This is an article I wrote, mostly to consolidate my own experience as a parent with the process of supporting a child with applying to college and being faced with all the life-altering decisions involved in choosing just one of them. I thought you all might find it helpful. It is written from a parent's perspective and with the financial health of the family top of mind, but as responsible teenagers considering college, many of you are in the driver's seat of this huge choice, and the choice of how to spend so much money (in most cases) is very powerful and has many short and long term consequences. I hope this article helps you to understand what your award letter really says, and what you are really buying.
I applaud all of you for putting yourselves through this crazy process, and wish everyone here the very best on their journey. Warning: it's kind of a hot take, but I also tried to entertain myself while I was writing it. I hope it entertains and enlightens anyone in the super stressful position of having to choose how to spend their family's money. Best of luck, everyone! Cheers! AND...it's not too late to change your mind!!!!!! :)
Tomorrow, thousands of modest-income families face a life-altering financial deadline: May 1, College Decision Day. While college acceptances, particularly to well-known, name-brand institutions, inspire parental and student pride alike, the astronomical price tag on those award letters, even with “generous gift aid” added, often clash with financial reality. Between the barrage of marketing emails and the emotional pressure from students longing for a particular brand, many parents feel obligated to prioritize their child’s “dream school” while downplaying, romanticizing or outright ignoring their family’s financial reality. Even if you’ve already paid a deposit, the gnawing doubt about the reality of paying name-brand tuition remains, but you push it out of your mind. It may feel like "everyone else" is doing this for their kids, or that your child’s personal identity (or your own!) depends on affiliation with a particular school brand. But, deep down, you know the numbers don't add up and you are terrified. You may also doubt the ROI (return on investment) of paying so much just for an undergraduate degree.
I know everyone in my family felt all these things and more, and I’m here to tell you that it is not too late to change your mind and expand your options to include those that offer better financial and logistical sanity. Choosing an affordable path doesn't mean sacrificing quality; it means removing a financial noose from your family’s neck while still positioning your family to compete in our uncertain economy.
If you have already paid a deposit to a high-priced private school while your in-state package is waiting in the wings, but still feel an overwhelming sense of dread and wish you could undo the decision, stop worrying and take action! College enrollment deposits are non-binding. While you will likely forfeit that $100 to $500, that loss is a pittance compared to the alternative. In most cases, a deposit represents less than half the cost of a single credit hour at a major university. Walking away now is a commonplace strategic move that can save your family tens of thousands of dollars over the next four years, and that savings is well worth a difficult conversation or two with your teenager to educate them on the reality of your situation and weathering their temporary disappointment.
The alternative is a lifetime of debt, stress, and years of worry, starting now, about how to pay what you owe now and how to account for ever increasing tuition costs. Smart parental investors in the undergraduate venture should expect and, indeed, actually plan for a 3-5% tuition and fees hike by their chosen school every year, without any increase in gift aid or other renewable aid. Many families “forget” to account for this well-established fact and come to regret it later. Your gift aid is “static,” meaning, it will, at best, stay the same each year, while tuition, fees, housing and meals are “fluid,” meaning that they will increase each year, with no ceiling, an average of 3-5%, which doesn’t sound like much, but you will be responsible for the entire amount. Can you and your family afford that?
If this year’s tuition goes up, say, from 70,000 to 74,000 as one of our potential schools did literally just a few days ago, what will you do? We were packaged with the estimated tuition being 70,000 for 2026-2027, then I noticed on their website yesterday, that the 2026-2027 tuition is listed at 74,000! Suddenly the aid we appealed for was already eaten up by an additional 4K of tuition! Merit and gift aid packages with “renewable” aid stay the same (at best) in subsequent years, so, if this happens to you, you will have to pay 4K more and there is little recourse. This additional tuition might be a very significant increase in your personal “adjusted tuition” which I calculate by subtracting your gift aid from the school’s stated sticker price tuition and fees. Suddenly, that merit aid isn’t going as far, is it? A tuition and fees increase can, and very likely, will happen every year of your child’s degree. Ditto for housing and food, if not at an even higher rate. If you know in your heart and in your bank account, that you cannot actually afford the college you deposited at over the next four to five years, have the courage to rescind it, take a deep breath, and read on.
