Once upon a time, financial aid consisted of merit scholarships funded by outside donors, and federal grants and loans. At least I think so. (My family was thoroughly middle class but saved, so my dad refused to even fill out the financial aid form, figuring we wouldn’t qualify for anything so there was no point.) Now, from what I understand, a sizable amount of the financial aid a student receives comes from the university itself.
Experts on the topic (the ones who write the articles online and in the paper) constantly compare tuition to a car’s sticker price. In the same way as a car’s price is negotiable, so, too, do students, on average, pay less than the “sticker price” of college tuition.
But tuition isn’t negotiable. The financial aid office knows everything about you, and they alone make the determination of how much aid to offer you, knowing that your Family Contribution will be defined the same everywhere else. And if your Family Contribution comes out too high, you’re not going to get anything — you will be paying Sticker Price. (See my prior post detailing the Expected Family Contribution calculation.)
That’s not what bugs me, though. What gets me is that, as an upper middle class parent who has saved diligently, I will be required, through the tuition checks I expect to someday write, to be paying not only my sons’ cost of attendance, but an inflated amount that represents the cost of attendance for the kid in class next to him, since the university will use a fair chunk of our tuition money to give financial aid to him.
(I’m in the middle of reading College (Un)Bound and intend to write more on this very eye-opening book when I’m done!)
UPDATE: I finished — here’s my summary.
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