Always Ask – Part 1
Always go back to the Financial Aid department and ask for more aid. They have funds at their disposal to give to students they want to encourage to come to their school. So when you get it narrowed down to the last two or three colleges, go back and ask for more.
When one of my sons was looking at colleges, he narrowed it down to the last three. They were three very different schools. School A was a small Christian school. School B was a large major private university, and School C was one of the smaller Ivy League schools. School B apparently decided that it really wanted him. It got to be a joke at our house that every week he got another offer of more money from them. He was awarded this scholarship and that scholarship, and finally a financial aid award.
Visit to Make Choices
He went on one last visit to the three institutions, and came home with a decision. “It would be easy to go to the Christian school,” he said. The students and professors are mostly like-minded, and the work would not be too hard. At School B he felt that the Christian fellowship group was a mile wide and an inch deep. He did not feel a connection there, and the school as a whole seemed impersonal.
At School C, the Christian group welcomed him right away. He went to an Activity Fair for prospective students and visited the table of a fellowship group. One student took him to lunch and then talked with him for a couple of hours about what it was like to be a Christian on this very secular campus. He went to the group meeting in the evening, and they remembered his name and accepted him as already a part of their group. The teaching was good and went deep. He felt at home, and the rest of the school felt like a mission field. He felt that his time would be worthwhile here.
Ask For More
He decided that he really wanted to go to the Ivy. But it was the most expensive of the three. They had sent their financial offer, and it left us with more to pay than at either of the other two colleges. But it also included a brochure that had several notes inviting you to ask questions. So I called the Financial Aid office at School C. I asked them how different schools came up with different numbers if they were working from the same FAFSA. They asked me what other schools we were looking at. I knew that they wouldn’t care about School A, so I just said School B. “OH,” they said. “We would be interested in seeing their offer.” I read it to them.
They were willing to fight. They said, “It is called professional judgment. If you will send us a copy of that offer, we will see if we can reverse engineer their numbers and see where they got them.” This is Greek for, “We will match their offer.”
Send Competing Offer
I copied the offer and sent it to them. They “matched” the offer. But School C also had a “no loan” policy, so everywhere School B had offered a loan, School C offered a grant! This means that School C gave him a much better offer than School B. If he had wanted to go to School B, we could have taken this offer back to School B and asked if they would match it.
But he really wanted to go to School C, so we happily took it and he went there for four years. The scholarships covered all of tuition and most of room & board. After the first year in the dorms he moved off campus. For the next three years the college gave him a check each semester that covered his rent and most of his food bill. The rest he made working in the summers, so his college didn’t cost us anything.