I also don’t agree that low income kids will necessarily have less in student loans.
Even if they get full Pell and state grant and commute to school, around here they still have to take out a loan and also work part time.
Their parents can’t contribute anything, and the grants don’t pay for all the costs. So they take out loans.
Now if their stats qualify them for a full ride somewhere, more power to them, the same can be achieved by a kid from a more affluent family, if the merit is not dependent on need.
My son attends a school that meets full need but costs over $70K per year so families with incomes up to 200K get some aid and substantial aid through $150K. For a wedding gift someone gave us a visit with a financial planner that we used when we had our first and were thinking about buying a little condo. They told us that if we wanted to save enough for in state college even starting as a baby we needed to save $750 per month for 18 years. We weren’t always able to do that but tried our best and at 18 years old we did have enough for instate COA. Our kids have had the choice of instate or meets full need private school which at our income is about the same amount. Any other private or OOS we told them they could only do if they got merit. They knew before even visiting or applying what we could afford. I’m glad we did the savings up front rather than getting loans and paying interest rather than earning interest. It took a lot of financial sacrifices–driving old cars, living in our starter level home for many years, few vacations, etc. Friends with similar incomes could never understand why we couldn’t go out to dinner with them or concerts, etc but now they do understand when our kids are college aged. I’m planning on giving our kids a visit to a financial planner for college graduation. It was definitely helpful to us. Even though we didn’t follow all the advice it was good to have an idea of how income should be allocated. Staying in the very low cost house was the biggest difference though.
Best for it to be a fee-only financial planner, so that it does not become a sales pitch for investment products that may not be the best fit for anything other than someone’s commissions.
Columbia has a list price of $70,829, but its net price calculator at https://npc.collegeboard.org/student/app/columbia indicates that financial aid grants there are possible for students who parents earn $200,000 income.
ikr. If my son got into Harvard or Yale, the cost would be reasonable as they cap the price based on family income. Unfortunately he is not that gifted and it will cost him a lot more money at a lesser school.
Did a little research at previous posts and it seems that her son is at UChicago and not an Ivy. BTW, we are under 200k and did not get any need based aid at UChicago for my D. So different results.
@goingnutsmom Yes UChicago but I think it’s really only the past very few years with the no barriers campaign that the aid situation has improved for higher income levels. They are up to $73K COA now too which is a pretty substantial increase over the same few years time (they have increased our aid both years he has been there though with the increase).
@acdchai, thanks for letting us know! My D just applied last year so No Barriers was definitely in place too. I think each familiy’s fin aid package will be different because no two circumstances are the same. We have really saved up for the kids college funds and that may certainly have to do something with the 0 aid result. Don’t know. But not going to second guess things.
@jadedhaven I do and don’t relate. When I first started running EFC and NPC’s and found out our EFC was 39k I thought that was insanely high and wrongly assumed that we wouldn’t really have to pay that. We are now at the end of D’s admission process, and unless we want to send her to our flagship for 25k a year, guess what? We really do have to pay 39k (plus a little because we’ll have plane fair and health insurance since she’ll be too far away for our insurance to cover her). And that’s with a $23,000 merit scholarship.
But as soon as we got her first acceptance and merit award back in January, I started doing some calculations and between what we have saved and what we can cash flow, DH and I have determined we can do it. He is keeping his 401k savings at 15%. I am lowering mine from 15% to 6% while D and S22 are in college. If we run into trouble, DH can lower his to 6%, too. We only have 1 $385 car payment own 2 other cars outright, 1 of which we can sell if we need to. When we bought our house 17 years ago, we bought less house than we could afford. I’ll never forget our loan officer pushing us to buy a more expensive house. We said “thanks but no thanks.” As a result, our mortgage is lower than a lot of our peers’ mortgages and will be paid off in 3 years, which doesn’t help us too much w/ D, but will help w/ her younger brother. We do take a LOT of vacations and spend on entertainment. We are going to cut our vacation and entertainment budget back. I have always had the luxury of not having to price shop at the grocery store or when I want something new for the house, etc. Since January, I have become much more price conscious, and I’m actually enjoying it-it’s a new challenge. We have stopped all our charitable giving (we had been giving about 4k a year).
To make sure our monthly cash flow plan will work, we started it in January. By the time we have to pay the first semester’s bill in July, we will have 6 months’ saved and we will have the confidence that we can do it.
We set a couple of ground-rules. D will not take any loans except the Direct unsubsidized loans. We will not take any PLUS loans or home equity loans. We will not use our retirement savings. Whatever we spend on D, we will have available (adjusted for inflation) to spend on S who is 5 years younger.
When I see some upper middle class parents complaining about how much college will cost or forcing their hard-working, bright kids to go to a commuter school, I see parents who are already living at the highest lifestyle their income will support and not wanting to cut back on anything.
@socalmom007 I feel like everyone is dumping on you and I hate to add to that, but one thing I noticed is you said you bought your house for $500,000 and currently owe $400,000. Someone with college age kids who bought their house when the kids were born or very young should have a lot more equity by the time their kids are college age than you seem to have. So that makes me wonder if you either tapped your home equity thereby increasing your mortgage, or if you moved up to a more expensive house?
I want to thank you for your honesty and willingness to engage in this discussion. You, too, @eandesmom. It’s interesting for me, whose gross household income is close to socal’s net, to see things from your point of view.
I’m not sure why we’re dredging this up again since it was contentious enough the first time, but since you tagged me I’ll answer. We’ve been in this house 12 years. Our first house would have been very small to raise 4 kids in. Should we have stayed in that tiny house and saved more for college? Maybe, I guess? But then we wouldn’t have the ample equity we have in this house to draw from now.
@eandesmom “Private loans are not given to the students, only the parents so that wouldn’t be counted.”
Private loans are given to students. I am a lawyer and I have had many student clients over the years who personally owe $80,000-$100,000+ in private loans.