<p>It looks like a good school, I just don't know if I would able to afford it if I got in. My family isn't super poor, but we're not rich either.</p>
<p>We have found the financial aid really wonderful. Williams is second I think on the list of best values and students are generally satisfied with financial aid.</p>
<p>It's my understanding that only the Ivies are more generous.</p>
<p>It's really hard to predict. In our case the financial aid offered to my son by Williams was far less than all other schools. We're in that same "not super poor but not rich either" category as the original poster.</p>
<p>Really? So sorry. Here it was the most generous package. Almost double Vassar's.</p>
<p>Did your student end up at a more generous school?</p>
<p>Your parents will probably have to pay between 20k to 30k a year.
Which isn't too bad, but if you're competitive for Williams, and your family might struggle, you'd be better off aiming for HYPSM.</p>
<p>It depends. Williams has excellent need-based financial aid, but does not do merit-aid price discounting. So whether the package will be "good" or not depends on your family's finances viz-a-viz need-based versus merit-based discounts and the other schools you are applying to.</p>
<p>For example, if you are a millionaire who doesn't qualify for need-based aid, then your package will be worse at Williams than at a school trying to lure you with a big merit-aid discount. Conversely, if you are low income family qualifying for a full-ride need-based aid package, you will probably do better at Williams than at the merit aid school.</p>
<p>mythmom: Our son does go to Williams. We believe it is the best school for him, but it hasn't been easy. Son works multiple jobs during the school year, we've drastically cut household expenses and deferred long-term home maintenance needs, and we've borrowed against our retirement funds. In addition to all of that, we'll have to take out a significant loan against our home this year. The economy hasn't helped. I'm currently unemployed. Still, we've gotten almost no aid from Williams. It's been hard for us to understand.</p>
<p>I should also note that that the financial aid offered to our son by other schools was not merit aid. For some reason Williams just thinks that we can afford more than other schools did. It really does come down to a case-by-case basis on whether Williams aid is generous.</p>
<p>I'm so sorry. I'm sure you've tried speaking to the FA office directly. </p>
<p>We also have belt tightening to do -- quite a bit of it because we also have a daughter at Barnard. However, we have gotten substantial aid from both schools, with Williams' package exceeding Barnard's.</p>
<p>We received aid offers from five "100%-of-need" schools, including Williams. Williams was in the middle of the pack, certainly not the worst, but not the best either. (And all the others were non-Ivies.)</p>
<p>All cases will differ.</p>
<p>If I recall correctly, Williams recently revised its FA policy such that when calculating the value of a household's total assets, the FA office would cap the value of home equity at 1.2 times total parental income. For the past few years, the cap was set at 2 times, and before that, 2.4 times parental income. I don't know if this would make a significant impact on the FA package offered to the OP, but it's certainly a positive trend.</p>
<p>Quick side note: I recently graduated from Williams, and during my four years there, I received no institutional aid, despite the fact that my widowed mother was putting me and my brother (twins) through college at the same time and our household annual income put us squarely in the middle class column. The total value of our other assets, including home equity, though, created a situation such that Williams felt no extra aid was necessary. While I do think our family probably deserved SOMETHING from Williams, we were fortunate enough such that I could still afford to go with little in the way of true financial hardship.</p>
<p>Williams' financial aid is fantastic for poor students and internationals (the latter if only because of need-blind international admissions); lots and lots of poor students are on full or almost-full financial aid. It also has a reputation for being more generous than other LACs, and that's probably true overall, but there's obviously a lot of variance and individual cases where Williams offers a worse package than other schools, as noted by the posters on this thread (my family, unfortunately, is one of those cases). You never really know until you apply, though, so if you think you'd like to go to Williams you might as well send in an application and see what they say.</p>
<p>If you're worried about financial aid, I would definitely advise looking at Harvard and Stanford, both of which have gotten dramatically more generous over the past few years. My parents, with a combined pre-tax income of about ~90k/yr, are paying the full $50k at Williams, but with the newer Harvard/Stanford policies they'd probably be paying closer to $10k-$15k. The other Ivies, along with the entire set of LACs, will probably have to match Harvard/Stanford's middle-class aid eventually if they want to stay competitive, but as of right now I don't think anyone else is coming close. </p>
<p>Again though, every family situation is different and you never really know until you apply. Unless you're trying to go ED you might as well send in a lot of applications and then wait to cross the financial aid bridge when you come to it; at that point you'll have a lot more information.</p>
<p>jeke, and others receiving little aid, are you middle income with significant assets? We make well above 90k/yr but have modest assets (have not had this level of income for very long) and the calculator gives us a very generous estimate. Did you find the Williams calculator to be close to the actual award? Can you pinpoint why your EFC is what it is?</p>
<p>Who knows.</p>
<p>Maybe it's the economy? The cost of Tuition, Room, and Board is climbing while the average grant award is slipping in turn. Can't imagine what these LACs are doing with their endowments.</p>
<p>Yikes! $90K in income and required to pay full COA of $50?! Something does not compute. I've never heard of anything like that without significant assets in the background.</p>
<p>Financial Aid is obviously so individualized that comparisons are difficult. What amazes me is that one family will find school x provides the the best aid and school y the worst. The next family sees the opposite result. How can this be? </p>
<p>I'd be tempted to say it's "preferential packaging", where a school somehow finds that a desirable student has more "need" than others - but in our case, S will be attending Williams, he received the best package from Williams (out of 8 offers), and I can absolutely say that he is not the recipient of preferential packaging at Williams! </p>
<p>By the way, we found the aid calculator to actually underestimate (somewhat) the aid S was offered.</p>
<p>It does to people who make about half of that including myself.</p>
<p>In our case our "significant assets" are our home (~$400K) and 401Ks. I would have thought that the new home equity cap would have helped us for next year, but it had no impact. In fact, out FA package for next year appears to be worse than the one for this year. We're currently communicating with the FA office to figure out how that can be the case.</p>
<p>I hope you have a favorable outcome.</p>
<p>Yes, it doesn't appear to make much sense. The variation from one school to the next doesn't have a rational explanation. I guess the formulas differ slightly from school to school.</p>
<p>We found the results fairly consistent with Vassar the outlier with less than half the aid. DS insisted it was a mistake, but since Williams was his first choice, we did not pursue it.</p>
<p>Ims2032,</p>
<p>I agree the cap should have helped and the 401k shouldn't affect the FA offer greatly. Please let us know how you fare with the FA people- honestly, you've made me nervous about future years now.</p>
<p>Mythmom, were your S's subsequent FA offers consistent w/ his freshman year?</p>
<p>electronblue, DadofB&G: my parents made the mistake of putting away money for my college education. The only significant assets are their retirement savings and my college fund, which I think was somewhere in the high five-digit range before I enrolled - I'm sure it's much smaller now. On the one hand, of course it's fair game for schools to ask for the money in a college fund (that's what it's for), but on the other hand it's quite misleading the way they throw around all these statistics about families earning $x getting massive financial aid, without pointing out that the only families actually getting that kind of aid are the ones who haven't bothered saving for their kids' education(s).</p>
<p>He's only a rising sophomore, but this year's award was completely consistent with last years -- maybe a hair better. And then, of course, no loans were included in the package.</p>
<p>I expect that next year the award will be significantly reduced because my daughter is graduating from Barnard in May.</p>