Too Poor for College, Too Rich for Financial Aid

Paying for College
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<p>Richard Morais (the father of Katherine Morais - the JHU student who graduated in 2013 in Creative Writing and Art History) previously worked for Forbes. <a href=“http://www.richardcmorais.com/”>http://www.richardcmorais.com/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>I also don’t see the point of a June 2014 article based on a 2009 situation. Or, since the student in question has already graduated, perhaps more information including how the family DID afford to put her through JHU, and how they are paying off the debt, if any.</p>

<p>I like that alternative title: - Too Poor for a Private Elite but …</p>

<p>I also question that ‘one of the biggest financial aid secrets’ is getting ‘scholarships and grants as a freshman in high school’ - really?! – how about some concrete examples (and not from 2009)?</p>

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<p>@Madison85‌
re: “Secret”, exactly! That sounds more like hyperbole than anything else. You can find a few interesting things online (people applying to hundreds of scholarships and then somehow coming up with $80k-100k), but they do not sound like stories of truth.</p>

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<p>Madison, thanks for the link to his (Morais’) bio. There are some interesting gems including this quote:
“A man cannot leave a better legacy to the world than a well-educated family” -Thomas Scott</p>

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<p>@204mom:</p>

<p>“Bless our public universities. My state has some of the best. But when the middle class must look away from private universities, it’s not a good thing.”</p>

<p>Well, paradigm shifts tend to be abrupt. In 20 years, a ton of small privates will close down and education and accreditation may come from MOOCs with most kids attending college while living at home and just visiting local sites/campuses at specified times for the social aspects of college (like a football game, etc.). More state flagships may adopt the PSU system where a lot of kids attend a local satellite campus they can drive to (or just take MOOCs) for the first 2 years before transferring to the main campus for the last 2.</p>

<p>The elite privates will become a luxury good for the rich and the lucky few who get financial aid.</p>

<p>One thing I know for sure is that current trends can not continue.</p>

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<p>You know what “too poor for college” means? It means selling your blood to buy your textbooks. It means working full-time at a graveyard shift job to pay the tuition and to pay the rent. It means refusing to leave a bank officer’s office when he tells you that you, at 22 years old, are really too old to get a school loan. That is what my dad faced in the early 1970s as he worked to return to college to make a better life for our family. He had a wife, and three little kids, and we moved into college housing, along with a lot of other young families with the same dream to get that college degree and move up the ladder from the lowest rungs to a place solidly in the the middle of the middle class. School loans were difficult to get, and my dad did not want to get school loans at all, but he was already working two jobs, and, at that time, he was willing to take a third at McDonalds. It is hard to believe, but in the early 1970s, if you were 22 years old, McDonalds actually considered you too old to work for them. So, he finally went to Bank of America, and was told that he was too old to get a school loan, and he refused to leave until the bank officer finally decided to give him a loan. Those are the kinds of things that people who truly are “too poor” do to pursue their dreams. And my dad’s dreams were quite humble - to get that degree and get that professional job and someday buy a house and someday see his kids go to college, too. Some of my greatest memories were while living in student housing with all of the other young families as all of the dads (and a couple of moms, too) pursued their college degrees.</p>

<p>We have come so far these days, and not in a good way, when people who have had generous incomes and lived in such a long period of prosperity since the 1980s, have blown those good incomes on constant streams of new cars and new houses and name-brand clothes and fancy shoes and exclusive preschools and college prep kindergartens and frequent restaurant meals and all sorts of other competitive conspicuous consumption, and have bought into the idea that their kids can only be successful if they get into a top 10 ranked school (or maybe top 100, a little slumming allowed.) This Morais guy is shocked to find that he cannot afford to pay tuition at Johns Hopkins. Well, boo hoo. His kid is not entitled to go to Johns Hopkins on the taxpayers’ dimes. And, as great a reputation as Johns Hopkins has, is it really worth the cost?</p>

<p>Financial aid was meant for those who were truly too poor to attend any college, not for those who desire to go to schools that have always been out of reach financially, and are ever more so because of poor money management on the part of the parents. It is time for people to face reality - you may not be able to afford that “dream” school. Big deal. Find schools that fit your budget. There are plenty around. Not being able to attend a dream college does not mean that one is “too poor for college.” These stories are starting to get bug me, especially as the more articles I see appearing in the media, I can see what the trend is - to make people like me subsidize the poor financial decisions of others, yet again, as I have had to do with the housing bubble, etc. I am tired of it. My kids knew upfront our limits, and they worked hard, and they have been blessed with opportunities that won’t require them to graduate in debt, and won’t require me to retire with school loan debt. Are they going to Harvard or Johns Hopkins? No, but so what.</p>

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<p>@chesterton,</p>

<p>Before u continue on w your holier than thou comparison of your virtuous father vs spendthrift parents today, consider that the cost of private 4-yr college has increased 4x the cost of living since your dad was a student. Medical costs have only increased 2x the cost of living. Back then it was actually possible for a student to work and pay for college at the same time.</p>

