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Leo Marshall, director of admissions and financial aid at the Webb Schools in Claremont, Calif. “We used to be trying to open our doors to all students,” he said. “Now, it’s ‘Who can afford us?’
ERIC LONG dreaded answering his phone this week at Tabor Academy in Marion, Mass., while across the country at the Webb Schools in Claremont, Calif., Leo Marshall let the switchboard screen his calls.
That’s because Tabor, Webb and many other boarding schools in the United States — like private day schools last month — have just sent out acceptance letters and financial aid awards. Some of the parents whose children were not admitted or given enough financial aid took to the phones to ask people like Mr. Long, the director of financial aid and associate director of admissions at Tabor, and Mr. Marshall, the director of admission and financial aid at Webb, what happened.
“Everyone who didn’t get the answer they wanted has been calling,” Mr. Long said.
Admission to the country’s top preparatory high schools has always been fiercely competitive. But today, with the price of some private boarding schools like Tabor topping $50,000 a year, affluent families are also lining up for aid — and sometimes shutting out those further down the income ladder. The reality has affected the whole philosophy behind financial aid.
“We used to be trying to open our doors to all students,” said Mr. Marshall, who has worked at independent schools for nearly four decades. “Now, it’s ‘Who can afford us?’ ”
That’s not many families. After paying $200,000 for four years of boarding school, parents are looking at another $200,000 or more for college. And that is for one child.
The magnitude of these costs mean that even parents with annual incomes of more than $300,000 are applying for financial aid and receiving it. Both Tabor and Webb said that about a third of students received aid.
If you were one of those families denied financial aid this week, or received less than you expected, there are generally complicated, if painful, reasons.
At Tabor, for example, a ranking system — generally unknown to parents — helps administrators make the hard choices. Mr. Long said Tabor had a panel that reviews all applications and assigns a number value from one to 10 to each student. That number encompasses grades, test scores, teacher evaluations and athletic prowess but also includes character traits. It not only determines whether students will be admitted but also plays a role in how much financial aid they receive.
Students who receive the top score, generally around a 9.2 or 9.3, are the brightest; they will get in and get funded, Mr. Long said.
The parents’ ability to pay, he said, starts to get factored in around 7.5. These are the solid students at the school. Below that rating, it becomes tougher for students to get the aid they need to attend. Students with sixes, he said, would “do a nice job” but they’re competing with similar sixes whose parents can pay. Those with fives will struggle at the school, but if they have a sought-after skill, like being a great hockey player, that could improve both admission and financial aid chances.
“If there’s a 6.8 who applied for financial aid, you want to give that application a good read. They’re tough to fund. If he gets bumped up to a 7.2, that saves him.”
If this comes as a surprise to parents, it shouldn’t, said admissions advisers. Schools are trying to create diverse communities of students, but they also need money to operate.
“Prepare to be told no,” said Brian Fisher, partner at AdmissionsQuest, a consultant. “One of the things that people don’t understand is that private school financial aid is totally different from college financial aid.”
One of the mistakes parents make is thinking that standardized financial aid forms that list a family’s assets, debts and expenses tell the whole story. Aid officers said they need to know more about a family.
“Someone who is making a modest income of $130,000 could almost qualify for everything,” Mr. Marshall said. “Someone making $350,000 could qualify for a lot. But I could show you someone making $200,000 who wouldn’t qualify for much.”
In that instance, the higher earner could be paying off medical or law school debt, while the other could have parents who could pay the tuition for their grandchildren.
Not all debt is the same. Mr. Marshall said he did not look favorably on a family with $100,000 in credit card debt but was more sympathetic to a family that has run up medical debt or is paying for an elderly relative to live with them.
The same goes for self-employed people who are able to lower their taxable income through deductions, business expenses and retirement savings. It is legal and good tax planning, for example, to put a spouse on the payroll for the purpose of putting that salary entirely into a tax-deferred retirement account. But a school is going to say that money could have been used to pay tuition.
A child’s college savings can also be fair game. “Its frustrating for us to see they have $100,000 in a 529 plan, but they think we can help them,” Mr. Marshall said. If the money isn’t tied up in such a plan, his school expects one-eighth of college savings to be available toward a ninth-grader’s tuition.
