I’ve run NPC comparisons for various income levels ($30K/$60K/$90K/>$120K).
My results typically show variations of a few thousand dollars (not tens of thousands) among the so-called “full need” schools. Furthermore, for incomes below ~$120K or so, even the worst of the “full need” offers generally are more-or-less competitive with the net prices of in-state flagships. Example:
Assumptions
$90K family income (w/equal shares earned by married parents)
No home equity.
No siblings.
Wisconsin resident.
Net Cost Estimate … College
$44,328 UC Berkeley (OOS)
$25,366 University of Minnesota TC
$20,181 Macalester College
$18,091 Carleton College
$15,092 University of Chicago
$14,800 Williams
$14,647 UPenn
$14,160 Wisconsin-Madison (in-state)
$13,892 Dartmouth
$12,497 Vanderbilt
$12,100 Stanford
YMMV.
I’ve made simplifying assumptions in these estimates. It may be the case that there is greater variation among the “full need” schools for certain income levels or in treating certain special circumstances (e.g. divorced parents, family farm/business) not to mention home equity, siblings in college, years to retirement, etc. Certainly, it’s the college that decides what the “need” is.
In no universe do middle class families have to pay full freight at the Ivies, not if middle class tracks with the actual middle of the income distribution in every state, even with good amount of college savings.
One of our major sources of funding our son’s Ivy education is limiting our spending. We have no car payment and generally don’t buy much in the way of consumer goods. We do like to eat out but the vast majority of meals are cooked at home. One sometimes overlooked source of savings is energy efficiency.
I’d have to agree with collegejoe, it would be hard to step in soon enough to let our kids know not to listen to college reps telling them their schools are affordable when they don’t know squat about our financial situation (plus I’ve never heard any of them say oh btw, odds are low you’ll be accepted anyway). I remember going to HS orientations, they start telling your 8th grader about college rep visits / lunches etc. Need to start crunching the numbers and telling our 8th graders what they can afford? A lot changes in those 4 years.
“Middle class” means different things to different people. For instance, $120k a year means something very different in Wisconsin than in NYC…
People outside the high cost of living areas only see the income levels of those in NYC. But there is a reason they are higher…to pay the higher rents, utilities, commuting costs. In my area, $120k a year would not even pay the rent after taxes.
I think some colleges take that into consideration…
It’s true what the OP says. Our income was in the range of getting some generous aid but our assets/equity way over the top. I can tell you all the recruiters who pushed us to apply. Dumb me didn’t run the NPCs til halfway thru the process and then got some rude awakenings. I do have to hand it to the Ivies and a few Ivy likes, because their NPCs were very accurate. Zero aid for us. Spending a quarter of our net worth is absolutely crazy this close to retirement. So glad son made that decision on his own without prodding from us. Sure we can afford to buy a Porsche or a Mercedes but why throw all that money away when we have two perfectly awesome Hondas. This is the dilemma for the 1%… And no not the 0.1%. They can fund college directly out of their pay checks.
TerryB, a lot CAN change in four years, but does it usually? And even if it does, so what? It’s absolutely not too early to start having discussions about the financial parameters of the college search.
ITA with @lookingforward. If you ran the NPC and saw a figure around $60,000 or more, barring some very large error, why would anyone think there’s “financial aid” available to reduce the COA to a number you would like to pay?
It’s not limited to Ivies. All schools have this line in their marketing. I ran NPC for dozens of schools and if the EFC said $60,000, I didn’t think “oh but the admission rep said we could afford it.” and disregard the number. That person didn’t enter my numbers, so obviously they were speaking generally to the entire audience, not specifically to me. Yes, in theory, we could afford $60,000, if we stopped contributing to our retirement and took substantial amounts out of savings. We weren’t willing to do that so DH and I gave D a hard number we were willing to pay.
For giggles, I ran Harvard’s NPC about a
a year ago. It was very generous. For someone to hit $60,000+, there’s either a substantial income or substantial assets involved or both. It’s kind of difficult to hear people who earned far above the median, said they are in the top 10- 15% say they are “middle-class” explaining it’s the cost of living in their metro area that make them “middle class”. Newsflash: there are many more people who do NOT earn that type of income in the exact same metro area.
^oh, I know! I live in the NYC metro area, and when people write about barely getting by on 250K, I want to scream. Really? Our income is less than half that, and we feel we’re pretty well off. can’t (won’t) complain.
My neighbor fell for this line as told by a private college counselor. They forgot that the guy likely markets himself based on the schools that his clients have been accepted to not the schools that they were ultimately able to attend. He told them not to worry about the money and foolishly they listened.
@tk21769, preferential packaging definitely does exist at privates who are outside the very tippy-top, though (to some degree even among the tippy-top). Especially among those schools who don’t claim to meet full-need (which would be something like 98% of schools). At those schools, it’s questionable how reliable the NPC is.
@SlackerMomMD, there’s a difference between a parent understanding the cost ramifications and getting a kid to listen.
Especially in families where parents kept kids in the dark about family finances. To most teenagers, 60K/250K are just numbers. Do they understand what that means?
I apologize for my last post. I was on my way out the door and replied in a flip manner.
Here’s more along the lines of what I wanted to say:
Admissions counselors are there for one thing only: to sell their school. Sure, they want qualified applicants, but there are more of them than the schools can handle. So they’re there to sell their school to more than enough people to fill their available seats… lots of competition is good for their numbers.
They’re not advocates for the students, they’re advocates for the school.
So just as I would never blindly accept the word of the salesman that I could afford that brand new Jaguar, I would never accept the word of an admissions counselor that I could afford his school— particularly one that hasn’t seen my FAFSA or even my tax return.
