I’m a rising sophomore and I’m starting to look at colleges. I’m planning ahead because I need to understand what I need to do financially in order to get into the school I want to go to. I’m interested in going to one of the better D3s. My top picks is Pomona but am also considering Williams, Amherst, Swarthmore, Wellesley, Bowdoin. Assuming that I’m admitted, and I’m recruited for my sport by the coach, my concern is, what if my family and I can’t afford the tuition? My parents’ income does not qualify me for little if any Fin Aid. My parents aren’t wealthy. They make a good living but we live in one of the priciest cities in North America - and that’s why they make what they make ($180K combined). Although they own their home, they really don’t have very much else. They are also close to retirement. Their only savings outside of their tax-sheltered Retirement fund is an investment of $70K. It would be unfair for me or the school to have them borrow against their retirement. Aside from looking at other schools that offer Merit Aid, what are the chances that a recruited athlete who’s accepted into a school does not attend the school? The bottom line is, will a school (that is need-based only) step up to help an incoming student that does not qualify for Fin. Aid? I know that my parents will do whatever they can to help me out but they cannot possibly pay $60K a year. Will any of these schools help narrow the gap?
I am a parent of a junior who hopes to be a recruited athlete at some LACs, and we have met with NESCAC coaches as part of that process. NESCAC is the conference that Amherst and Williams, along with Tufts, Conn etc., are in. The two NESCAC coaches we met with were quite firm that NESCAC does financial aid only, not merit money. From what we were told – no,those schools will not find a way to sweeten the pot for a student athlete they want. It is financial aid or nothing.
At the same time, other schools outside NESCAC which want an athlete for their sport, but are not schools which are quite in so much demand as those east coast schools, will use merit money to attract the desirable applicant. So, schools like Denison, Kenyon, Grinnell, Dickinson, St Lawrence are all schools which we know award merit money to attract students they want to enhance their campus. So are schools like Kalamazoo, Knox and Lawrence University.
Further, while your instinct may tell you that your family is not likely to qualify for financial aid, check the numbers to see. It sounds like your parents have been open with you about their financial situation, which is a wonderful advantage, as too often, parents are vague or optimistic that somehow it will work, and miss the opportunity to plan strategically for merit money to close the gap between what they can actually afford to pay and what schools expect them to pay. As I understand it, 401k plans are not considered as assets for families to use for college, but ordinary savings and investments are. Colleges do consider parents’ age – how close they are to retirement, so how many more “working” years they have. Ask your parents to help sort out finances by running the Net Price Calculators at Amherst and Williams, for instance, to see what those predict in terms of eligibility for financial aid. Do the same at Wellesley, Swat and Pomona, as they are outside NESCAC and may have different policies.
All coaches we have met with have said they expect a recruit to apply ED, so they understand that families need to have the complete financial picture before hand. At a NESCAC school, they will do an admissions pre-read and financial aid pre-read after July 1 of the summer before your senior year. Within 4-6 weeks, you will know if you are a likely candidate for admission and what your aid package will look like. Other, non-NESCAC schools also said they do admissions/financial aid pre-reads the summer before senior year, but the process outside NESCAC seems a little less structured.
So, my advice is, run the NPC to see what your aid situation might look like, and expand your list of possible schools to include schools which give merit money, if the predicted aid will not work for your family and you need merit money to close that gap and make school affordable.
Lastly, there may be some D1s that look like LACs, but award athletic scholarships, such as Colgate, Davidson, Lafeyette and Lehigh. I haven’t looked at the detail on those schools in a while, since my son isn’t looking D1, but those might be alternatives if you are a heavily recruited athlete.
Good luck!
You may qualify for aid with that income-we did and we make a bit more than your parents. Schools like the Ivys and some of the NESCACs also give a greater percentage of aid as scholarship and less as loan, which can make attending cheaper than some state or other private school where you end up with lots of loans.
Another important caveat is that if your money is tied to your sport, if you get hurt and can’t play, or if you decide to quit the sport, there goes your money. This can make an injury or academic problems even more stressful.
But Midwestmom is correct-if they say all aid is need, it is. And that’s the case with the Ivies, NESCACs, and Pomona.
