| OK, tokenadult, i'm still not going to give you the names of the colleges, but ALL of my childs schools gapped us.
She applied to 8 schools. She's been accepted at 6, waitlisted at one, and is waiting to hear from one. For the six that accepted her, she was offered a variety of need and merit-based aid. As someone else said, it appears that the schools that offered merit aid just reduced the need-based aid, so the total package was the same. After accounting for the gift aid, and taking out the loans, and then taking out the EFC that we're supposed to pay, we were gapped between $5700 and $10,900. Maybe that isn't too bad, but since our EFC is 5k, it's two to three times our EFC that we'll have to pay. So we're going to have to look really hard at what types of loans are being offered, etc, and take all that into consideration.
Of the six accepts, two were FAFSA only schools and four were CSS Profile schools. Ironically, the FAFSA only schools are the ones that gave the least aid. |