Sure, if it were a matter of paying for a heart transplant, most of us could beg, borrow or steal that $60K. But the reality is that doing so would cause the entire family severe hardship. To the admissions counselor, that means it’s still doable. But to the parents trying to also put some food on the table, pay for rent and utilities, and pay off the Visa bill, it’s far from “affordable.”
@bjkmom, OK, and what do you do with a 17 year-old who buys in to the marketing and thinks that the parents are being cheap and should do everything possible when it comes to their education? After all, most full-pay families can afford 60K/year with drastic enough sacrifices. What if the parents have always stressed that getting the best education is the most important thing?
I am siding with OP philosophically. College recruiters can indeed be like car salesman, and that’s not OK. The mission of any good college should be education, period (and for some, research as well). This trend of convinving every starry-eyed teenager to apply, and thereby improve the school’s selectivity rank, is unsavory.
Tens and tens of thousands of kids apply to ivies every year. How many of them know about NPCs? How many of them read college confidential? How many of them have parents savvy enough, or experienced enough, to guide them through the process? How many have parents involved AT ALL? Shouldn’t the recruiters be honest educators and tell every student (1) the low acceptance rate, the cost of applying, and the 25/75 stats to be accepted, and (2) the cost of the education, the availability of NPCs, how to access that NPC, and the information required from parents to ensure the NPC calculator is accurate for that family. Certainly, this information is not in the glossy brochures that typically insist the education will be made affordable for everyone, and encouraging everyone to apply!
I suppose the thing that irritates me most of all is how absolutely necessary parents are to the application process now. Nobody would trust their teenager alone with a car salesman when purchasing a car. Now we have to distrust the college recruiters too? They have access - alone and without parents - to impressionable teenagers, MANY of whom do not have access to more levelheaded/educated adults in their lives. Unacceptable that they are permitted to spout the nonsense that their colleges can be affordable for everyone, when WE all know that’s just not true.
@PurpleTitan, understood. The responsibility of setting limits and conveying these limits fall on the parent, not the child. That’s why it’s important for parents not to send mixed signals. Place the numbers in context so the kids do understand. If a parent is saying “there is no way we can pay $60,000+ for college” then they can’t turn around and say “I don’t want to limit or destroy my child’s dream” and encourage or allow their child apply thinking it’s a viable option.
How is the child to learn the meaning of $60,000 a year if parents say things like “we’ll make it work somehow” instead of something along the lines of “that’s more than my entire salary before taxes” ? When I said the latter to D, she got it pretty quickly. (and she’s not even Ivy -bound). I said “no” to a lot of schools on her list I really liked; wished I could easily afford; and, that would have been great for D.
We teach our children about the truth behind advertising, right? Apply the same concept to college admissions material and reps. They are selling their schools and may present things that, while technically true, can be misleading.
We pretty much ignored the pretty college mailings and brochures, except if we has never heard of the school. Then we would look at the mailing but always with the understanding it’s a marketing device. I knew about excessive mailings by various schools and I knew there would be a range of schools, so getting the random brochure from an Ivy did not mean suddenly my child had the stats for an Ivy school.
@PurpleTitan , you tell her the exact same thing you told her when she was 7 and wanted a pony, or was 12 and wanted to live like the Kardashians: “Honey, I know this is really important to you. But we simply can’t afford it. The person that told you we could had no idea how much money I make, or how much your braces cost, or the repairs to the car last winter, or the medical bills for mom’s surgery. His job was to sell his school, and apparently he’s good at his job.”
And then you add: “Know that your mom/dad and I are incredibly proud of all you’ve accomplished, and filled with a sense of awe and amazement at all that you will accomplish in the future. And we know, right down to our toes, that you will do great things and will receive a wonderful education at any school you attend. So we’re going to do our best to find one that fills you with joy, and that we can afford. But that reality is that that school is NOT one that costs $60K per year.”
And then you give her a hug and the conversation ends.
In NYC, the median is under 60k, and generally gets Either section 8 housing, subsidized or low income assisted housing which takes away the need for 2 to 5k in rent. There are a huge number of zero income folks here, and that is skewing where the median hits. But I’m not talking about those folks. They are “low income” for fafsa purposes anyway.
For an average person making $120k, their apartment options are limited here bc they won’t get rental assistance, yet rents are very high.
The point was that $120k does not go nearly as far in NY as in Wisconsin, and this is a problem when considering FA.
@Rdtsmith - at the Ivies I’m familiar with, retirement funds and home equity are not factored into financial aid calculations, so if you are paying full freight based on assets, it’s because you have the significant non-retirement funds available.
I played with the Harvard NPC and if you have $1 million of liquid assets (not including retirement funds or home equity, which are protected), and earn $150K/year, Havard will still give aid - the parental contribution works out to $55K/year. With the same income but no assets, Harvard expect parents to contribute $15/K a year. Effectively this means Harvard is asking parents with $1 million in the bank to put 16% of that towards funding their child’s education. By most people’s definition, this would count as affordable. Granted, Yale is not Harvard, but their financial aid is comparable.
If you don’t have a 401k or IRA, and are planning to use unprotected funds for retirement, I would imagine many schools would be willing to work with you.
I just tried the Harvard calculator for our situation. The Harvard calculator is much easier to work with than the Yale calculator. We would actually get about 20k in scholarship per year for Harvard. We would get zero from the Yale calculator.
I should have listened to the first person and tried out the Harvard calculator.
Harvard was not on my daughter’s list of schools, Yale, Cornell, and Columbia were the only Ivy league schools she was looking at. With those calculators we were not getting anything.
Not sure of the rest of the schools, but it seems like Harvard is the better deal of at least the schools we looked at.