If a student applies to a 100% need met school and the net price calculator is affordable, then is ED really a bad idea? The biggest concern I see on CC is that you won’t be able to compare financial aid packages. I don’t understand the need for this. If you get accepted ED and you can afford it then great. If you can’t, then you can decline due to insufficient financial aid and you can apply to reaches/matches that will hopefully be affordable or you can still have your affordable safety if nothing else works out. So why are people with financial need told not to apply ED?
It is really not as straight forward as that. Remember that schools that meet need meet need not want. They might expect the students’ parents to put 2nd mortgages on the house if they have a lot of equity in it. Affording it does not mean begin happy about the finances but being able to cover the finances. So it is not so easy to simply bow out. And it will put you in a difficult position if you want to bow out.
You can sense this by looking at how many threads there are on topics like “how can I get rejected from my ED college?”
The problem comes when the FA package is borderline-not affordable enough to be comfortable, but enough offered so that the student could scrape together the money to attend if necessary. An ED student, not able to compare offers, has no way of knowing if a low FA offer is the best they’re going to get. The danger (and everyone’s nightmare scenario) is that a student turns down a FA offer from their dream school, only to find that the offers at all their RD schools are worse.
ED is best for students that can absolutely go with paying full price and that school is unequivocally their first choice. It’s also best for the very amazing high stats/awesome background student who is very poor and assured of a great financial aid at those very few prestigious colleges that are no loans meet 100% need.
@lostaccount But you can get a decent estimate from NPCs right? Of course there are exceptions when someone’s package is completely different but I don’t think that’s the norm. Is it really hard to decline ED due to finances? I don’t know the exact steps but I thought they didn’t require any proof or anything like that. Also what do you mean by the difficult position after you opt out?
@Sue22 Wouldn’t that danger be avoided with a truly affordable safety?
BTW this isn’t about me and a specific school. Just wondering about this in general.
You could not decline the ED offer and then accept an offer with a similar financial aid package, for example. If it really is the case that the financial aid package turns out to be short of what you can really afford than you can decline but because you should know ahead of time about what to expect, that should not happen. The working premise is that it won’t happen. So while there are bound to be some instances of it, I would not apply ED to play my odds without being sure that if you got an offer you’d go.
Because schools get to decide what your need is, not you. I’ve watched many students sit down, have a conversation with their parents (as they should), and the family crunches their numbers and determines they really can’t afford anything/much of anything for college. Turns out colleges rarely think your need is what you think your need is – and meets-full-need colleges only promise to meet what they think it is.
And, many can meet need with loans. Which, on top of a parent contribution, student contribution, and work study, often turns out to be unaffordable for families. Even at schools that promise to meet need with no loans, parent and/or student contributions are still often expected through work study and/or summer work, etc – opportunities that aren’t guaranteed, and that many low income students find they cannot afford after already having to foot the bill for travel to and from campus, personal expenses, fees, etc).
I agree with @goingnutsmom. ED is only great for that kid whose family can live with full pay AND the student has no ambivalence about going to that school. For most others, it is just too risky. There are enough schools with nonbinding EA and SCEA/REA to choose from.
@classof2017,
A truly affordable safety is always a good thing, but here’s the kind of scenario I’m talking about…
The student applies ED to Dartmouth. Her family has set a budget of $20,000/year. The cost of her safety, UMass, will be $19,000. She’s hoping for merit money at her other schools, Vanderbilt and Emory, and she also applied to Harvard, known for great financial aid.
The offer at Dartmouth comes in with an EFC of $21,000. Should the student find the extra $1,000 or stick to the budget? How would that answer change if she could compare offers? What if she didn’t get into Harvard, Vanderbilt or Emory? Would it be worth saving $8,000 to attend UMass instead of Dartmouth?
What if, on the other hand, she was destined to get into Harvard with an EFC of $19,000 or one of the other two with merit awards that brought the EFC down to $10,000? Unfortunately the only way to find this out would be to roll the dice and turn down an offer from her first choice school.
Kids who need a lot of FA are of course free to apply ED, it’s just much more complicated, and more fraught, than it is for kids who don’t need it.
I think those with straight forward finances who use the school’s NPC and perhaps even discuss it with the financial aid department should be able to apply ED with some confidence that the ‘meets full need’ school will indeed, meet full need. If the student has a lot of items being put into the NPC that need explaining, a couple of step parents, huge amounts of equity in a home, then maybe the NPC isn’t going to give a good indication of need or award. Some of the Ivy schools and others without merit do pre-reads for athletes on financials too, so why not ask?
