be sure to share this thread with your sibs and parents.
The whole family needs to information about the realities of paying for college these days.
Stay in touch!
the best places to reach us is either here on the FA forum, or the parents forum.
Be sure to run the net price calculators on these schools (and your siblings’ safeties, if different) with your parents and talk as a family about whether the net prices are affordable. Affordability is a crucial aspect of a safety.
Step 1 is to run the college board’s EFC calculator. This will estimate your EFC for both the Fafsa and Profile methodologies. Use REAL numbers, not your best estimate of your parents resources! (If your parents don’t want to share their info, have them run it and tell you the results.)
This returns two EFC numbers: Your Institutional method EFC is the EFC for elite schools that take the Profile. The federal EFC is for all other schools. The FAFSA EFC will almost always be lower.
From each EFC, subtract the student loans you are willing to take (up to 5500 in federal student loans freshman year) and subtract the average amount you expect a brother to earn from work. That will be the student part of the family contribution.
Then will need to multiply what’s left by 4 for four kids in college! (You could run the EFC calculator four times, once for each brother, but there’s no need since you are all the same year in school.)
Then you will need to see how close the results are to what your parents are willing to spend.
Your parents need to set a preliminary number at this point. Make sure your parents count their tax benefits for having dependents in college when determining their tuition budget. The usual American Opportunity Tax Credit is 2500 per kid, but it starts to phase out over 180K income level, so you may need to run a hypothetical return through Turbo Tax to see what you get. They should also consider things like grocery bills will go down with four fewer men to feed and any other expenses that might go down once you finish high school. Conversely, if you guys all need separate cars to head to four separate schools, some expenses might go up!
If what the formulas say they want is pretty close to your parents’ willingness to pay - you are looking for “need based” aid. Search on schools that meet a large percentage of financial need and apply there. (Most of these schools with generous aid use your Profile EFC, but there are a few that will look at just the FAFSA. Earlham is one.)
If the formulas are way off - you are looking at merit aid and full tuition or full-ride scholarships. Head over to the lists and threads on finding merit scholarships.
You really need to also run the NPCs in each college website, too (some will send you to a Collegeboard calculator specific to that college, others have a different calculator – but they are supposed to be specific to the college’s FA calculations). As with FAFSA, use real numbers, not guesses.
I’ve run a few NPCs from colleges, and it seems we’d get a decent amount of money. According the the Gtown Calculator I would get 40,379 in aid, and that would leave 23,351 to pay off.
It’s a lot, but better than the 69,730 it costs to attend.
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safety schools are: OSU, University of Cincinnati, Miami University, and Xavier.
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Safety schools must be affordable. If after merit, you still have a high cost, your parents may say “no.”
You need to find out how much they’ll pay “per child” per year. If they’re thinking something like $50k per year, that means about $12k per child. That changes what your safeties would be.
Are there any younger children?
G’town leaves you with $24k to pay…I doubt that your parents want to spend $100k per year for you kids to go to college. Do they???
Looks like you mean that Georgetown would be:
$69,730 list price
<h2>-40,379 grants</h2>
$29,351 net price
<h2>- 6,000 student loan and work earnings</h2>
$23,351 parent contribution
If all four of you went to schools with the same net price as Georgetown, would your parents be able to afford $23,351 * 4 = $93,404 per year?
All the safety schools I listed are affordable. And I’d be fine with going there. And honestly, my parents expect us all to get full rides (which is highly unlikely), but they are willing to pay some of we get into Ivy Leauges, b/c they don’t want to see us pass up that kind of opportunity.
OSU would expect a similar contribution. There’s a huge difference between full rides for all 4 of you and $400K over 4 years.
You sound like you have a sort of vague idea of your parents’ finances (you don’t have their tax returns in front of you, are not sure which funds are in what kinds of retirement accounts, what investments or assets they hold outside of their retirement accounts). You really can’t get a good result from the NPC in a lot of cases without that.
I’d suggest you and your sibs have an NPC session with your parents. Maybe everybody gives them a list of schools to run, and they run them with real numbers. Then you have a family discussion about how much they are willing to pay per year, and maybe you go rework your lists again with this info in mind. They may want to print or save the results somehow, as they all start to run together pretty quickly! I actually tracked what I put in for input, the date I ran them, and what came out when I got serious about looking at them.
