<p>But once you cross 200K you’re probably in a pretty decent position to not need grants as long as you don’t go buying the latest Mercedes and go overboard on the house etc. An overly simplified view would be that you could pay $50K/year for college costs and still have $150K of income left over - not bad for most people.</p>
<p>btw - There’s nothing wrong with UCB/UCLA/UCSD either if she gets accepted to some of those. They’ll cost plenty as well (unless she commutes) but not nearly as much as a private with no grants.</p>
<p>I always suggest that if the thought of paying $X for any school causes you to breakout in flop sweat, then it isn’t worth it, no matter what the school. Period.</p>
<p>Things happen. People get ill, lose their jobs, get divorced. </p>
<p>Your child can get a great education at many universities in this country. You need to be able to sleep at night.</p>
<p>Oldfort- Gtbguy1 is the OP—not the guy that pulled this up from the archives–so what if this kid did get into an Ivy–the point being, no one is a shoe-in…</p>
<p>Depending where you live, 200k may not get you much. I am sure you didn’t mean that people wouldn’t have to pay tax on 200k, so after paying 50K, there wouldn’t be 150K left. Most people would only be able to take home ~120K, after paying 50K, there would only be 70K left. </p>
<p>200K is smack in the donut hole. 2018dad, you are still quite young. You may be able to pay off 40K over time. D1’s boyfriend graduated with 60K student loans. He did get a good job right after college. He got the job through his school’s connection. He is paying it down as fast as he can, and his parents are also taking one parent’s salary to help him pay it down. He is looking for a special niche job he has a lot of interest in. Because he went to one of the Ivies, he is eligible to go to a job fair limited to Ivy graduates for this particular industry he wants to get into. When D1 was looking for jobs, her school also sponsored a lot of meet/greet to introduce their students to the hiring managers.</p>
<p>Stevema - this is an old threat. 2018dad revived this threat. OP is done and gone and his D also got into an Ivy. Again, there is no reason to keep on repeating Ivies are not shoo-ins. We know. I am sure even 2018 dad knows.</p>
<p>Old hands know that some schools are reaches for everyone, but may not be able to understand that for the schools that do not dispense merit aid, families pay their EFC & the EFC is generally 1/3 to 1/4 of before tax income.</p>
<p>Which is why 2018 dad received an EFC of $50,000+, from his daughters ( apparently pricey) schools for his income of $200,000+. </p>
<p>Schools that use PROFILE are also generally going to find a higher EFC than schools that only use FAFSA. That additional information they are looking for isn’t so that they can take into account all the expenses of the household. On the contrary, they are looking for hidden pockets of money that can be used to pay tuition!</p>
<p>Sorry for hijacking this thread and digging it out from the grave. We just started this process and I googled “how can a family with 200K household incomeafford an Ivy League education” and this thread popped out. I replied to the thread w/o looking at the date.</p>
<p>I’m so glad I found this site and this particular thread since it looks like a lot of smart people are contributing to this forum and some were in a similar situation as we do right now. Ultimately it will be our decision but it’s nice to hear differing opinions and I would like to be knowledgeable as much as I can so that we can make an informed decision.</p>
<p>@SteveMA
Again, and I say it again, I know the odds/probabilities/acceptance rate of the Ivies. I can probably recite them off the top of my head and I think I will be accurate within 1 or 2%. I think when I said she’s a “match” to Cornell, you equate it as a shoo-in. My definition of “match” is different than yours. A “match”, for me, is when the applicant’s stat is at 80% and above of the schools published stat (SAT/SATII/ACT/GPA/Rank) of current student body. My daughter is probably at 90%, which makes her a very strong applicant at Cornell. Of course, this is not to be construed as 100% guarantee, since this is only the objective part of the application package, specially since she doesn’t have a hook. For HYPSM, she’s probably medium to high reach, since those schools are virtually high reach for everybody anyway. I don’t want to divulge her stat since she’s only a junior and she still has a chance to retake both SAT and ACT. Her school consistently sends about 5 kids to HYPSM (this year 1 is already accepted EA/ED to Yale, 1 to MIT and 1 to Brown), maybe about 10 overall to all Ivies and easily 25-30 kids to UC Berkeley and UCLA. She’s currently ranked #1 (through Junior 1st sem). And she’s not the typical nerd. She’ actually, IMO, a well rounded student with respectable ECs. Before she started HS, Ivy League was not in our horizon. I was thinking UC Sandiego is her reach and one of the Cal State U is her match. Fast forward 3 years and I am looking at her stat and holy guacamole she actually has a chance to go to an Ivy. Am I wrong to say that? One can dream, right?</p>