Parents’ lifestyle matters. In some cases, where parents have contested an award, Mr. Marshall said he has gone so far as to ask them to show him a monthly budget.
“We had a family spend $20,000 on volleyball camp that summer and they applied,” he said, reeling off a list of other summer programs, from trips to France to $18,000 in tennis lessons.
“The family is responsible for paying for tuition, not the school,” he said. “We have to have some confidence the family is doing everything possible to pay for tuition before we step in, because our resources are limited.”
Mr. Marshall said the toughest decisions were not over families that needed a little aid — or thought they did — but over deserving children whose parents had no ability to pay.
“If you have eight great kids from inner-city L.A., you want to fund them, but at $50,000 a year that’s $400,000,” he said. “You want to help them, but you just can’t. It’s painful.”
These problems are not confined to boarding schools. Top day schools face similar choices.
In the more affluent areas, parents sometimes need a reminder of what constitutes need. “You cannot be a member of a country club,” said Molly King, head of Greenwich Academy, a prestigious all-girls school from prekindergarten to 12th grade. “You shouldn’t have a second property, a boat, expensive vacations.”
She added, “While there are people who have suffered reversals, I think they’re surprised how high the threshold is for demonstrated need. They have expensive homes. We’d say you have significant borrowing power against your home.”
Yet Mrs. King said her school had increased its financial aid budget each year since the 2008 recession. It covers 25 percent of students.
The percentage of students on financial aid at day schools nationally is lower than at boarding schools, but the tuitions are also lower, generally under $40,000 a year.
But even when parents clearly need help, schools can do only so much. “In the ninth grade, well over half of our applicants need money,” said Geoff Bird, director of financial aid at Harvard-Westlake, a top day school in Los Angeles. “We try to look at the kids who are going to bring us the most and benefit the most.”
The school’s financial aid budget, about $8.5 million a year, goes to only 18 percent of students, he said.
Contesting awards is tough. Administrators said it’s a bad idea for parents to tell a financial aid director that another school gave them more aid. “That’s death,” Mr. Marshall said. But writing a letter explaining what the school might have overlooked could work.
ERIC LONG dreaded answering his phone this week at Tabor Academy in Marion, Mass., while across the country at the Webb Schools in Claremont, Calif., Leo Marshall let the switchboard screen his calls.
That’s because Tabor, Webb and many other boarding schools in the United States — like private day schools last month — have just sent out acceptance letters and financial aid awards. Some of the parents whose children were not admitted or given enough financial aid took to the phones to ask people like Mr. Long, the director of financial aid and associate director of admissions at Tabor, and Mr. Marshall, the director of admission and financial aid at Webb, what happened.
“Everyone who didn’t get the answer they wanted has been calling,” Mr. Long said.
Admission to the country’s top preparatory high schools has always been fiercely competitive. But today, with the price of some private boarding schools like Tabor topping $50,000 a year, affluent families are also lining up for aid — and sometimes shutting out those further down the income ladder. The reality has affected the whole philosophy behind financial aid.
“We used to be trying to open our doors to all students,” said Mr. Marshall, who has worked at independent schools for nearly four decades. “Now, it’s ‘Who can afford us?’ ”
That’s not many families. After paying $200,000 for four years of boarding school, parents are looking at another $200,000 or more for college. And that is for one child.
The magnitude of these costs mean that even parents with annual incomes of more than $300,000 are applying for financial aid and receiving it. Both Tabor and Webb said that about a third of students received aid.
If you were one of those families denied financial aid this week, or received less than you expected, there are generally complicated, if painful, reasons.
At Tabor, for example, a ranking system — generally unknown to parents — helps administrators make the hard choices. Mr. Long said Tabor had a panel that reviews all applications and assigns a number value from one to 10 to each student. That number encompasses grades, test scores, teacher evaluations and athletic prowess but also includes character traits. It not only determines whether students will be admitted but also plays a role in how much financial aid they receive.
Students who receive the top score, generally around a 9.2 or 9.3, are the brightest; they will get in and get funded, Mr. Long said.
