Denied Financial Aid

dodgersmom
Sun, 13 Mar 2011 13:58:18 +0000

crar24 - Once again, I appreciate your input, but it strikes me that you have limited familiarity with this situation. A family that can barely scrape together a small part of the tuition is not going to qualify for a $160,000 loan to cover the balance! (We are talking about four years of high school, after all.) And scholarships? Believe me, if they were readily available, people on this forum would have long since suggested them!

What really happens when kids are denied (or waitlisted for) financial aid is that maybe 20 or 25 percent of the families find another way to pay for the tuition - often a rich relative who was lurking in the background the entire time. The rest are just out of luck! The schools may be able to accommodate a few after other FA candidates turn down their offers and decide to go elsewhere . . . but it’s really only a few. At least one school has told FA applicants that they have perhaps a one percent chance of getting off the FA waitlist. Those are not promising odds.

This happens to a lot of otherwise highly qualified candidates. Trust me, if the schools knew a way for students to “bridge the gap,” they’d be the first to tell us. They don’t want to turn students away . . . but the financial realities are what they are.