How common are parental contribution limits that vary by college? I.e. what parents are actually willing to contribute, not what the colleges in question cost or offer in terms of financial aid.
An example would be parents who say “we will pay $X for school A, B, and C, but we will only pay $Y for other schools” (where Y < X and all schools are otherwise acceptable).
There are parents on this forum who have clearly stated that they will pay a premium cost for some schools but not others.
IRL, I don’t know one person who did this. Some of our family and friends did set a college budget with their kids…but it applied to any college to which they were accepted. In other words, they weren’t willing to pay mor for Yale than Quinnipiac.
We discussed colleges with our kids…and to be honest, neither applied anywhere that we would not have funded.
And also, what is meh to us could have been WOW to them.
I don’t know anyone irl who did this either. The budget is $x.
I would rather just take a college that is unacceptable off the table entirely instead of playing games.
In our case, DS’s dream program was USC for music production (new major this year). The connections and experience at USC would have been unparalleled for what he wants to do. We don’t qualify for need based aid, and he wasn’t strong enough for USC merit, so it would have been full pay for us. We could have done it (not without pain, but it wouldn’t have dashed our retirement) and would have seriously considered it due to the uniqueness of that opportunity. At the end of the day, he did not get accepted, but we were bracing for the possibility. He got merit from every other acceptance, so they were all less than full pay. I would not have gone full pay at any of the other schools (we had financial safeties in place) had he not received merit, but would only have considered it for USC due to the opportunity it presented in his field of study. So, UCB, to answer the question, we would have considered it if the acceptance came in.
I’ve heard parents express that in theory (“I will pay X+Y for top schools, and only X for lower schools”) before their kids are applying and getting accepted to colleges but I’ve never met any parent who put it into practice. Usually the budget is X dollars fit all schools no matter the name or rank.
Had we had the financial wherewithal to pay for our full EFC, and been in a position to stretch a bit beyond that figure, yes, there would have been a very small group of places that I would have considered stretching for had Happykid wanted to study there. But that stretch list is tiny, and dependent on specific potential majors. For any other of the 4,000-odd institutions in the US, I would not have gone one penny over the EFC. As it was, we couldn’t come close to meeting our EFC, and that determined where Happykid could apply, and where she could study.
For me it was binary, yes or no. My kids knew they would go to the most academic rigorous (a nicer way of saying ranking) school they could get into. In theory I would have paid for any school on their list, but in reality they didn’t have any school on their list because it was by a beach, best dorms, or best looking guys. If they have gone next tier down, they could have received substantial merit scholarship, but we chose not to, so one may say I was willing to pay a lot more for certain schools.
Sure, we would have done it. Our budget was:
{In-state Tuition +R&B+“other” =X}.
If she had wanted to go to another school and we thought the value would be there, we would have gone X+Y. As long as Y was manageable.
When looking at schools, we would state “I think you should apply to X, even though it’s a bit over our budget”. Or “That school is way over our budget, time to move on!”.
We did something like this, though not in exactly that way.
It was my husband’s idea. He pointed out to both of our kids that we have a good state university, with reasonable tuition rates. Both kids were likely to be admitted there. My husband told them that if they wanted to go somewhere else that would cost more, it needed to be a school that was substantially better than the state university or that offered something that the state university did not. Otherwise, he was unwilling to pay more than the cost of attending State U for another college.
So in effect, he was saying “We will pay Y [the cost of attending State U] for State U or any school that is of similar or lower quality, but we will pay a higher amount for a better school or one that offers something State U does not.”
As it turned out, Kid #1 got admitted to State U and got a merit scholarship to another college of similar academic quality that would have brought the cost of attendance down to the same level as State U. He chose State U, which happened to be his first choice anyway.
Kid #2 got admitted to a college that was substantially above State U’s level in terms of academic quality and prestige, and we paid the higher cost of attendance.
Yes I would pay a different amount.