Lynn O'Shaughnessy

The college admission season is winding down at this time of year except for this part: Parents are stressing about how they’re going to pay for the college that their children want to attend. Spring is when I hear from parents who are being guilted by their children to spend dangerously more than they should for a brand name research university

The article discovered that 38 elite schools, including some caught up in the current scandal, have more students enrolled from the top one percent of the income scale than from the entire bottom 60 percent. Here is a screenshot that show the schools that attract the most one percenters: Here is something else the The New York Times discovered: Roughly one in four of the students in households with the top 0.1 percent of income attend an elite college – universities that typically cluster toward the top of annual U. S. News & World Report rankings. Teenagers with a household income of $200,000, for instance, will, on average, have higher test scores than students whose parents make $150,000 and on down the income ladder. Rich parents need to stop thinking that they have failed as a parent if their children don’t attend an elite research university.

College financial aid administrators have the authority to make adjustments to the data elements on the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) or to the cost of attendance when there are special circumstances that affect the family’s ability to pay and their cash flow. If the family is honest and the special circumstances genuinely affect the family’s ability to pay for college, the college financial aid administrator will try to find a way to help the family, even if the special circumstance is one for which the college does not normally make an adjustment. If special circumstances affect the family’s ability to pay, the college can make adjustments to the data elements that are used by the financial aid formula to calculate the expected family contribution (EFC). So, the best approach to appealing for more merit aid is to let the college admissions office know if the college is genuinely your first choice and to provide the admissions office with information about any new developments that affect the student’s desirability.

After crossing paths with thousands of parents over the years through my blog, presentations and my online course, I ultimately concluded that it’s the high-income, educated (often with advanced degrees) parents, who believe that a degree from a place like Stanford, Harvard or Duke is the best (and perhaps the only) way to ensure financial success for life. What I find especially ironic is that these parents believe the Ivy League hype even though the vast majority of them didn’t attend these elite schools and they did just fine. Here are three main conclusions from the original studies, which were published in 2002 and 2011: Students who graduated from Ivy League schools and those who were accepted into Ivies, but attended other institutions, ultimately made the same salaries over their careers. An Ivy League degree did result in higher salaries for students who were minorities, low-income and the children of parents without college degrees.