Understanding how colleges and our government decide your financial fate via the SAI or Student Aid Index and what is expected as a result is critical. Assuming you’ve gotten this far into the college admissions process, the FAFSA generated SAI won’t be new to you, but you may not have spent enough time trying to understand what it actually reflects.
For many moderate-income families, paying Cost of Attendance at private schools, even with gift aid, has become an impossible burden, frequently requiring the equivalent of upwards of 47% of household income. This financial strain has been exacerbated by the recent transition from the Expected Family Contribution (EFC) to the Student Aid Index (SAI), a formula so restrictive it borders on financially oppressive.
Unless your child belongs to the very small group of hyper-competitive elite students who are offered full tuition plus room and board (aka a “free ride”) at top-tier institutions, you are likely trapped in this new 'limbo land.' This is the reality for anyone with an SAI above the $7,000 threshold (1), which effectively disqualifies families from state-funded aid and Pell Grants (2) awards that are already too low to bridge the gap created by schools not meeting your SAI.
According to the new, merciless federal formula, parents are expected to pay between 22% and 47% of their 'available income' toward their Student Aid Index (SAI). But, spoiler alert: that is actually the best-case scenario. In reality, most families are 'gapped,' meaning the school’s price tag, even after gift aid is applied, is often thousands of dollars higher than what is already an effectively oppressive SAI. It could be argued that any family with an SAI between $7,000 and $250,000 is being squeezed for this unsustainable share of their available income, regardless of actual ability to pay, because until you reach 1 million dollars in income, college will still cost a double-digit percentage of your hard-earned money.
If every award letter you open looks 'bat-shit crazy' despite the flurry of 'merit scholarships' your child supposedly 'won,' your instincts are 100% correct. Let’s be clear: 'merit aid' isn't exactly a prize; it’s a marketing discount in a for-profit system, though the amount may ostensibly be based on impressive grades or test scores or other measures. It is fundamentally insane to expect a family to surrender double-digit percentages of their gross income for an undergraduate degree. Full stop. Further, the multiple-sibling discount of EFC times gone by has been discontinued in the new SAI system, and families with more than one child in college at the same time will no longer receive any type of discount for either child.
To put a $90,000 private education at even a 'reasonable' 9% of household income, you would need to earn $1 million a year. For everyone else, being asked to cough up 30% or 40% of their earnings isn't just a sacrifice—it’s a mathematical impossibility that makes soul-crushing debt the only path to enrollment. Sound good? Yeah, I didn’t think so.
So, what can we do about it as fiscally responsible parents of our hopeful would-be college freshmen? Obviously, we could look at the difference between the cost of in-state and out-of-state schools as well as name-brand private school tuitions, but, I’m quite sure you have already done that. We know there is a pretty large variation in the cost of state schools depending on the state, and private schools in the mid-tier territory can give very good merit aid to attract students. Only you know what your award letter numbers look like, but for the sake of this argument, look at tuition and fees separately from housing and meals. Any gift aid/merit aid can be applied just to tuition and fees, go ahead and subtract your gift aid from your tuition and fees. I call this number “adjusted tuition.” Looking only at adjusted tuition (assuming housing/meals are not discounted at any school), what’s your best deal? THIS is the number we want to pay, and ideally, only this number.
In order to prepare yourself and your child for the rest of this answer, I would ask that we consider the purpose of college and examine the way that the college education is delivered, as well as the source and purpose of the associated expenses and our unconscious beliefs about them.
We are all familiar with the “residential experience” that most high school students expect when they think about “going to college.” It’s easy to imagine living in dorms with peers, eating in the dining hall, participating in campus events and clubs, going to class…sounds like living in a boarding school, right? Hmmm. Guess what? You are paying for your child to go to boarding school. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but there is if the housing and meals cost is so astronomical that both you and your teenager are considering taking out loans to cover it, in addition to spending your precious 529 or other savings, and of course, the 30 or 40% of your income that the award letter is asking of you. If you make more than a million dollars a year and can comfortably send your teenager to boarding school, then, of course, go right ahead. But for many of us, the decision to give our teenager a “residential experience” in addition to buying them over-priced tuition is going to cost us an untenable sum and we might not have thought about what we’re actually buying after tuition and fees, namely: no-frills, overcrowded, shared housing and access to cafeteria-style meals. Why are we even considering this?
