In July 2022 Slate published an article entitled, “The Single Most Important Thing to Know About Financial Aid It’s a Sham” which explained what many of us already feel about what colleges charge: that’s it's based on what they feel each family will pay. And that kids that aren’t particularly needy get huge discounts. It’s not your imagination. There really is not that much support out their either from the colleges or the government to cover costs. From the article
“College financial aid is largely an illusion. Government financial aid is real, if inadequate—federal Pell grants and state appropriations to reduce tuition at public universities definitely exist. But the financial aid purportedly provided by colleges themselves is mostly fiction.”
Why might this be? Several reasons: Colleges are seeking to fulfil “institutional priorities”, which may be more of one gender or another in a particular degree program, athletic priorities that don’t have much to do with degrees conferred, prioritizing filling out geographic classes from certain parts of the country that may not be well represented. Most importantly, colleges are ultimately businesses, and they seek visible and predictable cash flow. They recognize that dividing up a pool of money to several well-to-do families brings in a strong cohort of tuition money and kids that will likely do well after school ends, and also provide donations going forward. That one pool of scholarship resources could send one needy kid to school, but in an era of plummeting college aged demographics, it's easy to see why schools are allocating their resources that way.
That leaves plenty of families aghast to learn that the burden is borne in large part by them. Even a family that gets full tuition-paid scholarships and a Pell grant from the government (ie, free money that does not need to be paid back) of about $7,395 will likely find themselves bearing the cost of at least $10,000 per year in remainder costs. Multiply that across several kids and you have the recipe for a burden of nearly $100,000 which is a lot for a family that generally makes less than $60,000 to even qualify for that money.
There are two kinds of aid that come from colleges: financial aid, based on need and merit, purportedly based on a student’s amazing statistics like test scores and GPA. But rest assured that “merit” is less like an award for talent and more like a 20% off Bed Bath and Beyond coupon. Many kids that don’t have “blow-the-lights-out" qualifications get plenty of merit, and the actual amount depends on what pool is available and how many kids they seek to spread it across.
Colleges list prices or published Cost of Attendance (COA) can frequently be $60,000 and approaching $100,000 per year including room and board. Room and board alone is generally $15,000 per year, and what we learned during COVID, that experience of living among your peers is irreplaceable.
And as for “full-ride” or “full-tuition” scholarships? They are very scarce indeed. Think a handful of kids every year:
Only a small percentage of students receive full-ride scholarships. Full-ride scholarships (covering tuition, fees, room, board, and sometimes other expenses) are awarded to only about 0.1% of students. Full-tuition scholarships (covering tuition and fees) are awarded to approximately 1.5% of students.
So those types of awards are more like winning a lottery among a pool of highly qualified applicants. You can’t win if you don’t play, but having a multi-pronged strategy to figure out what you need to deliver to the billing account on August 15th can only come with time and simulating your different paths to make the best choice you can as a family.