Negotiating scholarships / financial aid - how to?

oorhai
Fri, 31 Mar 2017 17:56:21 +0000

My son has been admitted to several Liberal Arts Colleges. Two mid-western colleges have given him merit aid. A third mid-western college, which does not give merit aid and is ranked more highly (on someone’s scale), has given him roughly the same amount as the other two mid-western schools - but as financial aid.

My son is interested in a LAC in the East which also does not give merit aid but does give financial aid. The Eastern LAC gave him zero financial aid. The mid-western LAC which gave him financial aid and the eastern LAC which did not, are both in the top 10 LAC schools.

We gave the following reasoning in our CSS Profile application. About a quarter of our savings are outside of protected retirement assets because when we accumulated them we did not have access to 401(k) plans. We are academics and were on postdocs for umpteen years before we were able to get somewhat permanent positions. Had we had access to 401(k) plans during that period, our savings would have been protected retirement funds. As it currently stands, these unprotected savings are subject to be used at 5% annually for college tuition and we would ike to avoid that.

I think the mid-western LAC must have taken our comments into consideration because that’s what their aid numbers show.

Do you think it is reasonable for us to call the eastern LAC and point this out?