have liked the article better if she acknowledged her mistakes and wrapped it up with pointers for other families, but I didn’t see her take personal responsibilty at all. She doesn’t even have the courtesy to remove the OOS sticker from the car for her son. She expects him to do it. I hope he learns to like his college, but I think he’ll have to do that without a lot of help from his parents.
@austinmshauri The irony is that NJDan’s father is a wealth asset manager (according to a quick internet seach of the article’s author). According to his bio, he gives numerous talks at universities and high schools to promote financial literacy. And…the family did not run the NPC and is shocked that they didn’t get any financial aid. If he was in a different profession, maybe I could understand.
P.S. The author went to high school, not college, with children of farmers and mechanics. She graduated from Muhlenberg and then a post-graduate fellowship at U of Michigan.
In the affluent, NJ suburb that I live in, similar to the one in the article, it can’t be just any OOS public - it has to be one of UW,UMich,UVa,UNC (for the kids with higher grades/scores), or Penn State, UDel, Clemson,CU or maybe UMD (for the next tier). (Somehow UMD is regarded as a “Safety” even though it’s not…)
But no University of ME , which matches the in-state tuition, or SUNY schools (well,maybe Bing) for this group. One or two every year (out of about 400) do go to OOS schools such as Alabama.
There is always a large contingent going to Rutgers (possible after the sticker shock) - but the attitude of the author in that article is fairly typical.
Their background then makes this even stranger. I’m not sure it’s good for the dad’s business to have his wife broadcast just how clueless they were about all this.
^good point, @sevmom.
Her 15 minutes of fame?
Quite the overgeneralization and exaggeration. What is “high EFC”? One doesn’t have to have that high of an EFC to not get need based aid at state schools, even with two or more kids. One could not qualify for need based aid at state schools and still have net price of $30-45,000 at privates.
Huge leap to top 1%. Top 10-20 maybe but there is a big jump from that to 1% that doesn’t have to consider the cost when choosing a school.
And a quick google, top 10% has a huge variance. Top 25% is $77,000 and Top 10% is $121,968 in Tampa, $100,000 and $172,000 in NYC, and $141,790 and $238,855 in San Francisco. No NJ cities in the list or I would have picked one.
The author of the article simply didn’t educate herself. It was more about financial mismanagement than financial status.
As a journalist, maybe she doesn’t research, just reports in a catchy way, little critical thinking required.
DH was also from NJ, did the criticism thing. At the same time, there was much he loved. Rutgers is fine in many fields. It’s silly to talk of all the great kids “settling” and forget they’ll be your classmates. And assume WI magically offers some higher bar among peers. No offense intended.