<p>Thanks, 3Ks. I was thinking more of the retribution side, looking for actual cases of actions taken by the spurned ED school. We hear of rumors and fears, but so far, I don’t recall an actual case; it may be my poor memory. 
But I did note the implied Swat threat.</p>
<p>I think this topic has strayed too, as topics often do. What had once been - can Op back out of her agreement, and what are the ethics of that- Has become can any student back out?
I ask all posters here to remember some that say “no”, or at least “not rightfully so without consequences” may be referring to the specific Op and not to the more general “can anybody decline an ED offer?”.
As I remember the Op, the ED offer was doable, but not as generous as she hoped, remembering her wording that it “wasn’t” a horrible offer. Her dilemma was that a better offer came along.</p>
<p>I think the Op is ethically wrong to renege but I agree there are others that have financial reasons that could rightfully decline and rightfully seek an ethical release.
The example has even been asked here if a kid changed his mind only to attend a college in a warmer climate. It is unfortunate for that kid that he has done so despite the advice of parent(s) and counselors.</p>
<p>In an unrelated idea, I’d ask those seeking loopholes to use common sense too, to determine the spirit of an ED agreement. I installed a ceiling fan the other day. It had a warning label not to put people or objects in the path of moving blades. That seems a peculiar warning to me, as such a thing should be obvious. It makes me wonder if somebody lifted a kid up into the blades, got hurt, and then sued the company on the grounds that the manufacturer didn’t warn him so he didn’t know it might be dangerous.</p>
<p>drnoeyedea-- clever name. Thank you for posting. It is good to know that a student could go and speak to the Penn finaid office and get an adjusted package. I’m happy to hear that.</p>
<p>Crumb, I’m a lousy poster and I can hardly keep up.</p>
<p>Momofthreeboys, I think you might be surprised by some school districts. I’m not making this stuff up. Parents are nuts! I have lots of stories. The school district tries to stay out in front with various gatekeeping scenarios that may or may not work, and they are always tweaking things. Let me also add for the sake of discussing consequences in the cheating scandal, the student that suffered the severe consequence was the one headed off to a top private college and the ones headed off to top publics suffered none (beyond the HS consequence of suspension and loss of some Senior privileges).</p>
<p>It is ridiculously unfair to suggest that Penn’s ED is only for the wealthy.</p>
<p>Every year (or at least every year while my kids were there), Penn accepted 10-15 kids from their public school ED. Maybe one of those kids per year was full pay. Maybe. Far more were no pay. But most were middle/working class kids, often immigrants, often single-parent families, who were far from destitute, but equally far from comfortable.</p>
<p>I don’t know of a single situation where a kid walked away from his ED acceptance. Maybe it happened, but I never heard the rumor. (And the rumor would have traveled FAST, believe me. These kids were not big on privacy.) They were thrilled; it was a dream come true. Their parents were thrilled. Their aid packages often required sacrifice, or loans, or both, but they were generally superior to the best-understood alternatives (i.e., Temple or Drexel), or close enough to make everyone comfortable. Those who weren’t prepared to make the sacrifice knew that up front, and didn’t apply. But the level of unhappiness with Penn’s financial aid among ED acceptees was very, very low.</p>
<p>And not just ED acceptees. One kid’s classmate was accepted at MIT EA and then Penn RD. Not only was Penn’s financial package meaningfully better, Penn worked very sensitively with his non-English-speaking (and, I suspect, illegal) parents in a way that MIT never tried. Another kid, relatively well-to-do, tried to get Harvard to match Penn’s financial aid package. (Harvard asked what Yale and Stanford had offered him. Harvard was a little better than that. Harvard said, “You should go to Penn if this difference matters so much to you.” It turned out that the difference didn’t matter that much to him.)</p>
<p>The consequences to the high school and its relationship with colleges is a different matter. It may be a potentially real consequence --but they aren’t the ones who are paying for college – or, in the case of a kid who just changes their mind like Zoosermom’s friend who decided she wasn’t ready to leave home – the ones who have to attend the college.</p>
<p>The GC’s can maintain their integrity and positive relations with the colleges by refusing to help with any game playing, and by notifying colleges of ED status as appropriate. The GC’s can also learn to better advise students with financial limitations. </p>
<p>A GC might be legally bound to forward a transcript when its requested, but there is no rule that says the GC has to write a favorable recommendation. That’s going to mean that any kid who backs out of ED and then tries to apply to an equivalent college is going to have a tough time – the ad coms do look at what the g.c. writes.</p>
