Would such frugal “Millionaire Next Door” families outnumber the “middle class” high income families with spendy lifestyles (perhaps with annual vacations to exotic destinations and luxury cars) who complain about not being able to afford their EFC at even the most generous-with-FA colleges?
https://college.harvard.edu/financial-aid/net-price-calculator indicates that, at Harvard for a family of 3 with 1 in college, MA resident US citizens, the threshold for no FA is $255,000 income with no assets, or $100,000 income with $1,400,000 cash and investment assets.
“Will a kid that started an organization to make real change in his/her high school add more value than a kid that just studied all the time? Yup.”
Gross oversimplification and stereotyping - most Asian kids do not study all the time, and they start a lot of organizations. Colleges don’t reject Asians because they won’t add value.
Academically top performing Asian kids are not so stupid as to not realize importance of EC in admissions to top colleges, nor they are so lazy not to work on the EC when they know they need.
That said, some of them are more interested in colleges that don’t put weights on EC, for various reasons, and therefore do heavily focus on academics and neglect EC. For many kids, just focusing on SAT prep is indeed the best college strategy. And that reinforces the above stereotypes.
Still it doesn’t mean that they won’t socially contribute once they are in colleges.
Didn’t think the article was whiny but was pretty honest. I think she felt little guilty for trying to hide in her application that she was Asian. Anyway, I can honestly say some of the smartest kids (and they did not just study) from my kid’s high school went to Rice, University of Texas on scholarship, John Hopkins on scholarship, Berkeley etc.
@ucbalumnus , Harvard is exceptionally generous with FA. Most other private colleges are not nearly as generous. So if you take a school like Vanderbilt or Cornell, the asset threshold might be closer to $600-800K - at that level alone they are paying more than their state flagship. . That’s the price of a regular house, non McMansion in many cities in the Northeast and California. Add a bit more in investments and you are easily well over $1 million and that family is full pay. So the ‘millionaire’ next door could just be your average middle class Joe or Jane.
Cornell and Vanderbilt do not count primary residence towards assets (excluding special circumstances). They expect parents to contribute ~5% of cash savings and non-retirement stocks beyond a ~$100k threshold.
Vanderbilt was the most generous school for my son. We were a “typical” family of 5 making over 70K and under 80K the year my eldest applied. My son won one of the full tuition scholarships, and then Vandy stacked another 13K in need-based aid on top of that. Our billed amount for the year would have been $900 that year!
The next most generous was Caltech ($1400 billed amount) followed by Princeton (about 5-6K billed), and then MIT and Penn were about equal at around 9K billed. Our EFC that year was $10,500 because we had about 18K in 529 money. EFC went down each year after that to a low of about $4500 when two kids were in college.