Types of Financial Aid Read

fenwaysouth
Sun, 06 Oct 2013 08:20:03 +0000

fieldhockee asked…is the online calculator the best indication of what you will pay (at HYP for example) or would a financial aid package possibly be more generous if an applicant is being recruited by top ivys or the top public/private schools in his/her particular sport. It’s a shock to see what schools think a family can afford to pay.

For us, the online calculator was very close to a the financial package offered by an HYP and non-HYP (BCCDP is my preferred abbreviation). When we went through this Ivy FA exercise 4 years ago it was fairly accurate, but I think every US school’s online tool has got much better. The most accurate would be the schools actual FA read as the online tool isn’t going to accurately know the grant amount. Our experience was different from classicalmama…both FA reads were very close.

If you are comparing top public/private schools to an Ivy you are comparing apples to oranges and I think you’ll find the top public and private schools will have vastly more flexibility since they can offer both athletic and academic scholarships. I think we were able to use the Ivys as leverage against the other schools, but it wasn’t my sense that we were using the other schools as leverage against the Ivys.

In our case, my son had a 25% offer from an in-state “public” Ivy and a 55% from a private academic D1. One was significantly less and one marginally less than the need based Ivy FA we receive today, but those schools had other challenges (3+2 engineering programs) that we decided against. Bottom line for us…our decision was not a mostly financial one, nor an athletic one. It was all about the best engineering program. Everybody has to make their own decision what is most important between academic, athletic and financial. Did I answer your question?