Discovering Affordability

Paying for College
21

Schools vary in how they treat AP exam results. Even within a college, it can vary by department and major. You can look up this info on each school if your daughter is serious about graduating in less than 4 years or using the credit for other purposes, she needs to make sure this is even possible at the colleges on her list.

Possibilities with AP credits:
Graduating early
Taking year off traveling, working and still out in 3 paying years
Getting out of taking certain courses student doesn’t want to take
Able to start at more advanced level in field of interest
More leeway in course load and withdrawing from courses

In my experience, most kids going to the selective colleges where students tend to bond with each other and with the school community, it’s rare that kids graduate early.They really prefer to take every bit of the 4 years

22

My Daughter knows that only close to or full ride National Merit Schools are on the table for us Even though none of them are selective she still studies with her nose to the grind stone. She has the stats (top 1%, 1590 SAT) tons of rigor, but is taking all the AP classes…ie AP: Calc BC, Physics 1, Physics C, Chem, Lang, Lit, APUSH, Psych, Stats, Euro, to both fulfill her gen ed requirements but also take credit for Calc 1 & II and both physics. She plans to major in electrical engineering and wants to finish her BS /MS in 5 years. Financial limitations were explained in middle school so we don’t even discuss or consider schools that are not 100% affordable.

23

GREAT advice from @PurpleTitan in #18.

Kids across the spectrum, particularly high stats kids, are more than capable of figuring out the pecking order for merit aid. Put the responsibility on her to let her grow, knowing that she could flourish at a cheap non-selective school just as easily as anywhere else.

Having a dream school to begin with is a mistake, IMO.

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I encourage your daughter to read Frank Bruni’s Where You Go Is Not Who You’ll Be: An Antidote to the College Admissions Mania. Ivies aren’t “the be all and end all” - one can find success without incurring crushing debt at Prestige U.

25

@LookAtMyShoes

If, Columbia is the unaffordable dream, what about Fordham? In place of Harvard, what about BU or Northeastern? These are great schools, competitive to get in, and offer merit money. We know somebody who got a full tuition award with all sorts of perks from BU and Fordham treats National Merit Finalists very well. Last time I checked, Northeastern’s maximum merit award was about 30K.

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@LookAtMyShoes any chance she is National Merit. She could get full tuition at Fordham if she is with those stats.

27

I’m also in the camp of not applying to a school you know you can’t afford. It’s just a recipe for heartbreak.

My D is at a state flagship honors college. Lots and lots of APs accepted but she won’t be able to graduate early because of course sequencing. There are other benefits, but getting out in 3 years isn’t one of them. Other schools greatly limit the number of AP courses you an use. Your student will need to explore the website for each school on her list individually.

28

Lol, very true.

As COAs continue to rise, it can make a “generous award” of $24k (almost $100k for four years) seem paltry. Yet, people are often impressed to receive that much.

29

Her current goal is to become an attorney and practice law in New York City. The goal is not Columbia, that is a fantasy. It’s up to her, not where she attends, to determine whether or not she gets to her goal. Wiping out the family saving to go to a specific undergrad school is not the way to reach her goal. Tell her what you will contribute and allow her to apply anywhere she wishes. Make sure she understands that two things need to occur for her to attend a school, she has to be accepted and it has to be affordable. If a school doesn’t fit both of those parameters then she can’t attend. End of discussion. She will have to go elsewhere.

30

one more thing to consider when it comes to maximizing AP credits: I think you’d get the best bang for your buck with those credits at schools that charge by the credit hour; rather than a flat fee per semester.

Say you come in with 20 credits that can be used for your major. At a flat fee per semester school, those credits open up space to take other classes and possibly allow a kid to graduate early, but you still pay the same per semester. At a $/credit hr school, you can also potentially graduate early, but those classes mean you might pay less per semester if you are taking less classes.

31

Tell her what you’ll pay. Be on the same page with your spouse. Clarify what expenses you will and won’t cover. (Books? Spending money? Travel to and from? Unpaid summer internship expenses?) No one here can tell you what is “affordable”. Different families have different amounts available to spend, and prioritize things differently.

For us, college was a very high priority. One kid attended a school she loved that gave her merit covering about 1/3 the cost. The other was near full pay at an extremely expensive school (we got a small amount of FA for 2 years because of fluctuations in income for my small business, and were full pay for 2 years). To me, for that kid and that school, it was worth every single cent,

I think you need to stop with the “woe is me, we are a donut hole family”. I’d a lot rather be a donut hole family than one with less money overall in life. My kids have gotten a great boost in life before college because of things we could afford (high quality preschool, private school, great summer opportunities, etc). I know perfectly well that those benefits helped position my kids to start with for good college admissions results. I am on track for a reasonably comfortable, if not luxurious, retirement. We aren’t 1 percenters, but bring a 5 percenter in the US is a pretty darned good life. My kids are through school with the bills paid and I have no regrets.

32

“Her current goal is to become an attorney and practice law in New York City. The goal is not Columbia, that is a fantasy.”