I am not trying to be too sarcastic with my answer, but I think your light bulb has just come on. This is why this whole business (and I do mean business) of recruiting is so difficult. If you are a good enough athlete you will be admitted to any school you are interested in. But being recruited does not mean there is athletic money to be had. As a parent of a highly recruited athlete in a sport/event that typically has little money available (Men’s track), we were in the exact position you described.
The only suggestion I can offer, in terms of what worked for us, is to apply on time to maximize any academic dollars for the schools you are really interested in and then be open and direct with coaches. The coach can get you admitted, but he/she cannot award academic money, only athletic. We told coaches what our budget was and pointed out that we did not qualify for need based aid. The responses were usually equally direct but varied dramatically. My son was sometimes awarded academic money, in some cases athletic money, and in other cases tuition at in-state “athlete” rates, but no two responses where the same. However, the most common response was, “I wish I had money for you but don’t, so should you find a way to afford our school we would love to have you.” The coach is trying to get the best team with the budget he/she has available and in some cases all they can offer is guaranteed admission.
What is “tuition at in state ‘athlete’ rates”? Is that an athletic scholarship that somehow doesn’t count against the team’s scholarship $$? Or is it an academic scholarship that gives preferential treatment or something to athletes?
I am not sure how this scholarship was handled with regards to the number of scholarships allocated for each team, but the letter awarded my son in – state tuition rates as part of a neighboring scholar athlete program, however our state is across the country, certainly not neighboring. The letter came to him from the University’s scholarship department, not the athletic department. We did not push at it further, and don’t even know if there were any academic stipulations on GPA because the school ended not being a good fit for other (non- financial) reasons.
Interesting. Would you share what school it was?
I think the schools can allow a student instate rates and that wouldn’t go against the team NCAA scholarship maximum, because the school can charge anything it wants to to any student. A school could charge everyone, instate or out, a low tuition (South Dakota). It can charge the children of alums a special rate (Wyoming). Florida State has a few programs where if you do your first semester in Panama or Europe, you get instate rates for the rest of the time. If the school sets up a rate for a certain group (“Athletes from neighboring states”), it can probably get away with it. Of course it wouldn’t matter for head count sports as there is no cost to the athletes for tuition so it wouldn’t matter if tuition is $20k or $40k, but for equity sports, only having to pay a percentage of instate tuition is certainly a bargain.
There is some great advice here that reflects our experience. D ended up at Pomona (recruited athlete/accepted ED1). Our finances are very similar to yours, so we were a little concerned that we wouldn’t get the aid she’d need to attend, but knew that ED rules would let us bail out for financial reasons. We did end up receiving just enough need-based aid to make it work (which really kicked up when our second kid entered college). As for merit aid, as Midwestmom alluded, during the recruitment process, D was guaranteed very generous “non-athletic merit aid” by a D3 college similar to the ones she mentioned. I guess there’s a chance that it wasn’t shady… In your case, if you have the stats to get into the colleges you mention - which don’t give merit aid - you’d probably legitimately qualify academically for merit aid at quite a few very good D3s that aren’t quite at the “SWAP” level. As Midwestmom suggests, broaden your search a bit to include merit colleges, but the most important advice I can pass along is what we’ve learned from the experience of a couple of dozen athlete friends of our kids: Choose a college you’d be happy to be at even if you weren’t an athlete.
A clarification on my earlier response – I don’t mean to suggest that some of those schools with merit money are handing out what would be athletic scholarships to athletes, and just not calling it that. What I mean is that, a student academically qualified for Amherst, Pomona, Bowdoin etc – if they needed merit money to close the gap between what they can pay and what they are expected to pay – would likely qualify for merit aid at schools like St Lawrence, Denison, Kalamazoo etc. Those merit awards are used to pull in the higher stat kids to enhance the school community and are spread around all kinds of desirable kids, not just athletes.
Girlie00 – good advice is offered above. Don’t forget that grades matter as well. The schools you listed will want to see a 32 ACT and will go as low as 28 if you will be an all-star as a freshman. Merit Aid is worth considering at your income level. Congrats on thinking ahead … you have two years before coaches finalize their lists for the 2018 class.