<p>I am bumping this up for the 2014 cycle. There is a heartbreaking time coming up at at colleges across the country in August and September when students and families who identified “dream colleges” and said, “Don’t worry about the cost, just get accepted and we will find a way” receive very real bills for the upcoming semester.</p>
<p>Other families who exhausted savings paying for the first year of college in hopes that financial aid would increase the following year find that the expected contribution is driven by income and emptying their accounts had only a minimal impact on the amount they must pay. Students hoping for large scholarships for their second-fourth years discover that the large scholarships are awarded to incoming freshmen and they are battling for scholarships in the $2,000-$5,000 range that, thankfully, replace subsidized loans and work study but which have little impact on expected contribution.</p>
<p>Please, 2014 applicants, put together a great list of colleges to which you will apply that includes admissions and financial safeties that you love. I want all of you to have great options next spring. The fact is, there are nearly 4,000 colleges and universities in the US, and I am betting that, literally, thousands of them would be a great fit for any one of you and that you CAN follow you dreams and achieve success at nearly any of them. Do not get caught up in, or allow your parents or kids to push you into, a “prestige at any cost” mentality.</p>
<p>Typically when I post my point of view on this matter there are parents on this forum who are, frankly, nasty to me and tell me I am wrong. They advise students to take on crippling debt in pursuit of prestige when the identified “dreams” could be pursued at any number of colleges. I encourage those parents to post here and describe their strategy and to return in one, two and three years to follow-up on how it turned out. I encourage the students who, with their parents’ blessing and co-signature, took out $80,000 to $100,000 in loans to return 5 years after graduation to follow-up with the success of their plan and the ease of servicing that debt in their 20s while starting in a new profession.</p>
<p>The “head in the sand” method is NOT the way to go. Good luck.</p>