Just to clarify. I didn’t mean it is fantasy that she would get into Columbia. That is a challenge as Columbia is very selective. I mean something like the goal is to drive across the US, the fantasy is doing it in a Ferrari. How you look and feel in the Ferrari is what you envision or fantasize about but the fantasy is not your goal. I think that often the fantasy can interfere with your focus on your goal. There are many ways she could go to law school and eventually practice law in NYC. Going to Columbia may be one of them but not the best or most practical for her or your family.

33

AP credit wouldn’t do my son any good except lighten his load…which I guess has value. All the schools around here are flat fee per semester and he’s going into engineering so no doubling up on major courses due to pre-req requirements.

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Hear Hear @intparent. I will be a happy camper if I never hear the words “donut hole” again. Being a need-based-full-ride family is nothing that most of us would really enjoy living the life of.

35

One of my kids used AP credit to graduate a year early. The other used her AP credit to graduate in four years and a summer with a masters degree. But these were at school’s ranked around 100, that happen to be generous with AP credit, not tippy top schools. (They were also very generous with scholarships—we are a donut hole family too)

Check each school carefully on AP credit policies if the goal is to graduate early. Some schools give little to no credit. As other have mentioned, course sequences in some majors can also make it nearly impossible to graduate early.

Having watched my kids be very successful so far as graduates of lesser known schools, i will add my voice to those saying to target a name school for that law degree, not undergrad.

We set a budget for our kids that we could afford without debt for us or them, and they applied based on that, which left a lot of great schools off the table (and a lot still on it) , but they’ve thanked us repeatedly for the gift of being debt-free at graduation.

36

There are some pretty selective schools that will likely offer your daughter some really nice merit. We have a high stats daughter (now in college) and we are also full pay. We also have a younger child with some challenges who will need support as an adult so hanging on to as much cash as possible for our family was really important. We spent hours and hours of time researching schools that offer significant merit to high stats students. Do the research…our daughter got a full tuition ride and a few other outside scholarships. She had some other merit offers that were quite good and would have cost less than our highly regarded state flagship. They are out there. There wasn’t a dream school…but the outcome was pretty sweet.

37

Thank you everyone for your advice. I didn’t realize Fordham might give full rides for NMF. Yes, she should be announced in September as a NMF with a 1470 PSAT. We have discussed the full ride angle at UA. She could shave off 2 years there with APs and they pay 5 years through law school which is highly respected. However, being a liberal girl growing into a young woman in Alabama has made her want to live her life in a progressive, large city in the north. Chicago, Boston and NYC are her main choices.

We have looked at Fordham in NYC. I think the religious nature of the school has her leery of that school. She is very positive about Boston University, Northeastern and Northwestern, although, for each of those schools she’d have to get significant aid to be in our affordability range. We picked $30k/year for each child. We have two. It’s a lot to commit to, but we happily do so. Even at that level of generosity it limits her choices.

It’s ironic. All her life we raised our kids to study and prepare. All this is to have choices. Yet, in the end, what I failed to see, and articulate to my children is that it doesn’t mean that ALL choices will be open to you. Until getting involved with Elizabeth Warren’s book about affording college (I read in 2012), I didn’t know that college cost so much. I just assumed it was as affordable as when I went.

Anyway, this is just another lesson on what you have to understand as your limitations. Most of us don’t grow up rich. We must come to grips with not having what the rich have. You have to find joy in what you do have and make the best of it. College is a continuation of that. I was already ok with my lot in life, but didn’t realize that I hadn’t yet come to the same acceptance for my children’s lives.

That being said, I forwarded my findings to my daughter the other day and told her that this is her situation. It’s up to her to make Columbia, Penn, Brown, Cornell, etc affordable for her family. The implication being that she can study hard, get that law degree, make more money than me and raise the status of the family so they don’t have those limitations.

And by the way, I’m 2 generations away from immigrants. We are from Mykonos, Greece. Grandfather was a foreman in a factory. Mother was a manager at the USPS. I’m now a Systems Software Engineering Manager. Improving generation over generation.

Choice can equal progress. It doesn’t mean your get everything you want. However, what you do with that choice can mean that for you in the future.

38

It can be. You already know that she has affordable offers in Alabama (really free). If NMF she’d also be free in Florida and UT-Dallas.

People always talk about the good old days when college was affordable by working your way through. Well, that was true at state colleges but people weren’t working their way through Harvard and Dartmouth and Duke. They either got scholarships or a parent paid, just as it is now. My sister was at Middlebury and it was $5000/yr when our family income (with 5 more kids at home) was $25000. Yup, they expected 20% of our family income. She stayed one year and transferred to the state school where she could work her way through.

39

Make sure you spell out to her clearly how much you’ll pay. And if Columbia won’t be affordable don’t let her apply there. Implying something to a teenager doesn’t mean they’ll understand the message you intended to send.

40

“She wants to eventually practice law”

At the risk of stating the obvious, four years of undergrad is not going to be the end of it.

I think that you need to set a budget and stick to it.

“I didn’t know that college cost so much. I just assumed it was as affordable as when I went”

“Affordable” is relative. However, for us $70k per year was not affordable. Most importantly we found very good schools that were affordable for us and that were a very good fit for both daughters. This did require saying “NO” to a couple of schools. In retrospect the schools that we (the parents) said “NO” to would have been a significantly worse fit than the schools that my daughters actually ended up attending. Perhaps we were lucky in that regard.