A mother’s primer for parents of prospective students

By Samantha Burgess

College in our house was always a given, but as my son was finishing eighth grade, I had to wonder. He had yet to read a book for pleasure. Pleasure? That poor kid had just survived a suburban middle school where there was only one other student of color. When we moved and he entered an independent, socially conscious and very diverse high school, I knew we had made the right decision when he came home the very first day with a huge smile, announcing "Mom, I met a kid who looks just like me."

It was all (well, almost all) a joy from then on and over the next four years, my son became a scholar. He loved learning, exerted a discipline I had never dared dream possible and was one of only four to graduate with honors from his high school. While he was never comfortable with standardized testing and those low SAT scores kept him from going to larger state universities, he so excelled in every other area he was accepted at several of the most prominent (and expensive) colleges in the country.

Now that he had actually worked and earned his way into these incredible schools, I needed to figure out a way to pay for it. I consider myself an educated person, well traveled and the product of a multitude of rich experiences, yet nothing had prepared me for getting through the mental, emotional and time consuming maze of applying for and receiving financial aid. If my story can help make a family feel less alone, it is worth telling.

Even though my son completed most of the college application process himself, I found that it quickly became the equivalent of a part time job for me as well. So many questions to be answered: where, what, why and how much? And immediately on the heels of the all those college applications came the forms for financial aid; being the one who pays the bills and does the taxes, that job fell to me.

Asking for help is always a challenge, particularly for financial help. I was taught that it was impolite to talk about money at all and of course the implication was that not having enough was at best a weakness and more likely, a personal and professional failure. That feeling is compounded in a number of ways, such as those pretty commercials of smiling financial advisors talking dreamily of second homes, $100,000 weddings and how easy it is to have money for everything including, of course, the full price of a college education. For a moment they make you feel like you are the only one out there living paycheck to paycheck and somehow that is your fault. That’s ridiculous and in our hearts we know it. Reading Cornel West again for a refresher on how not to buy in to this thinking always helps.

Still, to not only admit there isn’t enough and to have to explain why not is an emotional and psychological hurdle that is not easy to cross. I remember thinking it was akin to going to the hospital to give birth: as much as I racked my brain, I couldn’t come up with another way to get through what I had to do. I had to face the process. Having survived both childbirth and seeking financial aid, my advice is: just do it.

My introduction to the financial aid process was the FAFSA (Free Application for Federal Student Aid.) After hours spent gathering and then inputting information, what was the result? A petrifying number called the EFC—the Expected Family Contribution � an amount almost double what I thought we could afford and about a quarter of our after-tax income. It is enough to deflate the most committed of students and their parents. You HAVE to get past this number. What you realize is they never ask about expenses so while you are filling out the FAFSA and the College Profile, the next form to be faced, keep a pad of paper next to you to jot down the expenses that come to mind—the reasons behind the mind bending credit bills, the medical expenses, braces, other children’s tuition, the out of work spouse, commitments to elderly parents, leaking roof, etc. Also make note of how you’ve tried to stay above water—refinancing the house, stripping the small retirement account, loans taken out, etc.

You take those numbers and explanations that are now overwhelming you and write them all out in what I have come to think of as the flip side of the annual Christmas letter. You know how you tell your friends all the positive familial highlights of the year? Well, now you are going to tell the other side of the story of how you got into the financial morass you are currently drowning in. Putting it all down isn’t easy and sometimes it is downright painful. It isn’t just the time all this takes; it is an emotional roller coaster as well.

It won’t be until close to the deadline for your student to decide which college they are going to attend that you receive the financial aid letters. You can appeal the decision, but if you have put everything into your first letter, it hopefully will be an amount you can live with. Can you actually afford it? Probably not. Can you make it work? Absolutely. I think of friends with both a Mercedes and a Jaguar in their garage who tell me they can’t afford private school for their child and I look out at the 1983 Oldsmobile in our driveway. It isn’t about judgments, it is about priorities and for us, Sarah Lawrence has been more than worth it.

My son first chose a college that had a higher percentage of students of color than Sarah Lawrence did, but he found they didn’t have the classes he wanted nor did he feel a sense of camaraderie. He decided on Sarah Lawrence because he felt they would meet his academic and creative needs and, in the process, has discovered a vital community in which he is thriving.

Initially, I balked at what I was raised calling one of the Seven Sisters, assuming the expense would be prohibitive, but I learned that one of the advantages of a small college is that yes, they crunch the numbers, but they also look at your realities and they have seen it all. Don’t confuse the financial aid office with the tax auditor. You have to be just as honest, but know they aren’t there to make judgments or to punish you. They really are there to help. Think about it. Their job is to start with a pile of money and finish without any and the purpose behind that is their charge to help create a diverse, talented and unique student body. Your job is to tell them the full story. Put it all out there. And if you give them the information honestly and in detail, they will work with you to make it work. They really can be your partner in your child’s education. The same individualized attention that makes the college so attractive for the students comes through for parents as well. And it doesn’t have to be in person. I feel that I now have a solid, working relationship with several of the administrators at Sarah Lawrence and I have never been there in person—I am three thousand miles away and such a trip would be a luxury.

Sarah Lawrence only offers scholarships for financial need, but other grants are available elsewhere. It’s best to start out with collegeboard.com or petersons.com because to wander the Internet is to invite spam or worse. Go cautiously and skeptically, but they are out there. And then there are the low interest loans available for both students and parents—we do a combination, but my son realizes that the loans we are taking out are a joint commitment to pay back; in other words, as much his as they are mine.

That was a process of its own. While I had always been adamant in informing my son that the ATM was not a vending machine—you have to put money in before you can take it out—I clearly had overly protected him from day to day economics. I had been raised in a financially volatile household and I hesitated to tell my own children about any economic details. As a result, I lost something in my attempts to clarify our priorities. "Even if we had the money, we wouldn’t spend it that way," was my common retort to tales of classmates’ luxury possessions or their family’s purchase of new Hummer, but my son didn’t know what we had, where we had it or what we owed. A young man ready to go off to college is ready to know those things and so we went over the family budget, the income and the bills and then read "Rich Dad, Poor Dad" together. Not only does he have a greater appreciation of economic choices, he might even take shorter showers and use a towel a second time. Most importantly, he has the bigger picture in focus and feels like a partner in the enterprise. And in reaching this mutual understanding of what we have committed to, he and I agree that we don’t refer to college tuition as a bill: it’s an investment.