My kids certainly needed financial aid, and i would not have had a problem relying on the NPC because our financial information is so simple the NPC would either tell us yea or nay.
As others have said, run the NPC’s and you should know if you’re in the ballpark. Occasionally they are not accurate, but I think that most schools that meet 100% of need, they are pretty good.The ones we had issues with were not full-need met schools. And we didn’t do any ED, so can’t speak from experience.
As a real example of how people are burnt, head over to the Boston College forum. Here’s a post from a thread there that gives a link to a great article. I think that the BC NPC is correct, so that’s not so much the issue, rather, that each schools idea of need is very different and they have their own calculations, as others have said.
http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/discussion/comment/19248028/#Comment_19248028
All NPCs were always wildly inaccurate for me (parents are divorced). In a time when more US marriages end in divorce than not, I’m not sure we can really give the advice to rely on NPCs. A relatively small subset of families have straightforward enough info for them to be accurate.
My D’s friend applied to Smith and got in. I advised her to sit down with her parents to do the NPC and make sure it was a viable option. She said that the NPC had come back with very generous financial aid estimate. I honestly was skeptical of the ED strategy for this family. Turns out that they were expecting merit on top of financial aid and she got no merit scholarships. She turned Smith down.
This was not the right strategy for this high stats kid. She should have applied RD to Smith because she had a very high likelihood of getting in RD anyway. Then see if they offer anything to entice her to come. But I couldn’t tell them that because it was not my concern and they would not have listened to me anyway because they were sure that they had a great strategy.
The whole concept of applying ED is based on the fact that the family has done their due diligence regarding finances (whether they are comfortable being full pay or accepting the financial aid offer), the school is the student’s clear first choice and that in exchange for an early decision, if admitted, they will attend. While one should use the net-price calculator to gauge, affordability, it is my no means a perfect process especially for families with complicated financial situations; stepfamilies, divorced separated, single parents, people who own property outside of their primary residence, self-employed, business/far owners.
While you don’t have to be married to the school for 4 years, you need to consider how you are going to finance it for 4 years. It is one thing to have 2 kids in college who are juniors/seniors when your child applies as a freshmen and you have this great financial aid package. But will it still be affordable when you have 2 kids in college or yet when that child is the only kid remaining and you may be full pay for the last 2 years? You may want to run the NPC a number of times each year adding an addition 3% to your income and 5% to the cost of attendance (as at many schools the price does increase every year). Don’t assume that because you have multiple kids in school that all things will be equal. For example if your FAFSA EFC is 25k per kid, and one kid attends the local CC, for 8k a year, your EFC may not necessarily be 25k for the kid looking to attend the 65K/year school.
One should not go into ED with one eye open, looking for the out clause or wondering what else is available . To me, you are expressing uncertainty and would be better served applying RD. Also keep in mind, what the ED process is at your school. If you need to compare packages or search for merit $$, which is a disadvantage of applying ED, then you should apply RD.
Student, parent and counselor all sign off that family agrees to and understands what they are getting into when they apply ED. ED also states, that you will withdraw all application and not make any new ones. At my school, when a student is accepted ED, with exception of rolling admission at local state U, the application process stops until the high school receives written confirmation that they have been released from ED.
So, basically, if you’ve done your due diligence to figure out your cost (as someone suggested above, talk to FA) and feel it’s affordable, then feel free to apply ED. My bet is that if you are in need of financial aid to any great extent, then the benefit of applying ED is probably negated. Lots of ED (or even RD) applicants out there that are going to be full pay.
My personal feeling in reading about ED on CC threads is that it’s a bad idea unless you can simply pay the full COA. Some people don’t seem to realize that if the acceptance rate doubles when applying ED at a school, and you have 0% chance of getting in RD, then you STILL have 0% change during ED.
We found that at the 100% need met schools our EFC was exactly right within a few hundred dollars. Our situation is pretty uncomplicated though with w2 income only no divorces, extra homes, or family businesses. If you are prepared to pay your full EFC PLUS the student contribution which is typically 2,500-5000 to be earned over the summer and/or work study during school then ED is a fine way to go. We did get a substantial merit award at one of the schools though which probably would not be the case for ED because they aren’t trying to woo you.
This is how it recently worked for a student I know with some financial need:
- Research colleges.
- Research their financial aid through their NPCs.
- Apply ED out of a clear preference for one college.
- Receive the acceptance and financial aid award. The financial aid award matches the NPC estimate.
- Attend college beginning fall of 2016.