@bgbg4us, what sport does the kid play? Does he play a “headcount” sport, football and basketball, or another sport (equivalency)? Headcount sports scholarships for D1 schools are “full ride”, equivalency scholarships are ones where the coach gets a certain number of scholarships for his/her entire roster. It is very rare for 1 kid in an equivalency sport to get a full scholarship. Friends we know with kids in equivalency sports got anywhere between 1/4 and a half, maybe 1 girl who was player of the year in our state got more. The remainder of their costs were made up with one or more of FA, merit aid and family contribution. HYP do not offer any athletic scholarships. Duke does.
“Offers” can also mean different things at different times for different institutions as relayed by different parents. What year is the kid in? Is he a senior?
For D1 programs, whether or not you get an athletic scholarship (or slot for Ivies which do not offer scholarships) has to do with your athletic ability and what the coach needs for that particular recruiting class. I have heard for some D3 programs, a coach who has a URM recruit may take a chance and not use a slot for that person in hopes that he/she will get in without the athletic boost because of the URM status. I do not know that personally, but it makes sense, similar to D3 coaches not using a slot on a kid with stellar academics who they think has a good chance of getting in with only “soft” or no support.
bksquared- yes its a headcount sport; kid’s a senior. We are all rooting for the kid; yet after I’ve read CC for years I’m slightly mystified about the offers. Kid has taken a few official visits to those colleges. Ok – carry on.
Re: #119 I’m not suggesting a conspiracy. Personally, I don’t believe any of the schools flout the rules surrounding athletic scholarships. My belief is based not just on the rules but on personal experience. But it wouldn’t surprise me at all if a FA estimate was recalculated following a discussion about an athletic scholarship. That doesn’t violate any rule and doesn’t mean something nefarious is going on, as estimates get changed all the time for different reasons. The only violation would be if the change had no needs-based rationale but was based on athletic talent alone. I’m not one who believes that happens, so I’d love to hear more specifics from tseliot.
@bgbg4us Some of this recruiting language is sport specific, as BKsquared mentions. “Offer” is going to have a very different meaning in football than, say, track. Ohiodad posted a link to a podcast a few months ago in this forum that explains some of those specifics with respect to football, differences between an offer and a commitable offer, etc. You might find it interesting, and a useful springboard to a discussion with your neighbor if that’s what you’re hoping for. If your concern is that a recruited athlete thinks an offer at an Ivy means an athletic scholarship, I’d be surprised if that’s the case.
Remember that once the recruit takes athletic money from the school, the school can’t give its own FA (without it counting against the team total, so why bother?). If a recruit from Duke has a 1/4 scholarship to play lacrosse, but also would have qualified for need based financial aid from Duke, that FA is gone. Recruit has to pick, athletic aid or need based. Recruit can still get a pell grant or SEOG, but that SEOG better be in line with what other non-athletes are getting from Duke (same EFC).
Now if this recruit had no need at Duke, and then says to Harvard ‘I need you to reconsider my aid and really need to get to 1/4 the COA’ Harvard is going to have to justify awarding FA in that amount. Need based only. Can Harvard do that? Sure, it uses a different method to calculate need than every other school. It cannot ‘find’ need for 1/4 the COA just because the recruit is getting that at a peer institution.
@twoinanddone question for you about Stanford and FA… In the primary sport I follow, Track, Stanford is always said to have a big recruiting advantage based on their generous FA. And I know that running the FA calculator is one of the first things they do with recruits. Quite a few of them do better with the FA than athletic money (money is scarce in track). Are you saying that this FA money will count against their 12.5/18 scholarships, but only if it is mixed with athletic money? Is there some allowance for gear, food, etc., without it counting as athletic money? I had the impression kids on FA were signing NLIs but I don’t know why Stanford would do that, assuming they’re fully funded. Thanks!
@bgbg4us, with this info, what “offfers” likely mean:
For Ivies: the coach is willing to use one of his allocated slots for the kid. At this stage, he likely has passed a preread from admissions that he will likely be admitted. The quid pro quo from the coach is that the kid will have to apply ED/SCEA as applicable. The kid and his parents probably can work or are already working with the coaches and the FA offices to get a “pre-read” of the likely FA packages. Once the kid applies early and assuming he hasn’t done anything incredibly stupid, he will get a “likely letter” prior to the ED/SCEA announcement date.
For the scholarship schools, it probably means that the coach has offered one of his scholarship for the kid’s class year to him, however, this is meaningless until a binding National Letter of Intent is signed. There have been a number of articles on how some less than scrupulous coaches “offer” more scholarships than they have and pull offers just prior to NLI signing dates, leaving some athletes high and dry, scrambling to find another school.