<p>Also in your father’s day, schools did not apply a “high tuition/ high aid” model to deliberately raise the cost of tuition so full pay parents had to pay the cost of FA for another kid, in addition to paying their own kid’s tuition.</p>

<p>Also back then, working people actually had confidence that there would be a pension or Social Secuirty waiting for them after a lifetime of labor. Those promises are no longer there, unless you are a public employee.</p>

<p>Yes, I think the JHU family was terribly naive about costs and should have worked that part of the equation harder. JHU is one of those schools like Stanford, which offer merit aid to ~1% of students. If you are upper middle class, then not worth bothering with.</p>

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<p>@GMTplus7:</p>

<p>Actually, unlike JHU (which offers a tiny number of academic merit scholarships) Stanford offers no academic merit aid (they do have full-ride and partial athletic scholarships). Shockingly, considering how rich they are, if you look at Stanford’s Common Data Set, they don’t even meet full need for everyone who they consider to have need(!)</p>

<p><a href=“Stanford Common Data Set | University Communications”>http://ucomm.stanford.edu/cds/2013&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

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<p>I think Stanford does guarantee to meet full need to all US and perm residents, not internationals, and they do get a number of international students. Also that guarantee can have stipulations like meeting certain deadlines to be eligible for certain grants and money. At a number of full need guaranteed school, if you don’t meet the deadlines, you miss out. If you are eligible for certain state aid at some schools, and you missed the deadline or didn’t bother to apply and you would have gotten it if you had just done so, the school won’t make up that gap. My guess is that the discrepancies in the common data and Stanford’s guarantee (which they so state on their website) are due to those situations. </p>

<p>The fact of the matter is that there are lots of private schools, boarding schools out there for high school (and younger even) kids that are pricey too. You can look them up. I was paying college tuition prices for my kids to go to highly regarded, highly selective independent school. No one expects or gets money from the federal, state government for such things, and there are few scholarships and fin aid. All of a sudden, it 's college and instead of State U , or even less expensively at time, local State U, people feel that they are entitled to get subsidies from top private schools, and for their kids to be fed and to live there. What should people be expected to pay for private schools, for sending their kids off to school? I am every bit on board with state funding for those who live too far from any 4 year state school (or 2 year, for that matter, though I think the US has done well with having affordable community colleges within commutable range for most) that they HAVE to board in order to get that education/degree especially once they have reached junior status in college. But I am not interested in paying for sleep away experience for students or private school as a tax payer. </p>

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<p>I agree that no one is “entitled” to go to an elite private college, and that “too poor for college” shouldn’t be applied in the context of our nation’s most expensive colleges. However, for those in the donut hole, it is frustrating that private colleges are becoming increasingly the domain of only the rich or the poor.</p>

<p>I am tired of the assumptions by many posters that someone in the donut hole cannot afford to pay for a private college because they have lived “high on the hog.” I know several families in the donut hole who drive old cars, take few and modest vacations, don’t live in mansions, and didn’t send their kids to private school. The FAFSA looks at income for 1 year. Quite possibly, the family’s higher income is recent, or perhaps they’re supporting an elderly parent, paying off their own student loans or prior debt from medical bills, live in a high cost area, recently went through a divorce, scrimping and saving to fund a 401k (unmatched by employer) because that will be their only source of retirement income, trying to save for college for siblings, putting money away to care for a special needs child after they’ve departed, or maybe there is a non-contributing parent or step-parent in the mix, or an ex that hasn’t paid child support in years. Everyone’s situation is different. Some people on here are so quick to judge and label others. Just like poor people aren’t all lazy, people who don’t qualify for FA, but can’t fork over 60k a year in after tax income, aren’t all financially irresponsible. </p>

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<p>Thank you, Overtheedge!</p>

<p>All it took for us was one child with a serious health condition.</p>

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<p>Did the school take that into consideration?</p>

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<p>Most people cannot afford to send their kids away to a private sleepaway college. Even if the EFCs say they can. That’s a fact. So if they cannot get enough financial aid or scholarships to make it work, they either have to borrow or their kid goes to an affordable school. Most famiies cannot afford to send their kids away to private boarding schools in the precollege years either.</p>

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<p>I’m with you, Overtheedge and 3boys! Us: one young child with a serious medical problem, so lots of uncovered health care costs and my wife’s forced abandonment of her career (and 40% of our income) at age 42. Plus, my chronically ill mother moving in with us. That forced a) helping with her living expenses, b) some physical re-design of our house, thereby lowering it’s value, because it is so specific to us, and we’re now a bit house-poor, and c) eventually there were home health aides and then nursing home costs. So, savings wiped out, income decreased, house not very salable because of all of the very specific modifications, and an EFC that we won’t be able to meet because of my income and that not all of these factors are taken into account by FAFSA and net price calculators. </p>