It is important to examine with eyes wide open, the lucrative myth that the modern college experience is built upon: the idea that at eighteen, a teenager instantly becomes an “independent adult” who must live separately from their family in order to seem to have successfully “launched.” We have been conditioned to accept this as a rite of passage, much to the delight…and profit of college corporations. More often than not, parents are not aware that they are unconsciously agreeing to funding a second household they cannot afford, since these teenagers are neither financially independent nor functioning adults.
Contrary to the social media hive-mind, these students aren't living “independently,” at college, nor would they be expected to live independently *anywhere* without a job or an income. They are living on your dime in a no-frills group home for which you will pay luxury prices to the tune of 17K-22K+ (these numbers are taken directly from the schools my child was accepted to) for 8-9 months just for a small, shared bedroom and meals. This is a ludicrous amount and surpasses rent for a shared apartment, even in most inflated American real estate markets. Students could rent a 2-bedroom apartment and have full access to their own bathroom, living room and kitchen for the price of a shared dorm room and the convenience of eating in a school’s dining hall. To add to costs, the school is taking on your labor as a parent as well.
As a parent buying the residential experience of college, you are outsourcing housing, food and labor costs and paying dearly for doing so. You are paying a premium for someone else to handle the grocery shopping, the cooking and the cleaning. You are even paying for 'faux parents' in the form of supportive adults: professors, advisors and administrators to be available to provide on-demand guidance. Turns out your student will not be asked to be “independent” very much at all beyond going to class, doing their homework, going to extra curriculars and making friends.
It’s no surprise then, that the only way a school could possibly get parents to pay for this investment is requiring first year students to live on campus and requiring them to buy a meal plan. On average, roughly 42.7% of the total cost an undergraduate pays to a four-year university is for room and board rather than academic instruction (3). How can you possibly avoid this?? How can you avoid paying luxury housing prices for a shared cinder block room? How can you avoid spending half your income and going into debt for bare-bones living accommodations and cafeteria food?
There are several options, but none of them are as easy to romanticize as dorming at your child’s favorite college. Instead, you’ll have to accept cold, hard cash in your pocket in exchange for the cinematic fantasy (and believe me, it is a fantasy) that most students and their parents often have about the fairy tale of living on campus: becoming besties with their roommate, loving their spacious, stylish room, ordering DoorDash from their campus dining options and rolling out of bed to get to class in seconds. Cinder block walls, no air conditioning, tiny, cramped quarters and a random roommate who eats the food you put in your tiny fridge are, more often than not, the reality. So, what can you do?
You can send your student to your in-state school…as a commuter. This costs tuition and fees, as well as books, supplies and transportation, but you avoid paying for room and board. In many cases, it is room and board (housing and meal plans) that cost just as much, if not significantly more than tuition at many schools after gift aid is applied to tuition. The cost of tuition and fees alone minus merit awards, plus the cost of commuting, at our in-state school is affordable for my family and we feel very fortunate to be able to choose this option. In most cases of commuting from home, you will have to apply for a “commuting waiver” as most schools require first year students to live on campus. This loop hole is a best-kept secret! The process is usually very easy and only requires a single email or form where your student must explain that he or she is going to live at home (their permanent residence) with parents. Sometimes living within the commuting radius with parents is automatically approved, other times, it is reviewed by a school’s housing committee. Be sure to explain that paying room and board would be a financial burden.
If your in-state school isn’t within a reasonable commuting distance, there are several other options you can pursue. Again, you will have to accept money in exchange for a romantic fantasy, and you’ll be foregoing that name-brand for a bargain bin…or will you? Did you happen to snag a really great merit-discount at a nearby name brand school by any chance?
You can apply for a commuting waiver to almost any school as long as your family lives within (or close enough) to their designated commuting radius. With the exception of a small handful of schools that have an “absolute residency requirement,” commuting is usually a possibility. And, if your student has the moxy to gain admission to one of the “absolute residency requirement” schools, guess what? The school is likely paying for room and board.
