Ivy financial aid

Tweet from HC Bradley with video link to university. (Of course, it's propaganda, but propaganda can also be true and good.)

https://twitter.com/CoachBradl..._m71iE_d1jA&s=19

@Goosegg posted:

Tweet from HC Bradley with video link to university. (Of course, it's propaganda, but propaganda can also be true and good.)

https://twitter.com/CoachBradl..._m71iE_d1jA&s=19

My kind of propaganda :-)  Good on Princeton and the other schools who will inevitably follow.

Thanks for sharing this info. I sent you a PM

Great post.  Something else to consider - there are very few transfers in to Ivies and grad students are not eligible so the players they recruit actually get a chance to develop. 

A very overlooked and important  perspective:

"there are very few transfers in to Ivies and grad students are not eligible so the players they recruit actually get a chance to develop."

Incredibly stable rosters. There is no exit interview where the player is cut. There aren't 20 kids coming in each year  - basically, there are just the 7 incoming players who replace the graduating seniors.

Every year a player who had a disappointing prior year gets a brand new shot at playing. My son had three straight years where he was penciled in as a weekend starter, only to work himself down the depth chart to unused. He appears in the school record book (game, season, career) in walks, hit batters, and wild pitches. Then came his senior year when he put it all together. Only at the service academies and the Ivy league would he have been given a new chance every year - at every other D1 he was offered athletic money, he would have been tossed after his first year.

That's the baseball side.

The "prepare for the world" side was exceptional in academics, networking, and employment opportunities.

Add in the FA we received and it was a really good deal.

How early would a family need to begin their financial planning/engineering? Is this something the family CPA would typically handle?

Most of the schools my son has looked at provide very generous need based aid. So far only one seems to be more loan based. Many of the others promise the student will be debt free depending on the parent’s financial situation.

This might have been mentioned in another thread, Ivies will compete with each other on need/aid when recruiting an athlete. Don’t be shy about taking an offer to the other coaches to see if they’ll beat it.

Keep in mind that this info is over 10 years old - I don't know what has changed.

We began financial planning in 9th grade, acted on it before the end of the year in 10th grade so it affected our taxes due in April of 10th grade. (We hadn't honed into these schools, but wanted to be in the best position for college in general; we had a small business and no w-2s.) (As an example, we were intending to expand our business anyway and the timing of that expansion would effect our taxable income [dropping it dramatically]; so, we timed the expansion accordingly.)

Ivys didn’t use FASFA; each had its own form. Look at the FA calculators on each school's website.

Personal homes and retirement accounts are not taken into account. Small businesses were given a zero value (actually true for most, for the others just really hard to put a value on it.)  Other hard assets are valued at a forced sale - not a fair market -  valuation. No lying, but a deep understanding of the FA rules is important. If you have other kids in college, that is very much taken into account.

We were actually amazed at the amount offered; my wife and I got the FA call and had to pull off the road to cry. We learned we didn't need to impoverish the family to send them to an Ivy.  Since then FA has improved also.

We had widely different FA offers from the schools - but each indicated it would look carefully at other offers. We didn't shop, though, as son wanted to go to the first offeree.

I believe Princeton has 37 Billion in endowments, yikes and good for them. I am glad they are doing something to address the gap as costs for even the Gov't defined "upper middle class" will struggle to pay for their DS or DD higher ed. 

Ivies and other private schools now require the FAFSA and the CSS Profile, and on the latter, each school has different pieces of information that they want.  Our experience was that each school offers different amounts of financial aid, they each calculate it their own way.

The other thing to know about very expensive schools is, the less need-based financial aid a school can offer to all students (i.e. lower endowment), the more likely they are to have academic merit scholarships for some students.

The way to prepare is to spend all the money you have on non real estate and non stock items before your child's sophomore year in HS.  My oldest(2017) went to Cornell and the Financial Aid office told me that having money in savings and a paid off house negatively affected how much money we could get.  Literally told me that if I had spent $100K on a mid-life crisis car, they would have made up the difference.

So live it up early, blow your money on what you want and let the financial aid pay for college.  At the end of the four years, whatever you have saved up will be gone one way or the other.  Just a question of what you have to show for it.

As anotherparent mentioned, we’ve seen different schools ask for different info on the calculators. The Yale calculator gives him $50k in aid, MIT gives him nothing.

Looks like we’ll miss the boat on the finance engineering. My business is very black and white when it comes to expenses. I may have the accountant take a look at the application for me but we aren’t going to expect much going into it.

@K9 posted:

Great post.  Something else to consider - there are very few transfers in to Ivies and grad students are not eligible so the players they recruit actually get a chance to develop.

And because there's no fifth year kids who miss a season due to injury do the grad transfer thing. NC State had a Penn grad transfer who started every game this year.

@TerribleBPthrower posted:

How early would a family need to begin their financial planning/engineering? Is this something the family CPA would typically handle?

I believe that the year that most schools look at from an income/tax return is 2 years prior to year kids enter school (which happens to be the year the kid graduates from HS). 2023 entry to school means school looks at 2021 tax return(s).

Another poster mentions "No lying, but a deep understanding of the FA rules is important. If you have other kids in college, that is very much taken into account." I think that this is important on many levels. When submitting the FAFSA/CSS forms be cognizant of when you complete this. Submit form when cash/savings are lowest (a lot of my income is paid to me early in the quarter, checking account is highest then and is less and less until end of quarter. "Engineering" could mean to pay your mortgage for the month or quarter, make any contributions to your retirement account, pay any credit card balances or other debt owed, etc. to get checking/savings as low as possible) and potentially make any other significant purchases needed PRIOR to submitting forms.

@OskiSD posted:

And because there's no fifth year kids who miss a season due to injury do the grad transfer thing. NC State had a Penn grad transfer who started every game this year.

There are countless examples of this from an injury/covid/redshirt standpoint each year. This is also true at several Patriot League schools without grad schools and schools like Davidson and several others. This is a positive one way experience for any entering kids to most Ivies to not have 5th years transferring in.

@OskiSD posted:

And because there's no fifth year kids who miss a season due to injury do the grad transfer thing. NC State had a Penn grad transfer who started every game this year.

Yup, another good point.  No shortage of opportunities for the grads... From D1 Baseball and Twitter this year Ivy grads going to Duke, Wake Forest, Cal, Villanova and Northeastern.

Not Ivy related, but financial planning/engineering related. Obviously everyone's situation is different, but divorced parents can have an advantage in the financial aid process, at least if your school uses FAFSA. FAFSA only asks for the financial information of the parent you live with the majority of the time, so depending on your situation, this can be an advantage. Schools that use the CSS profile want both parents financial info.

Tempting, but wife would use my life insurance before the D option.

Son went to William and Mary.  I mention this because it is one of the public ivies that has a long history of not releasing players. 

We filled out the FAFSA and CSS profiles. YAY!  Got financial aid!!!  When the baseball scholly hit the accounting office in the summer, the aid went away.  Boo.  I really was hoping for the double dip cone.

It pains me to read they consider that double dipping

@K9 posted:

Yup, another good point.  No shortage of opportunities for the grads... From D1 Baseball and Twitter this year Ivy grads going to Duke, Wake Forest, Cal, Villanova and Northeastern.

Also University of Georgia this year. And University of Southern California, University of Miami and Boston College in past years.