Reply to Do families with $250K in income get financial aid? If not, how do they afford college?

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[quote=Anonymous]For my kids:  one is at WM (in state— and we did 8 semesters of pre-paid 529 per kid when that was an option, so our cost for WM tuition is about $7k a year less than the sticker price— we got lucky on that).

One kid to a Midwestern SLAC with about $25k a year in merit.  Some of the decent Midwestern SLACs that offer that level of merit to kids who don’t qualify for need based aid include:

Kenyon
Oberlin 
Wooster
Denison (maybe? My kid didn’t as far as applying there, so I’m less sure about the aid landscape)
Grinnell
Macalaster
St. Olaf

My kid applied to all but Denison and got into all.  Merit that got the price down to about  $50k (including room and board) at all but Macalaster— they expected full pay for my kid, but the do offer merit to a decent number.  It was actually freaky. Our net cost for the 4 of the 5 schools that offered merit aid was within $5/year. Wooster offered much more merit than the others, but wasn’t a good fit for our particular kid.

But also, why do you think UVA, WM and VT get harder and harder to get into every year?  Because more and more UMC parents with high performing kids are priced out of $70k$100k a year all in. It creates a “barbell” at some private schools, esp SLACs w/o merit— really rich kids and poorer kids- very few UMC. IMO, that’s not a great environment — but no one asked me.

My kids came out of a wealthier (but not wealthiest) FCPS district (housing cost wise, just below Langley and McLean). And my SLAC kid was one of the only ones in his peer group to go private. SLACs just weren’t on most parents/kids radars.  Besides my kid, one went to Wooster with a ton of merit. One kid with SNs (HF anutism and ADHD) went to Elon.  Over the last three years, I’ve seen peers from their school go to:

The full range of VA publics, with an emphasis on JMU, GMU and VT (not CS or engineering) for strong but not superstar students- for VT, I know a couple education majors, pre-med, a couple humanities/ undecided  kids, a business major…

Some UVA/WM/VT CS/Engineering for the high end of the class high and CNU, UMW, VCU, etc on the lower end
Penn State
Ohio State 
a range of SEC schools, including places like U South Carolina for Business and Clemson, Alabama, Georgia Tech for CS/ Engineering. Plus, Auburn, Alabama, Florida and several other for not engineering
UNC (very strong student)
Michigan (2 kids— one a recruited athlete and one not, which is $$$— IDK if they got aid)
U Montana
Purdue for Engineering
Colorado
Minnesota
Indiana for business
UI-CU for engineering
A couple UCs (again $$$, but IDK their aid situation)
Pitt for STEM and not STEM

So basically, UMC in our areas usually goes public— either in VA or to OOS colleges with lower tuition.

We started saving in K when FT childcare expenses disappeared and seriously saving in late ES/ MS when as we lost more of the childcare expenses and income increased.

We were alsolucky that both sets of grandparents set up 529s for our kid— one is paying out $10k/ year per kid and one about $5k a year per kid. We could have made it work without that. But, it gave us some breathing room.

It can be done. But, maybe not at Emory, Vanderbilt, Wake Forest, Duke , etc unless your kid is a recruited athlete or a 1 in 500 or 1 in 1000 rockstar who gets the very small number of merit scholarships.

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