Why or Why Not to Apply ED

calmom
Wed, 31 Aug 2011 00:41:10 +0000

Jennifer, if you are applying for financial aid, you should not apply ED. It sounds like your family’s income fluctuates somewhat, which is exactly the worst situation for predicting financial aid. It is ignorant and short-sighted statement to say, “I’m willing to take out as many loans as needed.” In the first place, as a student you are only going to qualify for a limited amount of funding, which is probably less than the amount required to cover tuition at Barnard for a single semester. If the financial aid package requires you to take more than the amount you are eligible for, then it is your parents – not you – who will be taking those loans.

Secondly, loans have to be paid back. The more loans you take, the more you limit your post graduate opportunities. So anyone who enters college with the idea that they have no limits on what they are willing to borrow is not really thinking clearly.

Finally, if your parents don’t have the money to pay for a single trip to the east coast to interview, then they clearly have significant financial limitations, no matter what they say. My finances are such that my daughter qualified for Pell grants for half the time she was at Barnard, but flying her out for an interview was no big deal. I’d note that my daughter flew out alone, made all travel arrangements on her own an also arranged for places to stay; she also visited DC in the same trip. But round trip air fare was a drop in the bucket compared to all of the other costs related to college.

I am sure that your parents mean well, but if money is too “tight” for you to visit NY now, I hardly see how you can have a cavalier attitude about financial aid at Barnard.

I want to be clear that I am not saying that you should visit Barnard. They won’t hold it against you if you can’t visit. I’m just responding to the fact that your family apparently sees the cost of cross-country travel to be a barrier. That’s fine, that’s a lot of money to many people, but it tells me that you really, truly need to compare financial aid offers when considering where you go to college.

Quite simply, your attitude isn’t fair to your parents. I did borrow money to send my daughter to Barnard, and I am glad I did – but there was no way that I was going to borrow anything without being able to compare awards. You don’t know what their true financial picture is going to be next spring, and you don’t know what your range of options may be. If you are the first kid in your family going off to college, your parents may also have naive and uninformed ideas about what they can expect from financial aid. Do they even know what their FAFSA EFC is? Do they understand that that amount is simply a number that determines eligibility for federal aid, and that in most cases students have to pay much more than their FAFSA EFC to attend college?