<p>2018dad - one thing I would like to mention to you is that just because your school sends 5 students to HYPSM, even if your kid has very high stats, she may not be one of them because those 5 students could have very special hooks. D1 went to a school that consistently sent 20-30% of students to top 20 schools. We thought if D1 was top 5% then she would have very chance to be one of those 20-30%, but upon closer look, if you took out recruited athletes (huge %), legacies (many students had parents who went to those schools), very special talents, and few URMs, the percentage students got admitted without hooks went way down. </p>
<p>If your D is a Val, she will have many options, maybe not at an Ivy (because of costs), but certainly at some very good institutions. The hard part would be to manage her (and yours) expectations.</p>
<p>@mamabear1234
I would say it’s probably more of her dream than mine. Her dream school is Stanford, which has a lower admit rate than most of the Ivies. I also have some pet peeves: your/you’re, there/their/they’re.</p>
<p>@oldfort
Damn hooks. Where can i find one? If the kid’s parents are immigrants, is that a hook? What about if you’re an URM within an ORM group? Now that you mentioned those hooks (URM/legacies/athletes), the figures that I just mentioned on D’s school are not really great. This has been a very educational for me. Me and my wife didn’t grow up in the US and didn’t go to college here so this whole exercise is all new to us.</p>
I know what you’re trying to say but the reason those acronyms include the word ‘represented’ is because it’s not really related to just being a minority in the population - it’s whether the desired minority (desired by the particular college for whatever reasons they have) is represented adequately at the particular college. This could mean that one minority will be much more desirable to them than a different minority (ex: 100 qualified black applicants vs. 2000 qualified Asian applicants). But even the desired (according to the particular college) URMs need to be qualified so it’s not a slam-dunk for them either - more of a tipping point.</p>
<p>But that doesn’t really matter because there’s nothing your D can do about her ancestry she inherited (which is why I don’t believe in racial discrimination like this but that’s a topic for other threads and has been).</p>
<p>If your D is really interested in the Ivies, and if they’re within the realm of possibility from an an academic stats perspective, which it sounds as if they are for your D, then it boils down to whether you can afford whatever the cost will end up to be. By ‘afford’ I mean not just ‘technically afford’ it but ‘willing to pay for it’. These are two different things for most people. You just need to decide where you want to spend your money assuming it’s even basically possible with your means.</p>
<p>If nothing else - </p>
<p>Your family, including your D, can and should discuss the topic of finances frankly. You need to decide what you’re able and willing to spend for her college and it’s okay if that’s keyed to the particular college IMO (ex: 50K/yr for Harvard okay but 50K or even 40K for less than top 8 or 20 or 40 college not okay). Your D needs to fully understand your thoughts and intentions in this area.</p>
<p>She can apply to the Ivies she’s interested in and see what results. Maybe the admissions decisions will make your decision much easier (i.e. not accepted) or maybe they’ll make it difficult (i.e. accepted). You’ll then see what the bottom line costs will be after any grants. You can then see how that matches up with what you decided you’re able and willing to spend and your D needs to accept this decision and she needs to know she’ll do fine at colleges other than HYPSM.</p>
<p>She needs to also apply to true matches and safeties, ones she’d be reasonably happy at if she ends up there. The ivies aren’t predictable and plenty of people with higher stats are rejected while people with lower (than those high people) are accepted and it’s hard to predict why. UCB/UCLA aren’t so predictable either.</p>
