Reply to S/o: The shrinking middle class at top schools

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]This study is dividing incomes into quartiles.  The upper quartile starts at 98K annual income (2018-2019 school year, not certain if that's the last year the study covers).  So this has nothing to do with the donut hole gripes that circulate here.
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Except at the very top schools (and the study looked at 200 schools), the financial gap known as the doughnut hole goes down well into financial aid territory. Generally speaking, under FAFSA, a family making $100k is expected to pay $47k toward the cost of attendance. That can represent a big discount off the sticker price and still be too expensive for a family to bear, especially for high-performing students who might get a merit-based full ride from a less selective college. Practically the entire honors dorm at GMU, for example, is in this situation. They could be admitted to the more selective schools included in this study, but even with FA, they can’t rationalize the more expensive choice. And this affects admissions, too, because if you feel you can’t turn down a potential full ride at a school like GMU, you can’t afford to ED anywhere. That’s why the true middle class is disappearing from the 200 selective schools looked at in this study. [/quote]

If [b]we’re talking families near $100K income I[/b] completely agree.  They don’t get much aid and have a hard time scraping together any more. However, the most vocal complaints around here often turn out to have incomes 2-3 times that. Yes, tuition at a private is still painfully high, but those families are not disappearing, they’re over represented, and they’re not the focus of this study.[/quote]

Our family has the 100k income range in the DMV and our EFC was 32k yr.  Sounds like it wouldn't be do-able, but honestly we're almost done paying for the first and it was okay.  Kid has 17k in loans total but is graduating with a 68k job lined up in a social science field so it seems an affordable loan burden.  Still have savings in 529 for the 2nd and should be fine.  I've seen a couple other posters close  to our range on DCUM and they seem to express the same thing.  It's interesting when I see those with 175-300 complaining--I think it's because their income pushed them into a different social sphere with a different set of expectations and references.    [/quote]

We're in the 175 range. Our EFC will be about 40k which is doable. The problem will the the 2 years when our kids overlap. Ironically, we're priced out of UVA/VT/W&M, but the incredibly expensive privates that meet all need and use CSS will be affordable [/quote]

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