All the joys I have to look forward to enduring. This doesn’t include the issues I will have with the VA as I will transfer my benefits. Still not sure how that will be distributed yet.
For the first generation kids, I remember your pain. Don’t assume the parents understand all the terms associated with the loans either. We just hide it better.
The worst part is having to pick a college without knowing the four-year cost. Each year, you have to fill out all the forms and you only get the price for one year. There is always this fear of having to transfer to another school if the price spikes.
For myself, the stress point is waiting for the financial aid to show up on my son’s student account.
Until that moment, I can imagine that the financial aid will not arrive, and he will not be able to return to school.
After that moment, I am flooded with gratitude, and the joy of knowing that his dream continues for another year.
Carefully check out the cost of the intended major in the 3rd and 4th years. My daughter’s major costs $3K to $4K more a year in the 3rd and 4th years than the standard tuition cost per year that is listed on admission materials. There are some colleges where certain majors cost $5K or $6K more per year than the standard liberal arts major.
Also keep in mind that governmental and institutional need-based aid may drop substantially once you only have one kid in college, instead of two. That is certainly fair, but some people are surprised by how much the aid may drop.
Ah, but you also can’t expect that the cost for the first kid will go down when the second kid starts college, despite claims to “meet full need” and a significantly lower FAFSA EFC. Funny how the colleges cook the CSS numbers.
MazeArt. If your child needs work study, then they need to make sure they start applying first thing when they get on campus. That day. If the applications are online, do it before arriving on campus. I suggest your (upbeat, happy, nice, pleasant) child also go see the hiring managers in person, even when applying online. Make a “friend”, let them put a face to the application and it may give them a bump in the hiring process.
What I struggle with is not know if I’ll be able to afford to send my twins where they get in. I have some savings. I’ve run EFCs, studied the percentages of need that individual schools meet, will encourage my kids to apply where there is merit aid and where they are in the upper quartile of grades and scores, and read everything I can trying to understand.
I have degrees in economics & finance and currently work in accounting. And I STILL have no clue what college is going to cost.
Filling up the applications for FAFSA or CSS profile perhaps is the easiest part when compare to the later issues. Getting merit scholarships but then got offset by decrease in grant money is disappointing. It happened to my D’s freshmen FA package three times over the summer. I thought it was because there was no loan on her FA so they cut the grant. This year, the tuition rate is higher (she needs to pay upperclassmen tuition in sophomore year due to the number of credits accumulated) and two of the external scholarships are non-renewable. So there is now some loan amount on the FA package. One renewable external scholarship from the state came in today and I found again they offset the grant amount instead of loan. I guess this is due to the state fund. Hopefully this would not happen when the institutional scholarship renewable arrive. Even we have a small decrease in EFC this year and my D is attending a need met school, we are going to see ~$5000 more out of pocket this year (but can be covered by work study and loan). With the change in FAFSA next year and higher household income this year, there will be another few thousand dollars more in cost next year. 
@pheebers If your financial situation is typical (no farm, business, and maybe divorce), then the net price calculators should give you a good estimate of the cost for each college. It was in my case for the dozen schools my kiddo applied to last year.
My pain points?
I just found out about a family member needing money - more than half my son’s annual tuition and next week yet. It is frustrating that it does not matter to colleges if there are family members with medical or other significant financial needs…
Where do I begin?
First, our family lives in a very high cost of living city and neither FAFSA, the College Board’s Institutional Method, or our D’s college’s financial aid office takes that into account when computing EFCs or adjusting need-based award offers. Our family has a lot less money left over each month than a wealth family with the same EFC living in a low cost area, but we’re treated the same.
Second, I’m really fed-up with colleges aggressively trying to promote Parent PLUS loans as a component of “aid” (sic) packages. Thankfully, I have great credit and by co-signing for our D, we got a much better deal with a far lower interest rate and no origination fee by going with a private lender. I feel really sorry for families that are backed into a corner and have no alternative but these costly Parent PLUS loans that seem like Federal government sanctioned loansharking.