@twoinanddone, my understanding is this (and is applicable to @politeperson 's question on Stanford), using even numbers, college cost is 100, student family need is 75. If the kid gets a quarter athletic, 25, he can still get 50 in FA. The decision is not digital, it is the total aid between FA and athletic, cannot exceed the greater of FA or athletic. The digital situation would occur if the FA need is 20, then if the kid took the quarter athletic scholarship, no FA would be available. Because Stanford FA is generously calculated and is 100% grant, it could have an advantage over another school which may calculate FA need at 75 (with loans in the package) with Stanford calculating need at 90 with it 100% being grant.
My understanding is that once the athlete takes ANY athletic money, ANY additional financial aid counts against the team total. There are exemptions from ‘counting’ for merit based aid (conditions of gpa/test scores/rank), and federal need based aid (Pell), state merit aid (like Hope or Bright Futures), but there is no exception for financial aid from the school. My daughter had a $0 EFC and received merit aid and an athletic grant but no need based aid from the school (and the NPC showed she would have received need based FA).
Until a few years ago there were very strict rules on what non-scholarship athletes could take from the team at practice, so ridiculous as to allow a bagel but not bagels with cream cheese because that cream cheese made it a meal. Teams could eat together on game days but not after practice. Coaches couldn’t give them unlimited food (of course they could have school meal plans, but non scholarship kids had to pay for those themselves) Now it is a lot more reasonable and the non-scholarship athletes can have food at practice, game day, on the bus.
The headcount sports have very specific rules about walk ons and aid they can accept. If 85 Stanford football players are on full athletic scholarship, but the next 35 can be on full financial aid, why wouldn’t the coaches just put the wealthy kids on athletic scholarship and those with financial need on full need based aid? The coach would then get 120+ full scholarship players while Cal or other non-meets-full-need schools would only have the 85 players on scholarship. Why even limit the number of scholarship players on any team if the ‘rich’ schools can just put as many as they want on need based aid?
I think some of this is semantics, and some of this is simply people talking past each other who will never be convinced of how the system works. My simple thought on this has always been that if the Ivys wanted to offer athletic scholarships they could, easily. They choose, rather publicly, not to. The idea that these schools would make that choice and then more or less openly cheat and offer a squash player or middle distance runner athletic aid is ridiculous to me. I am still waiting for someone to articulate a rationale supporting such a system.
For those who are looking for insight and whatever help you can find to help your kid through this, I can only say that the need based aid offered by most of the Ivys and HYP in particular is light years away from the need based aid offered by most other schools. Don’t shut that door until you look closely at what the FA office says. We almost cut off the Ivys from my son’s list early on, assuming that we would get no or little FA. Thankfully, a parent of a former teammate clued me in on the scale of FA being awarded now.
There were many schools that recruited my son where he wouldn’t have received any need based aid at all. He went to Princeton and the aid was so generous that I paid less for his college education than his high school education. Call it what you want, athlete or NARP, the Ivys in general and HYP in particular are often the cheapest option available to a kid. It is easy to see how some people won’t accept this could be true, and that something shady must be going on when a kid who would likely be full pay at State U gets 20k+ in financial aid from Harvard.
Princeton: you got the aid because, per their need-only formula, you had the need. The same won’t apply to all admits.
And of course, a state school with poor FA to begin with, can’t offer much. Nothing odd in that.
Let’s also be aware that, in most cases, when you take an offer from one uber generous college and ask a second uber generous college to match it or increase what you originally got, it’s generally not tens of thousands added.
It’s important to note that the policy of matching FSA offers from peer schools is not some secret back room deal offered only to athletes. It applies to all students and many of the few schools that do it are very open about it.
^ Yes, for sure not a back room deal. The important difference, though, is that the match for athletes takes place prior to application or admission and in some cases does not require an estimate from another school. It’s possible that such an arrangement is available for non athletes but I don’t think so. Importantly, the intent of this is to remove cost as a barrier to athletes reaching an appropriate decision on best academic, athletic, social fit. The matching process simply needs to happen earlier because, in most cases, athletes are making the decision earlier, prior to applying anywhere, and are also being recruited by NLI schools. There’s nothing shady about it in my experience. But the result probably does advantage some athletes over non athletes who aren’t admitted to multiple Ivies.
And yes, it can be a difference of tens of thousands for some students. A year after starting the matching initiative, in 2012, Cornell put the cost at $800, 000 and an average of $10, 000 per student. With HYP generosity these days, I’m guessing the cost is far higher. I know that for an individual family with a lot of home equity the difference is significant to say the least.