@fretfulmother - Having seen this with others over the years, I would go with @Gibby’s advise with a caveat. Wait for all your admissions and offers, wait for your son to decide which of the schools are in running, pick top 3 and then ask each one who will match the best offer available to you.
You should be able to narrow down the offers to within 5k at that point whichever school he chooses to go to since the school he wants to attend should be more than happy to be close the gap as much as they can if the decision is purely coming down to finances.
The problem really for a STEM kid is that you can only negotiate the first year. If they get a summer job that pays 10-15k but end up having to spend all of it living wherever, your numbers are going to be out of whack anyway after that first or second high paying internship.
@fretfulmother Last year our son’s offer from Yale (EA) was significantly less than his offers from Harvard, Princeton, and Stanford, and we don’t own a home. We asked Yale to reconsider the offer, and they revised it so that it was in the same ballpark as the others (whose offers were remarkably close, though Harvard’s was the best). They weren’t able to guarantee that the aid percentage would stay approximately the same for the remaining years, assuming our circumstances stayed the same, but we felt very good about the new offer anyway and were able to decide between the schools without aid being a factor. (As a prospective CS major, my son chose Stanford.)
Yale is generous, but not at the higher incomes. Harvard’s fin aid is great and, better yet, understandable. I always feel that Yale looks at what the EFC says a parent should pay, undercuts that and negotiates the rest. At Harvard it was simple and clean and EFC meant EFC.
@myyalieboy: My son (Yale) and daughter (Harvard) overlapped in college for 3 years. During that time, Yale’s financial aid was always more generous than Harvard’s even though both colleges were looking at the same CSS Profile and FAFSA. When I complained to Harvard that Yale was being more generous with Financial Aid by about $4k to $5k per year, Harvard reevaluated the parent contribution portion of my daughter’s aid package and and increased it a bit, but they did not match Yale’s better aid. So, despite what folks think, Harvard does not always offer the better FA. And from my experience, both colleges are equally opaque with how they calculate the parent contribution – it’s all smoke and mirrors and very similar to negotiating a deal for a new car from various dealerships.
@fretfulmother No Yale did not match Harvard. Wharton went below Harvard by a few thousand to compete with Harvard. Stanford lowered dramatically by 5 figures and still didn’t match Harvard. I liked the Harvard approach because for us it was fast and understandable. No comparative negotiations needed. I’m still a huge, dare I even say Yuge fan of Yale though.