<p>Paying for college is going to be TOUGH. I don’t expect any sympathy, because many have it worse than me and in the case of my mother’s impact on our finances that was a conscious decision over which we had control. As the two of you have pointed out, though, what gets us furious is to be labelled as selfish or lazy. Maybe my kids will go to relatively low-cost public universities. Maybe they’ll get enough merit aid to go to more of what they see as a dream school. If they do, it’s not charity - it’s the school making an investment that it thinks will pay off for it in terms of inflating the school’s stats, adding a very talented kid to the student body, and/or having a successful and perhaps wealthy alum to hit up for donations in a few decades.</p>

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<p>@GMTPlus7… “holier than thou…” Hmmm, really? I guess I am supposed to take that as an insult, but I don’t actually. My father is a better, more morally upright man than many, though I was not touting my father as some saint, but rather as an example, and one of many, who really fit the description “too poor for college.” If only my story had included some dysfunction, you might not have reacted so negatively. You also don’t need to school me on the history. I lived through the history and am fully aware of the differences back then compared to today.</p>

<p>These “too poor for college, too rich for financial aid” stories never seem to focus on families with high incomes who have also chosen to live lives beneath their means, saving their income, or even facing catastrophic events that led to loss of income. No, these stories focus on those families who have enjoyed living lives above their means, are accustomed to living with a lot of debt, are not ever fazed by the idea of signing on for tens of thousands, and sometimes even hundreds of thousands, of dollars of debt. They fully expect that their kids attend high-priced, name-brand schools, and when they finally take a look at the numbers, and realize that their kids cannot attend unless everyone signs on for loans, they complain about being in the donut hole, and dare to say they are “too poor for college” because they don’t qualify for any free financial aid. </p>

<p>Well, why should they qualify for free financial aid? Why should other taxpayers, especially those taxpayers who earned a lot less money over the years and were not able to indulge their kids as much as some of these parents, pay to send those shocked parents’ kids to these premium-priced schools? I am totally fine with upper income parents spending all of their money, and giving their kids the good life, but I don’t want to pay for their kids to go to some overpriced university. Let them take on the full risk of all that debt themselves, or let them face reality and send their kids to the local public university. </p>

<p>As you can tell, I don’t find these stories to be of much value. If I am going to read stories about upper income families facing the challenges of helping their kids pursue a college education, I would rather read stories of upper income families who made choices early on to live beneath their means, saved as much of their money as they could, made sacrifices as far as where to live, drove older cars, bought more modest homes, dealt with catastrophic medical bills and loss of income over extended periods of time, encouraged their kids to work hard in order to win merit scholarships, and were realistic in creating lists of good colleges that met the families’ budgets and kept both the students and parents free of debt - and without all the whining about not getting any financial aid. Then again, even those stories would not be that enlightening as they would be very familiar to me already, as one who has lived and is living that particular life (and, no, not being holier than thou here.)</p>

<p>I guess I am just not ever on the side of whiners, and when I read some of these stories, that is all I hear - the whining. And it is tiresome.</p>

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<p>@chesterton‌,</p>

<p>I don’t know where you got the idea that I think taxpayers should be giving higher income families financial aid. I don’t. </p>

<p>I would, however, appreciate it if schools didn’t expect me to pay for their school-granted FA for other students, by deliberately jacking up the price for me. This is on top of the eye-watering amount of taxes I pay that helps fund federal FA for other kids.</p>

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<p>@GMTplus7:</p>

<p>Then go to NYU. They’re stingy with aid to everyone.</p>

<p>Not that they’re cheap. They charge more than Harvard. They just don’t disburse out the tuition that they take in.</p>

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<p>My sister’s three kids all faced $50k+ EFCs; my sister does not work outside the home but she and her husband own a small piece of investment property and that apparently really affects the numbers. My niece, knowing the story of our family and that her mother and I and our 4 other siblings all got good financial aid back in the day because there were so many of us and our parents made little money, lamented the fact that there were no big financial aid packages in her future. </p>

<p>I told her this. For 18 years she lived a life where her mother could afford to stay home; she and her brothers played varsity and club sports and their parents traveled with them to out-of-state meets, they took yearly vacations, they had everything they need. I got a big financial aid package to a big private school, but in the years before that, none of the kids in my family played sports or did any extracurricular activities (no money, no time because we all had part-time jobs supporting the family, no one to drive us around anywhere), we took maybe 3 vacations during my whole childhood; major dental and minor other medical needs were not taken care of; new clothes were rare. </p>

<p>If I had the chance to exchange my 4 years of relative “wealth” in college for the first 18 years of my niece’s life, I would in a heartbeat. I do think that the costs of private schools are staggering. But I find it hard to be sympathetic to kids who’ve had it pretty good in their lives up til college. </p>