The parents’ ability to pay, he said, starts to get factored in around 7.5. These are the solid students at the school. Below that rating, it becomes tougher for students to get the aid they need to attend. Students with sixes, he said, would “do a nice job” but they’re competing with similar sixes whose parents can pay. Those with fives will struggle at the school, but if they have a sought-after skill, like being a great hockey player, that could improve both admission and financial aid chances.
“If there’s a 6.8 who applied for financial aid, you want to give that application a good read. They’re tough to fund. If he gets bumped up to a 7.2, that saves him.”
If this comes as a surprise to parents, it shouldn’t, said admissions advisers. Schools are trying to create diverse communities of students, but they also need money to operate.
“Prepare to be told no,” said Brian Fisher, partner at AdmissionsQuest, a consultant. “One of the things that people don’t understand is that private school financial aid is totally different from college financial aid.”
One of the mistakes parents make is thinking that standardized financial aid forms that list a family’s assets, debts and expenses tell the whole story. Aid officers said they need to know more about a family.
“Someone who is making a modest income of $130,000 could almost qualify for everything,” Mr. Marshall said. “Someone making $350,000 could qualify for a lot. But I could show you someone making $200,000 who wouldn’t qualify for much.”
In that instance, the higher earner could be paying off medical or law school debt, while the other could have parents who could pay the tuition for their grandchildren.
Not all debt is the same. Mr. Marshall said he did not look favorably on a family with $100,000 in credit card debt but was more sympathetic to a family that has run up medical debt or is paying for an elderly relative to live with them.
The same goes for self-employed people who are able to lower their taxable income through deductions, business expenses and retirement savings. It is legal and good tax planning, for example, to put a spouse on the payroll for the purpose of putting that salary entirely into a tax-deferred retirement account. But a school is going to say that money could have been used to pay tuition.
A child’s college savings can also be fair game. “Its frustrating for us to see they have $100,000 in a 529 plan, but they think we can help them,” Mr. Marshall said. If the money isn’t tied up in such a plan, his school expects one-eighth of college savings to be available toward a ninth-grader’s tuition.
Parents’ lifestyle matters. In some cases, where parents have contested an award, Mr. Marshall said he has gone so far as to ask them to show him a monthly budget.
“We had a family spend $20,000 on volleyball camp that summer and they applied,” he said, reeling off a list of other summer programs, from trips to France to $18,000 in tennis lessons.
“The family is responsible for paying for tuition, not the school,” he said. “We have to have some confidence the family is doing everything possible to pay for tuition before we step in, because our resources are limited.”
Mr. Marshall said the toughest decisions were not over families that needed a little aid — or thought they did — but over deserving children whose parents had no ability to pay.
“If you have eight great kids from inner-city L.A., you want to fund them, but at $50,000 a year that’s $400,000,” he said. “You want to help them, but you just can’t. It’s painful.”
These problems are not confined to boarding schools. Top day schools face similar choices.
In the more affluent areas, parents sometimes need a reminder of what constitutes need. “You cannot be a member of a country club,” said Molly King, head of Greenwich Academy, a prestigious all-girls school from prekindergarten to 12th grade. “You shouldn’t have a second property, a boat, expensive vacations.”
She added, “While there are people who have suffered reversals, I think they’re surprised how high the threshold is for demonstrated need. They have expensive homes. We’d say you have significant borrowing power against your home.”
Yet Mrs. King said her school had increased its financial aid budget each year since the 2008 recession. It covers 25 percent of students.
The percentage of students on financial aid at day schools nationally is lower than at boarding schools, but the tuitions are also lower, generally under $40,000 a year.
But even when parents clearly need help, schools can do only so much. “In the ninth grade, well over half of our applicants need money,” said Geoff Bird, director of financial aid at Harvard-Westlake, a top day school in Los Angeles. “We try to look at the kids who are going to bring us the most and benefit the most.”
The school’s financial aid budget, about $8.5 million a year, goes to only 18 percent of students, he said.
Contesting awards is tough. Administrators said it’s a bad idea for parents to tell a financial aid director that another school gave them more aid. “That’s death,” Mr. Marshall said. But writing a letter explaining what the school might have overlooked could work.
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