you will know what kind of schools to pursue. In the next chapter, you’ll find the tools you’ll need to determine whether financial aid is a possibility.
If You Do Qualify for Financial Aid...
You need to figure out which schools are generous and which are miserly. Many schools don’t advertise their financial aid breakdowns of grants, loans, and work study, but as you’ll learn later in the book, it is easy to retrieve financial aid statistics for individual schools.
The colleges and universities that often dangle the fattest financial
aid packages are routinely the richest ones that sit on endowments
that can reach into the billions of dollars. Recently 76 colleges
and universities were sitting on endowments that were worth at least
$1 billion. These schools are more likely to be able to bestow a kid
with a free or heavily subsidized education.
Many of the schools with the most generous reputations,
however, are also the hardest to wheedle your way into. Amherst
College, for instance, says it will meet 100% of its students’ financial
needs. And even better, the school does not saddle its financial aid
students with loans. Instead all Amherst students receive need-based
grants. Princeton University in Princeton, New Jersey; Pomona
College in Claremont, California; Davidson College in Davidson,
North Carolina; Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine; and Williams
College in Williamstown, Massachusetts, are also among the small,
but growing number of elite schools that don’t saddle families with
loans.
Harvard, however, made everybody else’s generosity look like a
pittance when it announced its ambitious aid plan, which attracted
front-page media attention. In addition to continuing to help middleclass
and poor students, Harvard is now assisting families who make
between $120,000 and $180,000 per year. The school caps the cost to
these families at 10% of their income, which means the richest of
these families will typically pay roughly $18,000 a year for a school
with a recent price tag of $45,600. After Harvard’s announcement,
Yale University, Stanford University, and Brown University were
among the schools that quickly followed with their own plans to
benefit more affluent families.
It can’t get much better than that, but, of course, there is a catch.
Very few students can earn a spot in the freshman class at these
schools. Amherst’s acceptance rate is just 19%, and Davidson’s is
30%. Harvard and Yale reject 91% of their applicants. Pomona turns
away all but 18% of its applicants.
Luckily, plenty of schools do provide generous financial aid packages
without requiring stratospheric SAT scores and valedictorian
credentials. What’s more, you can find schools that mix need-based
financial aid with merit money, which is awarded regardless of whether
a family is rich, poor, or in between. It’s possible to obtain both kinds of
assistance if you fit the profile that a particular school covets.
If You Don’t Qualify for Financial Aid...
If “no” is the answer, you’ll want to focus on the sugar daddies that
award merit aid to students for academic achievements or other talents
because the alternative is paying full fare.
As you’ll learn in great detail later, tons of schools distribute merit
aid without caring how much money mom and dad make or how much
cash they have stuffed in bank accounts. The average merit award that
private schools hand out slashes the tuition bill by 33.5%. Many public
schools have also jumped on the merit aid bandwagon. And here’s
equally great news: Even “B” students can qualify for these awards at
plenty of schools.
If you aren’t receiving financial aid, you’ll want to identify up front
the schools that dispense merit awards, which are also known as
tuition discounts. If you don’t, you could end up spending tens of
thousands of dollars more than you had planned.
Action Plan
Make it a priority to determine whether your family will qualify for
need-based aid.
Source: The College Solution: A Guide for Everyone Looking for the Right School at the Right Price
