<p>I could pay $50,000 tuition on a $165,000 salary but I’d need to know I was going to get that salary for the next five years to make the commitment. My daughter’s EFC is over $40,000 so she’s going to an instate school with about $16,000 COA. If this had been a year ago I would have tried to commit to a higher tuition.</p>
<p>“mumurthigal…not sure how your family pays less than $20K a year in taxes on $165K/ income…”</p>
<p>Perhaps an ivy league educated accountant who did an internship on Wall Street? tee hee</p>
<p>The problem is that the more people make, the more the spend…if you want your kids to go to college,START SAVING EARLY!!</p>
<p>Well, my EFC is 35.5k, and my parents say I would neeed to get all of that plus 5k or so to go to a private school, so I guess we will se what happens.</p>
<p>If the question is, can they afford it out of income, the answer is that most could not. That would be about half their after tax income.</p>
<p>In expensive parts of the Country, I think most people at that level would not find it doable with that size family unless there is a lot of overlap.</p>
<p>If any of your sibs will be in college at the same time, that would help.</p>
<p>Ironically, the family who just blows through extra money each year is going to be hit harder than those who bought things like a house in a good school district/neighborhood or other such commitments that are not easy to discard. You can stop buying clothes, you can stop the vacations and entertainment. Not so easy to yank the other kids from private school they love, or to sell your house in this market.</p>
<p>i said similar. actual income is like 180k.</p>
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<p>OK…now I’m very confused. Are you saying that you need $40,500 in aid to go to a private university? Perhaps this has been covered already…you would need to get merit aid if your EFC is $35K. Need based financial aid does NOT cover the EFC. The EFC is your family’s expected contribution. </p>
<p>If a college’s cost of attendance is $50,000, and your EFC is $35,000, the balance …or your “need” would be $15,000. If that REALLY is your EFC, you would not get need based aid of any kind in excess of $15,000. </p>
<p>The only exceptions would be the very highly endowed and competitive schools like Harvard and Stanford that provide need based aid to students with family incomes up to about $150,000 (actually, I think Harvard is $180K) whereby your family would pay 10% of their income for your college costs. So…if your income was $165K AND you were lucky enough to get accepted to Harvard, your costs would be in the $16,500 range or so. This is just an example…I’m not a financial aid officer. But of course, the first HURDLE (and it IS a hurdle) is being one of the 10% of applicants to be accepted to these well endowed and generous schools. They reject about 90% of students who apply, many with fabulous high school credentials.</p>
<p>You should also be looking for schools that award substantial MERIT aid to students with your stats (SAT/ACT scores, grades, course, recommendations, essays).</p>
<p>Yeah, sorry, I was in a rush so my last post did not make much sense. What I mean was that I needed to get the COA/EFC difference (15k or so) plus another 5k worth of outside scholarships.</p>
<p>My main schools I am applying to are Boston College, Villanova (accepted EA), Wake Forest, and Vandy. BC and Vandy claim to meet full need but that of course doesn’t mean that it is actually going to be the full 15k. Wake Forest trys to meet full aid too, I think. Villanova gives awful aid from what I’ve heard so I doubt I will be going there. I guess we’ll see what happens.</p>
<p>very simply, yes. Yes that should be very doable.</p>