I hope your parents do not plan to take out loans. Honestly, nor should they tap into their retirement accounts. You quads should discuss – don’t let jonesing for prestige pull your parents into a situation that is unaffordable for them.
You probably COULD all get full rides, but not at the Ivies. I think your parents have to say how much they are willing to spend per kid, then you guys have to go find that.
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All the safety schools I listed are affordable. And I’d be fine with going there. And honestly, my parents expect us all to get full rides (which is highly unlikely), but they are willing to pay some of we get into Ivy Leauges, b/c they don’t want to see us pass up that kind of opportunity.
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You kids are very smart, but I think you need to tread carefully.
Your parents are expecting FREE rides UNLESS y’all get into Ivy schools.
So…how would your safeties be affordable??? You might get half or full tuition scholarships at those. Who would pay the other half tuition and room, board, books, fees, etc?
I’m reminded of a mom who was so thrilled that her DD got a half-tuition scholarship to her private univ (about $20k). Wow! Amazing! They were so happy about that that they never “did the math” about the remaining costs. When August rolled around and the first semester’s remaining costs were due, they realized that they’d be paying about $35k-40k per year for four years, which was more than their instate flagship at full-pay (which they thought was unaffordable.)
From what you’ve written about full-ride expectations, I don’t see your parents paying $25k-35k per year for each child at a safety. Frankly, I don’t see them spending $100k per year towards Ivies.
Home equity will also be figured in.
There are a few schools that we have visited that I know for a fact I would get a full ride, because they told us so. They are mostly HBCUs. The only problem most of these schools don’t have the fields of study I’m looking at: Econ, IR, and Arabic. My parents went to Jackson State in Mississippi, and we could get full rides at several other HBCU schools.
^^^
Yes! Then THOSE are your safeties.
I don’t think you understand that a safety is a school where you know FOR SURE that you have all costs covered, as well as assured acceptance… You would have that at the HBCUs, but not at Miami-O, Xavier, and some others…so they’re NOT safeties.
I understand that paying for 4 kids is gonna be hard but, I am still trying to talk my parents out of the “all or nothing mentality” they don’t understand that we cannot bank on full rides, one is hard enough to get, much less 4. I’m gonna try and run the numbers with them to show them what we are dealing with, even at state schools.
Good idea. It is hard bc 4 kids at once is financial Armageddon! And they did not plan for 4, I’m betting you all surprised them!
But you are right. A couple with $200k income in Ohio with $1m in 401ks should pay something for each of you…
First show them a list of all the places you know you will get full rides from the yolasite list. They may be shocked at how few there realistically are!
Good luck!
@intparent agree that you need to run NPCs too. But, knowing whether he needs merit or need based aid helps determine where to run those NPCs.
Better merit aid comes often comes from “undermatching” stats-wise, while need-based" aid often comes from trying to get into richer, often higher-ranked schools.
I think they may want to look at both types of schools. “Meets need” schools with excellent need based aid might give them aid with four kids in college at once (eek – can’t imagine!). But if the parents really have saved NOTHING toward their EFC, and don’t want to contribute out of current earnings, then likely the big merit options where the quads have high stats are going to be a better route. I see nothing wrong with them running NPCs for both and having a family conversation about what money is available, though.
Boy, is their house going to be quiet in fall 2018!!
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am still trying to talk my parents out of the “all or nothing mentality” they don’t understand that we cannot bank on full rides, one is hard enough to get, much less 4. I’m gonna try and run the numbers with them to show them what we are dealing with, even at state schools.
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I don’t know where your parents are coming from. However, I have had a similar conversation with my sister-in-law who has a high stats AA child. My SIL won’t accept the idea that her child isn’t going to get a free ride for being a high stats AA. Sure, Niece can get a free ride at “some schools”, but not the ones that they want. However, SIL just won’t believe that tippy top schools aren’t going to essentially pay them to enroll her. Niece is a rising junior, so mom’s going to believe this for a couple more years…until the reality sets in.
Are your parents thinking that high stats URMs get huge merit awards even from schools that give little or no merit?