@compmom - Yes, S still wants to take a gap year, in spite of something very interesting that contained in the mail we received from the Princeton’s FA office yesterday.
While my S has been expressing his wish to take a gap year since his junior year in high school, I had an ulterior, financial motive in fully supporting that idea. Our 2015 financial data displayed a sudden and significant increase in income due to company stock exercise. When filing the CSS/Profile and PFAA (Princeton’s internal FA application), I made a note of the atypical nature of our 2015 financial situation. Naturally and as expected, most of the colleges that accepted my S hardly gave any grant money. Amherst only gave $4,000, for example. Pomona was more generous, then Williams and Princeton offering the most generous amount. Still, a bit too high to comfortably send my son to either place, so the idea of taking a gap year sounded great. My son wanted it, and since our income would go back to normal in 2016, he’d get a much lower EFC when he enroll the following year.
Then the letter came from the Princeton’s FA office. It said, to my total surprise, that if we bring our 2016 income tax filing to the Preview visit day, they’d adjust the EFC based on that year’s data and ignore the calculation based on the 2015 data. I was floored when I read this! I never realized that any college would go to that extent of making it affordable and workable for the accepted student families. I was impressed!
In spite of this sudden turn of events, however, I’m still going to honor my son’s wish to take a gap year to do all the things that he’s been so wanting to do but never had the time to do. He just has too many interests. He wants to learn to cook, learn his parents’ native language, wants to produce his YouTube music channel, learn audio and video editing, and the list goes on and on.
So, yes, he’s going to take a gap year. 