One of the things you learn when you look at colleges is that the price of attendance is not the real price. The real price is whatever the feds say you can pay. Once we filled out the FAFSA, that was it. The number it spit out was what the real price.
All three schools gave grants and scholarships that knocked off about half the price. All three gave out a combination of subsidized and unsubsidized student loans in the exact same amounts. The only difference is that one school tacked on an additional Stafford Loan.
The obvious thing about the process -- the schools really aren't competing on price. You might be able to negotiate a few things, but the FAFSA number is essentially the same. The differences among the expected family contributions were neglible.
There are some liberal arts colleges that can do more for students -- offer less in loans, more in outright grants. These schools are the ones that sit on bigger endowments; prominent examples in this area are Macalester and Grinnell, which both have endowments north of $1 billion. Because they have the money, they garner more applicants and can be more selective. You see the news reports that admissions rates at the Ivies and places like Stanford are now in the neighborhood of 5-8%; that's how the game works.
2 comments:
I'd personally like to see more colleges really competing on course offerings. Yes, they're all adding majors and minors and concentrations, but apart from Hillsdale, Grove City, and New St. Andrews, a true liberal arts curriculum is hard to find.
Part of the problem might be that it doesn't offer a lot of room for prestigious research centers and the like......
Back in the day, I applied at a state college and checked into financial assistance. My father had made $16k the previous year (launching a new business) and they said he made too much money for me to get aid. I was pointed to the federal student loan program, where over the course of my college education I took out two whopping loans of $1500 apiece (and only needed the second one for a semester in England before I graduated). The loans covered my tuition, my parents provided a mobile home for me to live in near campus, and some book money. That expenditure wouldn't cover one class for one semester today, I'm afraid. (On a side note, my daughter just earned her BA through a combination of PSEO credits at the local community college and taking classes through the College Plus program (working with a coach on the course work on-line then going to a testing center to take the tests when they were scheduled. We laid out just north of $14k for the whole program - including the $300 the college asked for to have the diploma mailed to her.) It's not an easy way to get a degree - the work is intensive and grueling and you have to be pretty self-motivated. Fortunately she had on-line chat groups with other students taking the same course and regular email ocntact with the professors, plus the CP coach.
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