Our son has received several D1 football offers, including Yale and Columbia. I understand that they doesn’t give football scholarships, but how actually does the financial aide work for football players? It says it based and your families income. Let’s say we make around 260k combined, what would we except to pay?
Have you asked either for a financial pre-read? Start with that and by running the numbers through the Net Price Calculator for each college:
https://admissions.yale.edu/estimate-your-cost
https://cc-seas.financialaid.columbia.edu/estimate-cost
I thought you could ask for a financial aid preread?
Ask the coaches for a pre-read from the financial aid office. Let the Columbia coach know you’re being recruited by Yale. The Columbia FA office will produce an estimate using Yale’s FA formula if you provide evidence of recruiting interest from Yale. (If you’ve had any calls or emails from Harvard or Princeton, that’s worth mentioning too). HYP generally have the best aid but the other schools will match. You can run the net price calculators on each website to get an idea of the difference.
Run the Net Price Calculator. Yale claims to provide some FA to 72% of those who are in the income bracket of $200K - $250K, but keep in mind that it depends on: # of siblings in college, your family size and your total assets (including your students income and assets). Yale, unlike Harvard and Princeton, takes your home equity into consideration when making their FA decision, so don’t expect their FA to be as generous as H and P. I don’t know about Columbia.
We never looked at Yale, but Harvard and Princeton had relatively easy NPC calculators. Even without getting your tax returns out, I’m guessing in about 10 minutes you will have a good idea of where roughly you sit. I would run the numbers for Yale and Columbia, then also for Harvard and Princeton to see if they are way different. If so, your S may want to try to talk to those coaches too.
My experience was that ivy coaches are happy to to help you get your financial aid up to the best you would have gotten from a competing Ivy program, as long as there is legitimate recruiting interest from them.
Having said that, my guess is that you are in a tough spot. You made enough that financial aid isn’t great, although I’m guessing you get something. It seems to me like people in the $200-300,000 range are in the worst spot. To much income for great aid, not enough to pay $300,000 after tax over 4 years without it being a huge sacrifice. But run the numbers to be sure. Good luck.
FYI legitimate recruiting interest doesn’t mean an offer or even official visit. 2 calls or personal emails from a coach are probably enough.