You might wonder how your financial aid or merit awards might be affected if you are able to commute. Gift aid is usually unaffected by commuting, as gift aid is primarily merit aid, and is unrelated to whether you live on campus or not. If, however, you were given a specific housing grant to live on campus, obviously, that would no longer be relevant if you are commuting. Contact admissions (in the case of merit aid or school-based gift aid) or the financial aid department (in the case of federal grants and loans) of the school in question to double check that your aid package will not change if your child commutes.
We did consider the commuting hack with a competitive private school within 30 minutes of our home, but the tuition alone was FOUR TIMES our in-state offer for the exact same degree and program. Thankfully, a professor from the big name defected a few years ago and started his own program at our in-state school and it ranks very near identically to the big school. Our 4-year in-state, tuition/fees degree will cost us under 30K, while a tuition-only degree at the name brand would have cost…110K+ and been a headache for commuting as it is in a city. Dorming at the big name? Yeah, that would have cost 176K without a single cup of coffee from a non-school source. Hell’s no.
If you don’t live near enough to a 4-year college for commuting to be an option, you can, of course, have your student enroll in community college and take a year or two of courses there and then transfer to a 4-year school. Credits at an in-state community college can cost as little as $150/credit, while one credit at a private college might literally be 10-12 TIMES that amount. You can save tens of thousands of dollars this way, and many have.
If you don’t mind online learning, there are plenty of online colleges to choose from, and none of them have room and board fees.
If you need more time to make this decision, consider this best kept secret… You can take as many online college classes as you wish at Arizona State University (ASU) specifically in their “universal learners course” program. It only costs $25 to register for any of their UL classes, they offer both synchronous and asynchronous options, and there is no admissions process. Anyone ages 14 and up can take these courses! They are real ASU courses, structured so they are as standard as possible and will transfer easily to most other 4-year schools. You can see the syllabus online before you even decide if you want to take the course. Once you take the course and get your grade, it is only $400 per course (3-credits) to put that class on an official ASU transcript! That’s an INSANE deal at $125 per credit, cheaper than many community college credits! ASU offers many courses that are REQUIRED by 4-year colleges: English composition, Math, History, Psychology, Sociology, etc. and they are all taught by real ASU professors. My child took these courses and easily transferred the credits to his (in-state) school, and we are already 10% done with his 120 credit degree requirement. I really don’t know why more people don’t seem to know about this, but no one I’ve spoken to has been aware of it and it’s never mentioned on any social media platform that I have seen or “how to pay for college” book I have read. Thank you, ASU for being awesome, and I hope other people take advantage of your AMAZING Universal Learner program!
If you are on the fence or embarrassed or afraid to disappoint your child by asking them to live at home and commute to school versus living on campus, consider this: would you AND your child rather they live at home for another four years NOW while they are earning their degree, or have them come back to live at home AFTER they graduate when they can’t find a job that pays enough as many 22yo students end up doing? If you spend upwards of $80,000 on your child’s housing and meals during their college experience (even assuming they move off-campus in junior and senior years), will you have the cash to be able to help them get an apartment or pay a down payment on a house after they graduate? If so, great, then dorming is an option for you. If not? Consider commuting, or online learning.
My family’s preference was to commute, which included my teenager’s blessing once we explained to them that we would be saving over 100K in tuition, room and board and would therefore be able to help with housing AFTER graduation with these savings over 4-years.
You may ask if we feel ready to launch our child. YES, we are ALL ready to separate, but, in exchange for the extra 100K+ we can wait four more years. We would all rather spend that money on an actual house or apartment or car than on buying my child a roommate (essentially a faux-sibling) for them to have to share a tiny, non-air air-conditioned prison cell with and eat cafeteria food while paying luxury hotel prices. We good.
I will leave you now to think, really think and feel about this decision. This is real money you are considering spending, in a war-time economy with an administration that is unfriendly to higher education. Is it truly worth it for your family to fund a “residential college experience” for your teenager in exchange for an undergraduate degree when that degree can be earned any number of other ways without crippling your bank account and enslaving you and your child to a lifetime of future loan payments? Is it? Only you can decide.
I wish you the best in the final stage of your decision making processes! Cheers and love to all!