<p>I got accepted ED to my first choice. It has a full-need, no loan financial aid policy. However, the package I got was less than ideal, way less than what the net price estimators told me. I don’t know how the aid department calculated my need, but something was messed up.</p>
<p>I considered withdrawing my application and applying to other schools, but I realized that I only had about a week to apply before the deadlines and knew I would not be happier at another college, nor would there be any guarantees that the other aid packages from Harvard, Yale, etc. would be better. My family concluded that we were going to make some hard sacrifices, but the money wasn’t worth giving up a guaranteed spot. What makes it more frustrating is that outside scholarship money can only be used to pay down the student contribution portion, not the EFC.</p>
<p>One of my best friends, however, got admitted ED and had to withdraw. The school counted both parents in the EFC, even though one of his parents was not willing to contribute. He’s taking a gap year next year instead.</p>
<p>^ blubbermonkey---- “One of my best friends, however, got admitted ED sand had to withdraw. The school counted both parents EFC, even though one of his parents was not willing to contribute.”</p>
<p>There are a few things wrong with this scenario:
Your friend Never should have applied ED under circumstances where one parent refused to pay anything toward his education.</p>
<ol>
<li>Your friend’s parents can not claim ignorance as a way of bowing out because all they had to do was read and they would have known that BOTH parents income and financials are taken into consideration when distributing FA.</li>
</ol>
<p>3.The ED agreement is a contract which implies that a person NOT be ignorant of the financial obligations of the contract.</p>
<p>I can’t imagine what shape we all be in if every kids parents decided that they would just “tell” a college that they were not contributing so therefore Johnny needs aid. There would be a whole bunch of kids getting aid while mom or dad was sitting on a fortune.</p>
<p>blubbermonkey, have you and your parents contacted the FA office to discuss the offer? If it seems way off of the estimators, perhaps something did indeed get “messed up.” Mistakes do happen, even at the most prestigious of institutions. If there was no mistake, at least you’ll know the reason and be better prepared for the following 3 years of expenses. </p>
<p>Also, maybe I’m reading your post wrong - were you thinking you couldn’t apply anywhere else until hearing from ED? It is completely allowable to apply RD (or even EA in most cases with a few notable exceptions) to other colleges when applying ED. The constraint is that you have to withdraw those applications when the ED acceptance arrives. Maybe I’m confused, but since you said you only had a week to submit other applications it sounds like your ED school was the only one you applied to.</p>
<p>I hope it all works out for you.</p>
<p>As for your best friend, I feel for him. When one or both parents refuse to to contribute their kids’ college costs, it puts the kid in an awful position because the aid formulas don’t take that into consideration. I can see why - because everyone would say they won’t pay so their kid would get more aid - but the parents who really DO have means and simply REFUSE to contribute leave their kid up a creek without a paddle.</p>
<p>As I understand/understood it, you cannot back out of ED because the money “did not work out” but because it is absolutely not doable. That is what we were told when my son was looking and therefore, since we are in the weird doughnut hole of middle class–few assets but enough income to raise EFC to unmanageable levels given our ages, paying back loans for us would be impossible–he did not apply anywhere ED although he had a clear first choice. </p>
<p>If ED financial was not enough, his guidance counselor made it clear he had to go anyway. He did the right thing and applied RD everywhere, unaware that “a borderline student with need might be accepted at ED but discarded at RD.” That is not what the schools put forward nor what we understood. </p>
<p>This process is drastically unfair to those who are both honest and believe what the admissions offices are telling them.</p>
<p>That is not what we were advised. We were told that if ED met 1a large % of need, even if that meant huge loans, you had to go if accepted. I think there is a lot of misunderstanding about what “binding” means. </p>
<p>In any event, my S did not apply ED. </p>
<p>I am completely disillusioned in the college process as a whole. I told my children, do really well in school, get straight A’s, stay clean-cut and do some extracurriculars and generally be a good kid and you will go to college. I am older parent whose own college app experience was vastly different than today. It now seems that since we have lost most of our home equity, only one of us has a pension and that is very small and we are older that my kids may not easily go to college, although they are excellent students. They haven’t done thousands of hours of community service: they were too busy commuting to far away schools to get a top-notch education, they haven’t published articles or created companies. They are just great kids and top students, and their parents happen to be middle-class late bloomers with not much saved. And apparently parents who “didn’t know the ropes.” </p>
<p>I am sure there are thousands and thousands out there like us.</p>
<p>“I told my children, do really well in school, get straight A’s, stay clean-cut and do some extracurriculars and generally be a good kid and you will go to college.” - enonimouse</p>
<p>I think the disconnect often comes with the expanded definition of what going to college entails. ED schools are almost all, by definition, highly selective and expensive. The kid who you profile above will almost certainly be able to go to some state school which in our day was what going to college meant for most kids. Actually, it still does. We have so much information handy now for all these distant schools that kids and parents can get that kid in a candy store “shopping” feeling. It used to be that you had to send away for a viewbook and/or catalogue and fill out apps by hand. Maybe some of it is external messaging but a lot of it, I think, is just being able to open a website and dream about “100% of need met”.</p>
