I am a parent of a Junior in HS. For the most part we are looking for schools that offer good merit aid for a student with her STATS. She has understood this and doesn’t feel like she needs to apply to T20 schools since they don’t offer merit aid.
She is a super hard working, very high STATS kid who is pretty brilliant, in my opinion. Tons of volunteering, part of a pre-professional dance program (15 hrs per week), leadership, and a pretty cool passion project, and has a hook of being from a very underrepresented western state.
I know she can get a great education at many, many schools and prestige hasn’t been on our minds necessarily. Fit is the most important thing we are looking for. We have a lot of conversations about this and she gets it.
BUT, I keep hearing that most people don’t pay full price to go to the T20s and that they are super generous with their aid for even upper middle class families. So I go back and forth about whether we should encourage her to shoot for the stars just to see what happens. The schools that she might consider applying to in that case are Brown, Williams, Cornell, or Princeton.
We have an odd financial situation though, which I don’t really understand how the CSS schools will interpret.
I recently retired my small photography business so am currently unemployed and my partner makes about 120k. Between the 529 we have for our child, our retirement accounts, and modest brokerage accounts, our assets come to about 375k. My child has only about 2k of assets herself from earned income in a savings account. (We would not encourage her to apply to T20 that takes into account the value of our primary home.)
However, my parents have both passed on and I am the beneficiary of two irrevocable trusts from them. According to the trusts’ terms, I am only allowed a distribution up to 3% of the value of the trusts’ each year. I usually withdrawal that amount to help us supplement my husband’s income for general living expenses, like bills and mortgage payments, and such.
When filling out the NPCs for the schools mentioned above, they ask for my total assets which include trusts. When I enter the total value of these two trusts, we end up having to be “full pay.” I have been told that many colleges calculate something like 6% of parents’ assets to be used to pay for college. But the reality is that I don’t even have access to that % of these assets. Only 3% a year.
If I instead enter 3% of the value of the trusts as earned income into the NPCs, but leave out the full value of the trusts in the assets section, then the result is way more inline with what we are looking to pay for my child to go to college (closer to 65k).
Would I enter this information into the special circumstances section of the CSS? Would it even make a difference? I have documentation from the estate lawyers about the terms of the trusts that I could include.
Or do I just need to accept the fact that we would be considered full pay and not bother having her even consider those schools? We do not believe any undergrad education is worth 90k a year. We have found some perfectly good fit schools that would probably offer her great merit aid.
Thoughts?