<p>JHS-- I was really being sarcastic. I happen to actually believe Penn would like to work with any student it thought it wanted to admit to make attendance possible. I actually believe this of almost all schools, which is why I find it very odd when people claim a school would ding a kid for not being able to afford it. I really happen to believe that to the best of thier ability thier mission is to educate and to educate in a manner which excludes no socio-economic class, at all. I also happen to believe any student applying ED, with an exception so incredibly rare as to be irrelevent, would LOVE to go to Penn…Maybe I’m naive, but that is why all this “gaming” talk is annoying. To me.</p>
<p>3Ks, your two examples are of parents and students with integrity.</p>
<p>poetgrl – Drnoeyedea might have had a positive experience with the Penn financial aid office, but that doesn’t mean that they are able to meet the requirements of every applicant in all circumstances. Need-based schools still follow rules and policies – so they are going to make a decision depending on whether the circumstances presented to them fit within the sort of thing where they can take actions to recalculate the need and increase the award. </p>
<p>So yes, the applicant can talk to financial aid. No harm in asking. But the outcome can still end up that Penn is not affordable in the eyes of this specific applicant.</p>
<p>We have worked with GCs at two different public schools over the past six years and they have both been very competent, caring people. One was more than familiar with the schools on my son’s list and could (and did) question a couple of his choices. When she heard his explanations, she agreed with him. She met with us for 1.5 hours to discuss my son’s goals. Volunteered to add more info to her letter when he won some awards. Was very focused on reach/match/safety schools in the list.</p>
<p>The other GC did not meet with us parents, but had along chat with my S. She emailed me afterwards to tell me he had spent more time on his questionnaire than any other student she has worked with and that she was impressed with the thoroughness of his search criteria. She did <em>not</em> ask where he was applying, though.</p>
<p>I expect both would have have discussed with us the issues behind ED had we gone that route. I would not have expected either of them to be terribly familiar with financial aid. At a certain level, it feels like the GCs are given instructions NOT to discuss $$ with students or parents becuse they do not want to be seen as directing students of various economic levels to one tier of schools or another. Our experience is that they all seem to be reading from the same script.</p>
<p>Two years I was asked to speak to the junior parents at one of my kids’ schools about the college application process and all I talked about was money. EFC is ALWAYS more than you think it will be. Assume roughly 30-35% of your take-home income. Talk to your kids NOW about what you can reasonably afford. The parents were starved for this stuff, and this was a group of highly educated parents who are in that that dreaded FA black hole – enough $$ to live a median middle class life in a very expensive area, but enough income that they will not likely qualify for much, if any, aid.</p>
<p>Can we afford our EFC with two kids in college next fall? Nope. We’ll be borrowing a portion of it for the two years the kids overlap. The kids will be doing their part, too. Any FA we get will be manna from heaven. We have always assumed that the tradeoff for the improved chances in ED would be less FA. It was a strategy we were considering for S2 at one point if EA did not work out well. </p>
<p>My sense is that a student approaches a college honestly and openly and says we just can’t make this work, the school will not hold it against the kid (or the HS). It’s when there are counternegotiations w/other schools and other mischief that p.o.'s the colleges.</p>
<p>Calmom-- I have no doubt at all that you are right about that!</p>
<p>I just like to see everybody working in good faith as much as possible. I have some reservations about some of the “advertising” language I see going on and whatnot, but it is good to know the school will speak to the student and really try. Cuz I have no doubt at all that most of the kids really do want it to work out quite badly.</p>
<p>I recall the heartbroken financially related posts from the spring. :(</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>In that case, being upset is understandable. Unfortunately, sometimes the college uses its own mysterious formula and decides that the EFC is really “X” + $10k. If “X” is at the outer limit of what the family can afford, “X” + $10k just isn’t happening.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Okay, how about this?</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Why is that so hard to understand?</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Then why do they offer financial aid?</p>
<p>Poetgrl, I think that its possible that for the OP there might be a problem related to the parents willingness to pay. She said that she had to bear the costs entirely on her own because the parents had a lot of debt, and on another thread she also mentioned having an “abusive stepfather.” To me, “stepfather” raises a financial aid red flag, because often with blended families, the step-parent is not eager to pay for college for the spouse’s kid, especially if the relationship between step-parent / stepchild is not all that hot.</p>
<p>So it may be that the family has an EFC that is significant, but are not going to pay anything toward the kid’s college. But colleges aren’t that generous with dependency overrides – so its unlikely that Penn or any other college will disregard parental income and assets merely because the parents refuse to pay.</p>