<p>@saintfan that’s an interesting concept you bring up. In my state (NY), there are many public colleges that offer ED. Is it not like this in other states?</p>
<p>Also curious about this notion that one should have to consider an offer workable if it includes lots of loans. That may feel more workable to some people than to others. I can’t imagine a school saying, “Too bad, deal with it” if a parent or student declines a package that includes mostly loans. Why in the world would they do that? They are not ogres and they for sure do not want to be the subject of a story with a headline such as, “Snooty college forces unemployed factory worker to take out $60K in loans to pay for his daughter’s education.” Of course they are going to take the family’s word for it. </p>
<p>The reality is that colleges know some people are going to back out of the agreement for good reasons and some for less good reasons. They are not dummies; they surely know the likely percentage of students who will decline based on years of data. The ED “contract” is filled with as many conditions as it is so that people will think long and hard about applying ED. And college websites work hard to be as discouraging as possible to anyone who would apply ED on a whim. Of course colleges know that people will game the system. Of course they know that 17-year-olds are not always as certain one day as they felt a few days or a few months before. Of course they know people may not like what the college considers to be a reasonable financial aid package. What they are hoping is that MOST people are a) smart enough to read the documents they sign and b) honorable enough to abide by the terms of the agreement they signed. They can’t be surprised by the fact that some people are not as savvy about financial aid as others, so they have to be accounting for people who really don’t know the ins and outs of FA until they get the final offer.</p>
<p>Part of this comes down to the kind of person you are and how risk adverse you are. </p>
<p>I happen to be very risk adverse and would never apply ED out of concern that the package would not be high enough and then I would then stress over whether I could find money someway/somehow so I could go. I would agonize about telling the school no, embarrassed that I took the chance when I probably should have known better if I financially needed that total package. And be so disappointed that after all that work, it was money that kept me out. </p>
<p>Others are able to gamble and look at the ED application as putting all their chips on one spot, feeling well if I don’t get what I need to get then I will just pull out. No problem, I have applications already to go to those RD schools as back up. They see it as a chance experience, a why not give the wheel a spin.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, we live in a state where the state colleges are not much to choose from–most of our students go out of state. We have one problematic large university and a few smaller colleges, most were until recently oriented to education majors. Not much else public. I know, I went to one of the “higher rated” colleges and the intellectual environment and work ethic just was not there, nor was the quality of work.</p>
<p>@saintfan please see my response above. The fact is that kids who have taken 8 AP’s will find the level of work at most, perhaps not all, of our small state colleges to be much lower than was expected of them in high school. My husband has taught at several and I attended one as an adult finishing up my BA. I will never forget a world history class where the students were constantly complaining about homework and reading; they were frequently talking the professor out of the assigned work. I supervise graduates from the large university on a regular basis and find they are lacking in many, many aspects from writing skills to problem solving skills to initiative. </p>
<p>Further, our state schools are very, very expensive. So, yes, a state school might be the right answer for many but not all.</p>
<p>Your son did the right thing, even if for the wrong reason (a clueless counselor is a pretty common affliction, unfortunately). It sounds like you were looking for merit aid. Any student who wants to compare aid offers, need-based or merit, shouldn’t be applying ED. They want to be able to compare RD offers. ED might help with getting admitted, but it’s not generally going to help with being able to afford the school.</p>
<p>ED is still a “free look” even if merit money is hoped for (as long as we’re still talking about the one “dream” school). The worst that happens is having to turn down the offer, and you move on to RD elsewhere (which you’d have to do applying RD, too).</p>
<p>“Worst that happens” could end up being that the ED financial offer is better than (or just as disappointing as) anything received RD. That would be really depressing!</p>
<p>
:eek: My D1 applied and was accepted ED. We are full-pay so she only had to worry about acceptance, not the aid offer. Still, part of the deal of letting her apply ED was that her other applications had to be ready to go if she was rejected or deferred.</p>
<p>The more I read this thread the more I wonder why we have an outcry about Bernie Madoff and Wall Street Banks. Here’s CC, majority of whose adult members are well educated people and we are telling the kids that a binding agreement is not really binding but just a suggestion. In 99.9 percent of the cases a parent must have an inkling of how much money they have saved for college, how much they have to squeeze their budget to contribute, how much the kid can contribute, and how much they can reasonably expect from Fin.Aid. So what happens? We have people who will use the ED advantage to get in, but then decide, “nah, not enough” and rescind. Its in very rare cases that a family cant figure out in advance. And the attitude of “free look” is, in my book, so unethical and morally wrong that I don’t even want to go there.</p>
<p>I only applied to 3 schools. 1 ED and 2 EA. Rejected from ED (Columbia) and in at the other two (Michigan an Kalamazoo College). I don’t get why people apply to so many schools… I didn’t even bother applying anywhere RD, nor had any ready by Dec 23rd when I got my acceptance from UMich.</p>