Disadvantage of kid #1

cptofthehouse
Fri, 20 Apr 2012 14:16:01 +0000

I’ve known people who have had two kids a year apart and had the older one take a gap year to get two in college. Yes, you can pay less that way.

However, in order for it to work optimally, both kids have to be in schools that guarantee to meet need, and the cost of the schools to be equal.

I have two in college this year. At our income level, if both kids had picked top priced colleges and if each of those were colleges that met full need, we would have ended up with about $10K maybe in defined need, I think a little less than that,because I am going 50/50 and PROFILE schools tend to split 60/60. (in other words the you pay 60%$ of the total calculated family contribution generated by PROFILE per kid, not half as FAFSA splits the EFC). Unless both kids were going to schools that didn’t include loans in the package, they would get subsidized loans on the Stafford, from what I have seen of such situations. Now if they were both at Harvard, that would be a whole other story, but I am talking about top priced, top 50 LACs that guarantee to meet full need or close to it…

As it is, neither kid’s college guarantees to meet needs, so they could just throw up their hands and say, “tough beans” but there would still be the subsidized interest on the Stafford, right? Except kid #1 has a merit award that brings his cost down below what our expected 60% would be for him. That’s pure money, so how can I complain? He’s had it from day 1 from that school. And Kid 2 is going to an OOS public where the cost is $5K mrore than half of what a top priced private school would be. So the costs of the two kids combined is under what our EFC and what most any college would calculate as what we should pay. So, we luck out, as we are paying less than what we would be even if both kids were getting aid at full need met schools. ALso, the younger one is continuing 3 years solo since the older one is graduating this year. The older one also won some awards and research money in the last few years that have reduced his costs further and has a nice paying job at the college tutoring center. It’s still a lot of money for us, but still costs less than if we’d gotten the max out of the way the system works.