"Why Public Universities Are Now a Bad Bargain for the Middle Class"

[cosmicfish]

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Well, that wasn’t really my central point, but the answer to your question is probably ‘yes’. For example, at the schools that pledge to meet the full financial aid of all students, surely some students simply don’t obtain all of the aid that they should, often times because of a lack of knowledge about how to position themselves to obtain maximum aid. Let’s face it - many families simply do not know how to optimally ‘shield’ (a euphemism for ‘hide’) their assets for the purposes of maximizing their financial aid.

No. I have a friend who has spent two decades in financial aid at three different school, and this is way off base.</p>

<p>Merit-based aid is awarded to the “best” student who meets certain criteria. Universities WANT to award that money (for a variety of reasons including fund-raising, as who wants to donate scholarship money to school that isn’t even awarding the money they have?) and advise donors to either leave academic limits to the school (essentially meaning there ARE no such limits) or to make the limits sufficiently reachable that it will be exceptionally rare for NO ONE to qualify. The only merit-based aid that is likely to go unclaimed in a given year is that aid which is tied to non-academic requirements - if the Axl Rose Scholarship can ONLY be awarded to children of aging hair-band stars and no such children are enrolled then it lies fallow, otherwise it goes to the best such candidate.</p>

<p>Need-based aid is awarded without regard to academics, so studying (as you suggested) will not help! There is more give here, as these funds are largely drawn directly from endowments or billed to the government, but funding is based on statistical projections based on past history, and growth in these areas is limited - if Harvard suddenly found out that EVERY student needed the maximum level of aid, they would likely remove that promise rather than excessively deplete their endowment. Likewise, if Pell grants suddenly went through the roof it is likely that lawmakers would take steps to reduce the amount of the grants or to limit availability.</p>

<p>Regardless, between the two types of aid there is not NEARLY enough unawarded money to back up your idea that “many students would have found a school that would have provided them with extensive aid - whether financial aid at a rich private school, or merit aid somewhere else - if they had simply studied far harder.” Some, yes, but relatively few.</p>

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Another example would not be regarding financial aid perse, but rather regarding other ways to reduce costs. Many families do not actually know how to establish state residency to reduce tuition at an OOS public school. For example, it may make sense for a given family to ‘move’ to the particular state in which their child will be attending a state university. Heck, it may even make sense for that child to attempt to defer admission for a year (e.g. send him off on a Grand Tour to Europe) so that the family can complete that move to the new state. Granted, this is most easily done if the parents were perhaps contemplating moving to the new state for career purposes anyway. For example, if you’re a manager at Intel operations in Arizona, and your child gets into Berkeley, then that’s when you should consider pursuing an internal transfer opportunity to Intel headquarters in Santa Clara.

This solution only works when (a) it is reasonable and and financially sensible for the parents to do so and (b) all the in-college children are accepted and enrolled in the same state! In the first case I can say categorically that my particular job only really exists in a few places, even if I changed employers - it is highly unlikely that I could transfer or change employers without taking a substantial pay cut likely exceeding any improvement in tuition.</p>