Get Real About Paying for College

Nathan Hoffmann was on his way to graduating as valedictorian of his high school class at Blue Valley Northwest in Overland Park, Kansas -- a National Merit Scholar with his sights set on the Ivy League and other prestige schools.

Sharon Hoffman, a part-time editor at the Kansas City Star and her husband, Reed, a freelance photographer, told their son, “’Apply wherever you want. We’re not going to restrict you.’” Given their son’s academic achievements, they thought they were a shoe-in for some sort of financial aid package. “When we went to information meetings at colleges, they said, ‘everyone gets financial aid,’” she recalled. “We thought we could handle it.”

Nathan applied to Yale, Columbia, Stanford, and Northwestern, as well as state universities in Michigan and Wisconsin. And, at his parents' request, he reluctantly applied to the University of Kansas.

Waitlisted at Columbia, he got in at Northwestern, Michigan, Wisconsin, and KU. Northwestern, his first choice after the Ivies, beckoned. Until they got the financial aid package -- zero.

“We went back to Northwestern and asked them what happened,” said Hoffmann. “They never said, ‘Everyone gets financial aid, unless you have savings.’ We had been putting money into UTMUG accounts [custodial accounts for minors set up under the Uniform Transfers to Minors Act]  since he was a baby, and had saved $100,000 for college. Northwestern was going to be $53,000 a year. We asked them to reconsider. He got a $2,000 work-study grant.”

University of Kansas, on the other hand, was offering a $40,000 scholarship over the next 4 years to the National Merit Scholar, who wants to do a double major in music and biochemistry. With in-state tuition set at about $7,725 for the year, and room and board and fees at an additional $10,000, the Hoffmanns will have enough left over to send their son to graduate school.

Nathan will be attending school in Kansas.

“In April, he was so mad at us,” said Sharon Hoffmann. “He said, ‘It sounds like you made the decision for me.’ And while we didn’t, we were trying to talk him out of being $100,000 in debt by the time he graduated.”

In the end, Nathan did see the value in the decision. And, while he complained that all of his friends were going to schools such as Duke, USC, and Penn, Hoffmann said the story has a happy ending. “One by one,” she said, “his friends announced they were going to KU, too.”
The dilemma Nathan and his parents faced played out at kitchen tables across the country this year.

Susan Freinkel, whose son, Eli Wolfe, was accepted at Wesleyan in Connecticut and the University of California at Santa Cruz near his home in San Francisco, called it the “double-whammy” of a huge demographic cohort applying to college at a time when schools’ endowments were hard hit.

Eli is a student at San Francisco’s public School of the Arts. He excelled in his fiction writing program and set his goal as a private school on the East Coast. Like the Hoffmanns, his parents told him to see where he got in, and they’d see what sort of financial aid they got.

Wesleyan, with a total cost of about $55,000 in tuition and expenses, was out of their price range, but Susan, a freelance writer, and her husband Eric Wolfe, a communications director for a union, were hoping for a decent financial aid package. What they received was a shock: Just $7,000, much of it in loans. When they appealed, Wesleyan doled out another $4,000, some of it a work-study grant.

“That whittled down the amount we'd be on the hook for to $43,000,” said Freinkel. “We agonized about it. He’s a good student, he worked so hard to get accepted to a good school.”

She said that with savings of about $50,000 for their son, it meant that after Eli’s first year, they'd be scrambling for funds. And when it came time for Eli’s brother and sister to attend college, things would be that much tighter. If he went to UC Santa Cruz, a competitive university where in-state tuition is $26,000, they'd have 2 years of tuition paid for, and they'd have an easier time financing the rest of his education.