Reply to What would happen if ED was outlawed?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]My kids top choices don’t do ED so I have no personal interest here but it feels like people oversimplify and sometimes miss the broader point.

[b]We are a donut hole family and I feel like my issues is schools that do offer merit aid and have an ED round feel stacked for the wealthy.
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For example, I recognize I don’t want to pay full price for Boston College and the price during ED and the price outside ED are likely to be identical because they simply don’t offer merit except to a very very small handful of kids.

For a schools that do offer merit, it is asking kids to agree to an unknown price in advance. If ED across the board offered no merit and everyone who was selected ED automatically paid full price, or if schools would do ED merit pre-reads, it would feel more reasonable.

What happens instead is that it favors kids that can pay full price even if the actual price they are charged is in the range of a donut hole family. Those donut hole families don’t apply because they can’t pay full price and don’t know what the actual price will be.

This argument that “if you can’t afford it in ED you can afford it outside ED” makes sense for a small subset of schools that give no merit[b], but falls apart for schools that do give merit because you have no idea if you can afford it in ED because the price is unknown.[/b][/quote]

Merit aid is not a stand-in for financial aid. If you NEED financial aid, then the answer is don't ED to a school that offers merit to only a handful of students and is stingy with financial aid.  Or, if we're living in a fantasy land where we can outlaw whatever we want, then make it illegal for schools to offer ED if they offer merit aid but not FA.[/quote]

The majority of ED applications are to elite schools. Most don't offer merit, only need-based aid. Which makes this point moot. Either you can afford the NPC estimate or you can't, regardless of whether the application is ED or RD. The number doesn't change. I understand it is very frustrating to realize a $90k/yr school is unaffordable, but no one is entitled to attend one. We are donut hole, applied to a school that showed we'd get $25+ in aid. The remaining $65K is not easy, but we decided the education was worth the sacrifices. It was a tough choice between that and a state flagship honors college, due to cost. Easy to see the decision going the other way. But it did not affect the decision to ED, because the financial package was the same regardless. We ran all the numbers and decided our financial pain level accordingly.

Chasing merit meant going down 1-2 tiers; we decided not to. But even though the specific merit sum is unknown, it is not that difficult to figure out a likely number. Schools like Grinnell and Oberlin offer a set financial incentive to apply ED; then the merit offers can add an additional chunk of money. Based on previous years' offers, you can get a pretty good idea of the likely number based on stats. If the offer, with merit, doesn't end up in the anticipated range, you can pull out for financial reasons.

Lastly, most schools below T-20 offer non-binding EA. Indeed a number of T-10s do as well. ED isn't even an option for that many schools, much less a necessity.

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