So I love Dartmouth . . .

Poisonous
Thu, 30 Jul 2009 17:31:15 +0000

Hapa,

I was in nearly the same situation a few months ago. I was admitted to a number of good colleges RD (Duke, UPenn, Princeton…) and WL at some others (Dart, Harvard, Amherst…). My parents made about 200k in income in 2008 because they were very lucky in their businesses, but they never planned to make that much money again. So, I was stuck with a 200k income on all my FA documents, and I ended up getting 0$ from all the prestigious RD schools that accepted me. I had ALOT to think about that month. My parents said they would try to pay for it, but I knew that it would be a huge burden on my family. I declined all of the colleges, after they refused my request for more aid, and chose to go to UF for free.

Well, a couple months later I was admitted to Dartmouth off the WL and it was like living that pain all over again. Dartmouth originally gave me no money, but, fortunately, I was able to get them to give me about 18k a year after I talked to the FA office. Now I’m happy to be going to Dartmouth next year even though it will still cost a small fortune.

I think scholarships can help, but they’re a double-edged sword. I won a few thousand dollars in scholarships, but they were the kind that requires the money go straight to the FA office. The FA office actually reduced my FA to compensate for the money I got from scholarships, so I ended up paying the same amount. I’ll probably be doing Army ROTC on a scholarship to help pay for Dmouth, but if you can rack up a significant amount of scholarship money it could really dent your personal burden.