<p>This can be a tough situation. My son was in that boat when he returned to college after a hiatus. He was age 23 and had been self-supporting for 3 years, living on his own - but still a dependent for FAFSA purposes. Basically, the “parents won’t pay their EFC” scenario is rough, and there’s not a whole lot of flexibility from colleges on that one. </p>
<p>While everyone is jumping all over the OP on “ethical” grounds, its quite possible that her problem begins at home. That is, it may be that her parents are telling her they won’t pay the Penn bill, and that they are the ones insisting she take the full ride offer.</p>
<p>I’d just add that when there is a blended family, the whole issue of the parents taking out loans also takes on a new dimension. It’s one thing for mommy & daddy to sign onto a loan for tens of thousands of dollars, its quite another to try to get step-dad to agree to take on that responsibility, especially if there is a possibility that the debt might outlast the marriage.</p>
<p>I agree that F&M seems to take an easy-going approach to breaking the ED agreement. I suspect, based on the colleges’ acceptance statistics and student body standardized testing profile, that competitions for spots is … modest … And as such, it should not be held up as any kind of example of what happens at selective, top tier colleges.</p>
<p>One more time: ‘Aid’ as used by college FA offices can mean any of the following: grant, loan, or work.</p>
<p>Stevensmama I think most everyone is saying variations of what you are saying. It is entirely possible that a parent and student, even an astute parent and student, would take the meaning of what the colleges say about no loan or meets 100% of need to mean one thing and when they get the actual letter with the ED decision realize that it is not what they ‘expected.’ The colleges (at least the ones that have been cited) have an “out” for that reason. A family could simply be in a position where even a generous package isn’t going to work for them. Many, many posts a few pages back going through the Penn example very closely albeit speculatively. And as posters have said, families have tolerances that are unique about what they are comfortable with. The colleges want diverse classes. They want geographic diversity, racial diversity, economic diversity. To “get” that diversity they utilize financial aid strategies. Sure any business would love 100% of their customers paying 100% of the asking rate, but colleges have set aside budgets to achieve their institutional goals of diversity and have to balance their needs in terms of volume of full paying customers and the needs of their diversity customers. And before someone jumps all over me, the two are not mutually exclusive, but you all get what I’m trying to say.</p>
<p>EricLG – Penn PROMISES its students that its aid does not include loans.</p>
<p>It is possible that this student applied to Penn based on that promise. </p>
<p>So as to this particular student, it would have been reasonable to expect that her financially need be fully met without loans.</p>
<p>Calmom that is why I tried to stay out of the fray and not pass judgement on the situation.</p>
<p>CalMom, Upenn promises no student loans in the FA package. Sure, but then they are quick to point out that loans are a common part of attending UPenn, in order to meet the school’s EFC determination.</p>
<p>Look at this ‘askBen’: [Undergraduate</a> Federal Stafford Loan Program (subsidized)](<a href=“Submit My Documents”>Submit My Documents)</p>
<p>Smoke and mirrors, no matter how much you want to believe otherwise.</p>
<p>Yes, I’ve appreciated all the explanations on this thread, and I have a great appreciation, as well, for how challenging this must be to negotiate, for the student as well as the parent.</p>
<p>What is most interesting to me, to raise an entirely different topic, is the way colleges are so adament about parents staying “out of” the academic process of applications and whatnot, but about parents being so incredibly “informed” about the finaid aspect.</p>
<p>As in “Let your kids handle the applications themselves. Do not call the schools. Do not get involved or ask questions. WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND WHAT MEET FULL NEED REALLY MEANS???” Are you irresponsible? :rolleyes:</p>
<p>There’s a lot of strange stuff about all of this imho.</p>
<p>“It is ridiculously unfair to suggest that Penn’s ED is only for the wealthy.”</p>
<p>I know nothing about Penn, but it is definitely fair to claim that ED was originally designed for and used by the wealthy. For PR reasons, schools are trying to minimize that now. Personally, I have <em>never</em> seen an ED applicant other than a full-pay student. Part of that is due to the smart advice of the counselors at our top-notch high school. They always counsel FA applicants to apply RD and compare packages.</p>
<p>The counselors at a high-powered h.s. that sends boatloads of kids to Ivies care very much about their relationships with colleges and work hard to maintain their integrity. They monitor applications and will not send out transcripts or do anything in violation of ED. The counselors are the gatekeepers and that explains the low level of defaults on ED.</p>
<p>I have seen plenty of kids (including my own) turn down Penn’s peers because the financial aid offered is just not doable. It happens all the time during RD. I have never seen anyone turn down ED for financial reasons, but only because FA applicants around here simply do not apply ED.</p>