xferring between GLADCHEMS & Financial Aid

dzmlsience
Thu, 12 Apr 2012 01:45:59 +0000

It looks as though the responders on this thread have melded my posting with that of the original poster (wayne22). Our situation is a little different from wayne22’s in that we have an “expectation” of being able to foot the bill for our child’s entire private school education. Would we have been willing to lean into the private school decision if we were at a lower level of certainty? Possibly. How low a threshold of certainty is hard to say but clearly no one wants to create a substantial possibility of needing to yank their kid out of a school that suits them well. But THAT would the driver of the decision - not some sense of duty to disclose financial information to the school. When and if we needed (or thought we had a chance of receiving) financial aid we would submit a request through the regular channels. Not asking for it in year 1 or year 2 or year 3 doesn’t strike me as particularly dishonest. Calling it “lying” is downright ridiculous.

Maybe some of the apparent disagreement on this topic stems from different schools approaching it differently. Do some schools tell you explicitly that its a “four year” box you are checking? Maybe they ask if you are applying as a “four-year-full-pay” student? If that’s the case, I get it.

Our daughter only wanted to go to one place and its the only application she submitted. This particular institution (one of the 200+ year old New England schools) is pretty clear in its communications that FA is a year-by-year event. Not just in the sense that you need to re-apply to continue receiving aid but that you can also apply in any year to begin receiving aid. Of course there are all kinds of caveats (e.g. don’t quit your job and expect to get a full-ride) but I would guess being bled dry paying multiple years of the fully inflated tuition is one of the more common reasons for later aid requests. That’s just a guess.

I notice that many of the older, well-endowed institutions brush close to saying that they are need-blind in admissions but they all stop short of claiming it. NBA in aspiration but not quite in fact. I don’t understand what it means to NOT be need-blind when you don’t require financials from all applicants. Folks on this board seem to suggest that there are unwritten rules about how to apply. Unwritten rules aren’t rules but opinions that, for one reason or another, are not able to become actual rules (“I’m just a bill, yeah I’m only a bill…”). If schools wanted to avoid the sophomore FA request it would be rather easily accomplished - just require everyone to submit financials when applying for admission. Or require a new application for admission when families seek to switch from subsidizers to subsidized. If a school isn’t doing that, it must not be much of a problem. And if they are doing it then there is no problem.

I’m sorry but the analogy of the education decision to the mortgage decision is utterly inapt. The economics and pricing dynamics are completely different. Institutions of higher education are pure price discriminators and receive significant benefit from enrolling the most highly qualified students and athletes. Wealth is inversely related to mortgage price and directly related to education price. And the possibility of a child having to leave private school prematurely is nowhere near as traumatic as a family losing their home. In a normal market, a family should be much more willing to take on the uncertainty of being able to pay 4 years of tuition versus 30 years of mortgage. The cost of failure is simply much less.

Its not a nice thing to think about but, with schools consciously trying to find the fuzzy line where families can just barely make it financially, should anyone be surprised that some would fail? There is risk in striking out on a private school path - even if you’ve already banked all of the cash. Each family’s risk appetite is for them to decide. I don’t find it helpful or fair to label them dishonest.