<p>It’s best if you and your D can take as pragmatic of an approach as possible and not get too emotionally tied up with the ‘Ivy concept/allure’ since otherwise there can be a lot of disappointment either due to lack of acceptances or lack of funds.</p>
<p>It sounds as if she’ll do great regardless of where she goes.</p>
<p>I thought that what he meant by “URM within an ORM group” was an individual who is Asian but not of South Asian or Chinese, Korean, or Japanese ancestry. Filipinos, Vietnamese, Laotians, Cambodians, Indonesians, and others in Southeast Asia are among the Asians who have faced discrimination, are on average economically disadvantaged, and are actually underrepresented in four-year colleges and universities, though they are often treated as ORM’s. Of course some subgroup of the subgroup could be advantaged in every possible way, so one’s view of justice and fairness in admissions can all depend on how deeply one looks into it and how much information is considered.</p>
<p>^^ But there’s no fixed global definition or URM/ORM (or perfectly RM) so it’s up to an individual college to just use racial/cultural (or anything else) stats however they feel like using them. Some colleges may resolve only to major group, like ‘Asian’, and others might go to a finer level like ‘India’, ‘Vietnamese’, ‘Hmong’, etc. They might use the global ‘Black’ or they might distinguish between native born USA blacks versus Caribbean Island blacks versus African blacks or not and they might or might not include factors such as family socioeconomic situation in the equation, whether the parents have attended college or not, whether the student is really from a disadvantaged background regardless of his/her race, etc.</p>
<p>In other words - whether they’re really trying to accommodate disadvantaged backgrounds and create a truly cosmopolitan student body or if they’re just trying to have the proportion of racial/ethnic attributes at a simplistic high level match some pre-conceived targets regardless of their backgrounds - i.e simply be able to provide the gross stats such as being able to say x number white (even if all from the USA rather than elsewhere), x number Asian (even if all from China/Japan), x number black (even if all from the islands), etc.</p>
<p>If one really cares about this aspect they’d have to try to find out how a particular college really uses these attributes and that’s probably difficult to find out unless the college states they don’t use race at all, like the UCs.</p>
<p>But since the students have no control over these stats and can’t change them, it’s best to not worry about it or over-think it.</p>
<p>@GladGradDad
Thanks. Great post and recommendations. The selfish side of me wish that she will not be accepted to these top tier private colleges and just hope that she’ll be accepted to one of the better UCs. That way it will be easier for us to decide. With a little bit of savings and 529/Roth IRA, I can get her through UC with very minimal loan or no loan at all. But she’ll apply to a few of them and see what happens.</p>
<p>“With a little bit of savings and 529/Roth IRA, I can get her through UC with very minimal loan or no loan at all.”</p>
<p>You’re going to cash in some or all of your retirement savings? Personally, I don’t understand why you would jeopardize your own retirement. But that’s just my opinion. Only 4% of parents dip into their retirement savings. Here’s a link to some information you might want to take a look at:</p>
<p>^^
Thanks for the link and your concern. We fully fund (15% or up to the employer’s limit or gov’t limit) our 401K amd 403 Retirement accounts. Also my wife has another after tax Retirement/pension account through her job and I have after tax Roth IRA outside of work. We were saving for college through 529 (under our name) but then we found out that 529 savings are considered as parent’s asset when applying for grants so we opened another Roth IRA under my wife’s name and use this for college savings. ROTH IRA withdrawals (principal and interest) for educational purposed doesn’t incur penalty and since it’s a “retirement” money, it’s not factored in as asset.</p>
<p>So to answer your question, yes, we might be cashing in some “retirement” money from my wife’s ROTH IRA. But I learned few minutes ago that FAFSA and some colleges (via CSS profile) requires you to report Roth IRA distribution. You can’t win against them.</p>