Vanderbilt financial aid decision

@FionaGallagher First of all, I doubt the admissions officers see if the applications they are reviewing asked for a fee waiver, though of course I don’t know for certain (and neither do you). Second of all, need-blind doesn’t only apply to low-income students. I’m upper-middle class and didn’t need a fee waiver, but still qualified for over half of tuition to be covered in financial aid.

@angelaruth0750 , My kid was also at MOSAIC and enjoyed it. We came from California and I took 3 days off from work to take her. She enjoyed the experience and felt she would like attending VU. When we got the offer we were surprised. $0 offered in either merit or FA. My EFC per FAFSA is just over half of Vandy’s COA. But I was most surprised by some other things in the offer:

  1. No merit/incentive money even though she was MOSAIC. I was expecting at least a token amount.
  2. Vandy’s COA went up an astonishing 4.5% from 2018-2019. This increase alone raises the 4-year cost by over $16k, which will buy you a full semester at our highly-ranked state flagships.
  3. In the offer letter, it clearly stated the 74k+ COA was estimated (in italics). So Vandy is still not willing to commit to a family’s cost 4.5 months from move-in day.
  4. As of yesterday, Vanderbilt is still not posting 2019-2020 COA on their website.
  5. Unlike other schools, Vanderbilt’s COA does not include a provision for transportation costs.
  6. Because Vanderbilt mandates that students live on campus for all 4 years, a family cannot reduce their costs by seeking alternative housing options.

I was hoping that I could make Vanderbilt a viable option for my daughter, but at these costs combined with expected increases, I just cannot commit to a single undergraduate degree for over $300k, especially when our state flagships are so highly ranked and will cost us less than half.

@lmk5 I assume you’ve already called Vanderbilt to talk about the situation?

^In my S19’s financial aid letter, it did include travel costs in the overall COA.

@albertsax , yes we did. They responded quite quickly and mentioned that they don’t go by the FAFSA EFC, only the CSS Profile. They declined to offer my daughter any merit or FA.

@elena13 , on my daughter’s there is no entry. I believe it says “varies” or it just says to be sure to include costs for travel. Perhaps because we are on the west coast they didn’t want to further inflate the COA.

@SincererLove:

" How did they lead to believe?? No one in admission nor alumni would guarantee the students or parents on FA or even comment on that."

Vanderbilt proudly advertises “Vanderbilt will meet 100% of a family’s demonstrated financial need. Financial aid awards do not include loans.” This point is driven home repeatedly in both visit presentation and interviews. With your familiarity of the school, I’m surprised you missed it. Our students were lead to believe that demonstrated financial need, in some significant manner, would be met by Vanderbilt. What was offered was very far from their demonstrated need. This isn’t a one-off. Our small public school had five students accepted this year and nine offers last year. That’s pretty solid for a senior class averaging just 170 students. None of these 14 students attended Vandy, and in almost every case, it was because of the gap between demonstrated need and actual FA.

Vanderbilt is a great academic institution and they certainly don’t need you to remind others of that fact. They are, however, more than a little misleading regarding aid. If they were more candid about what they can and cannot do, they would spare a lot of kids, and their families, a lot of grief and aggravation. Vanderbilt, like so many other highly sought after schools, is separating their students into two groups: the wealthy families on one end of the spectrum, and lower income students on the other. One extreme ensures a steady flow of revenue in both tuition and endowments. The other extreme allows Vandy to virtue signal diversity. The middle class goes elsewhere.

I don’t expect someone else to pay for my child’s education, but there should be more truth in advertising when it comes to financial aid at Vandy.

@Anisqoyo - you are so spot on.

@Anisqoyo - I guess I’m still unclear about whether or not all those families put financial information into the net price calculator prior to applying? It is pretty easy to do before the paying the application fee and doing all the extra work. If that many students had an award amount that was significantly different than the npc I would definitely be concerned. However, since all colleges calculate demonstrated need differently, it is important to families to do the research ahead of time. My son had financial aid offers from many colleges that claim to meet demonstrated need but the offers were very different from one another. It can be pretty frustrating after going through this long and stressful process, so I can empathize with the parents.

@anisqoyo Vanderbilt does meet 100% of demonstrated need, as per their guarantee. The fact is that each school calculates need differently, and so someone may be caught off guard if they were expecting one school to give the same amount as another. Vanderbilt gave exactly as much need to me as was predicted in their NPC.

It should also be pointed out again that Vanderbilt is need blind, and so they don’t purposely take a certain number of full-pay students purely to get enough tuition money. Their endowment is large enough anyway that that kind of thing isn’t necessary.

