Early Decision and Financial Aid

Roger_Dooley
Sun, 22 Jul 2007 14:10:17 +0000

100% financial need met




The problem is that many top schools consider loans as meeting financial need. I’ve always felt this was entirely disingenuous - kind of like an auto dealer selling you a car for “free” (except for the loans, of course). While some loans are subsidized and are a somewhat better deal than others, I still consider every loan part of the family contribution inasmuch as they will be paid back by the student. Not everyone agrees with me on this, but hey… a loan that must be repaid is your money, not the school’s.

In short, don’t assume that a college that meets 100% of need will be affordable unless they also state that they will meet 100% of need with no loans. If you don’t know your FAFSA EFC, calculate it - that will be a good starting point to understand what your need might be.

If you apply ED and also supply all of your financial data, the college should give you a timely indication of what they will offer you for aid (assuming no big changes in the current year data). If it’s packed with loans, you can probably back out for financial reasons. If it’s just a Stafford (and perhaps Perkins if you qualify) loan, that may be a reasonable burden to for the student to assume. The real catch is the “family contribution” - if they say that the EFC is, for example, $25K - and your family can’t or won’t cough up that much - you can probably back out for that reason, too. If you are applying to the most elite schools, though, you shouldn’t expect huge differences in aid. Sometimes they will happen, and a few schools have gone “no loan”, but they mostly work with the same data and reach fairly similar conclusions.

If you apply to schools that award merit aid (which Ivies do not do), you may see fairly big variations in your aid packages.

Good luck!