Third, while we’re thankful for the need-based aid we did receive, I’m not sure the aggravation and gross invasion of privacy filling out the CSS PROFILE and providing detailed copies of tax returns to iDocs and Financial Aid offices was worth the effort. With all the hacking and identify theft going on, I am not happy about having to e-mail or upload our most sensitive personal financial information to sites with unknown security.
Fourth, I wish I had started putting away more money earlier into a 529 plan, although I think it’s wrong that 529 plans are counted as parent assets for purposes of computing EFC.
Fifth, several Net Price Calculators significantly overstated how much aid we could expect to receive when compared to the actual offer letters our D received when she was offered admission to those colleges.
^^^ It is better than having the 529 count as the kid’s asset for FAFSA. They are doing you a favor.
@CollegeDadofTwo and @ARTCC have mostly hit upon my pain points.
2b. Schools whose NPC asks only for financial info, and nothing about the student’s test scores or GPA, yet the result it spits out is termed “projected need- and merit-based aid”.
2c. The lack of transparency on so many (most?) schools’ web sites about their policies on stacking aid.
2d. We have a certain net price that is the ceiling of what we can pay. For some particularly attractive schools whose projected net price is above that ceiling, we scour the schools’ websites to see if they even offer larger scholarships for which D might compete. It amazes me how often one can’t tell from their websites. I wouldn’t say that this happens the majority of the time, but why should it happen at all?
Now I’m upset at the OP for starting this thread! S/he has me all worked up!
Many things aren’t cheaper or more expensive whether you live in a high cost city like San Francisco or a lower cost one like Memphis. If you buy a power tool off Amazon, it will cost the same in either place, and if you pay for it with your credit card issued out of South Dakota, your interest rate will be the same too. If you work for the government, you’ll get a (very large) locality pay difference on your NYC paycheck that those who work in small town North Carolina won’t see. Alaska residence pay no income tax and in fact get a Permanent Fund distribution. There is no way to even out the cost of living in each area on the FAFSA, then increase or decrease it for plumbers working in NYC and charging $85/hr while plumbers in Kansas city only charge $50/hr for the same work. Live where you want to live.
There is a lot more unfairness by the Fed Govt than the schools. The feds limit the tax credits for singles to $80k per year (no matter what the cost of living in your area is) but married people get $160k - and it doesn’t matter if you have 1 child in school or 10. You get the credit or you don’t.
I think the most frustrating thing is whatever you are working on at the time - FAFSA, applications, sending the payments, taxes.
Above, @dadof1 mentions that the net price calculators were pretty reliable in his experience, and immediately after @CollegeDadofTwo says they’re out of date and unreliable. I believe both and am grateful to both posters, but that illustrates my frustration – I really have no idea what to expect in my situation! (Which is not particularly complex as far as schools are concerned).
I always kind of thought the high COA folks got the advantage on FAFSA. When they own a home, that’s a valuable asset that’s ignored. Then, if they sell someday after the kids are gone and head to a low COA area, they have a heckuva windfall. Folks in low COA areas don’t get that. Low COA areas often have lower incomes, too.
@twoinanddone is correct. There,s just no way to balance out COA.
I’m guessing that the private colleges in the highest cost locations are the ones who would most likely take into account the difference in cost of living.
A household making $100K in NYC or San Francisco is unlikely to have much money left after housing and taxes to provide much disposable income for their kid’s college education. Even houses in need of major work in formerly depressed parts of Brooklyn are selling for $800K or more.
I found a wide variety of difference in the NPCs - some clearly did not ask for enough information to give you an accurate estimate. I counted it as a “con” on the pros and cons list if colleges made it hard to find the NPC or provided an NPC that didn’t ask for enough information to be accurate (as well as colleges that made you go through a lot of effort to figure out what the full cost of attendance is).
@ordinarylives I know the NPCs I ran took home value into account – and the more equity you have, the higher your expected contribution is. It appears that they expect you to mortgage yourself to the hilt.