@elena13;@albersax: It’s improbable that so many families over the past two years have miscalculated the NPC so significantly that not one student out of 14 has enrolled. You would think that educated parents, with highly educated kids, would do their homework - as best they can - regarding aid before they use their one ED on a school that says they will meet 100% of demonstrated need. The NPC is not fail-safe, but even with a generous fudge factor, Vandy appears to be promising more than they can (or are willing to) deliver. The reasons don’t matter because it’s their money and they can allocate it as they wish. It’s unfortunate they choose not to manage expectations better or to deliver better on what they promise.

Schools advertise they are need blind and that they look at applications holistically. I want to believe these things are true but Pollyanna just isn’t my style. If these huge trusts served to temper the revenue driven nature of private schools, as is claimed by some, the cost of tuition wouldn’t be escalating at more than twice the rate of inflation.

When Vanderbilt, or any school, claims to give only grants and not loans, it merely means that they won’t offer loans. It does not mean that they substitute a grant for what another school might offer in a loan. Case in point: I’ve gotten FA loan packages offered from my in-state colleges whose cost of attendance is less than half that of Vanderbilt, but Vanderbilt offered nothing. It sounds very virtuous to eschew loans, but it’s actually disingenuous.

As far as being need blind, let’s think about this for a second. What entity, whether non-profit or not, would allow such severe yearly budget swings that would surely occur if that entity was 100% need blind? You just can’t run a railroad (and stay open) that way. They must have a way of predicting their revenue and expenses with some measure of predictability in order to survive. Again, it sounds quite noble to say you look the other way when it comes to students’ finances with regards to admission, but does anyone really believe that? There are lots of ways to predict a student’s ability to pay by merely looking at where they live, the HS they went to, their demographic, and lots of other available data. They must do this in order to meet their diversity goals with regards to socioeconomic standing. Colleges are non-profit, but they sure aren’t charities.

@Anisqoyo You hit the nail on the head! People need to know that there is quite a bit of room for interpretation in the phrase, “unmet need.” Considering Vanderbilt does not use the FAFSA EFC to determine need, and that there is no resultant EFC that families can see after completing the CSS Profile, Vanderbilt is able to be very subjective on their definition of unmet need, without families having a valid number to back up their case. My child will attend Vanderbilt next fall, but he WILL have student loans! We are a very middle class family, which as you mentioned, seems to be the demographic where Vandy comes up short.

I am pretty certain that schools that meet need without loans does not mean what was stated in the prior posts. It means that if your need is determined to be 50,000 then they will offer a 50,000 grant and you may still get loans as opposed to a school where your need is met with loans. In that case the grant may be 46,500 with a 4500 loan making up the 50,000. Regardless of the formula to determine the loan, ultimately the “no loan” promise equals more grant aid. In the former case, the grant should be 50,000 and you can still get the 4500 federal direct loan.

@FionaGallagher , can you tell us what other schools your child was accepted to and how you arrived at your decision to attend Vanderbilt?

@LMK5 Several large state publics where he would have had a full ride due to being a NMF. We had a long, hard talk about his options, what we could pay, and the debt he would incur. Ultimately, we let him decide once he had all the figures in front of him. He decided the Vanderbilt experience was worth the $27k of debt he will have when he graduates.

My D is deciding between Vanderbilt with okay aid (roughly 50%) and Alabama, where as NMF she would be PAID to go. Why did he pick Vanderbilt instead of the full ride NMF?

I found “demonstrated financial needs” hard to interpret and very subjective. We don’t qualify for FA, but that does Not stop me of thinking that we have a demonstrated need to help pay for $75k for U Chicago after D’s EA admission. It turned out that again we don’t qualify.

$27k debt for 4 year of Vandy is not bad. Did your son consider the NMF scholarship that he also qualifies? That is 5k a year. @fionagallagher

D is a full tuition scholarship winner at Vandy and we never visited prior to the admission and scholarship award. The alumni who interviewed her was super nice and they never talked about FA. She is from a 300 kids suburban public HS which only sends 2 students (three admits) to Vandy in last 4 years.

FWIW, the financial aid award my family received (me that is) is right in line with what was calculated in the NPC for Vandy prior to me applying ED. We called after being offered admission asking for more and we were told no. I am sure there is always some wiggle room, but we didn’t get any unfortunately. Having said that, another top tier school I considered has roughly the same annual cost and the NPC number that school spit out was roughly the same as Vandy…a few hundred dollars difference in fact. In short, there were no surprises for us. I was awarded an amount in line with the Vandy NPC.

For us: Washington and Lee aid was within a few hundred dollars of Vanderbilt. USocal $20,000 less aid than Vanderbilt.