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Congratulations! Your child has been accepted at the college or university of her or his choice — or second or third or fourth choice.
May 1 is the traditional date for parents to notify institutions that their children will attend and to accept the financial aid package they’ve been offered.
But this year the novel coronavirus has shut down schools and workplaces and put everything into limbo, even whether many schools will hold on-campus classes in the fall.
Read:Stay-at-home and school closures—turn this into a chance to teach your kids some money lessons
So, what should you do? We reached out to two experts in financial aid who are advising families right now on how to manage this unprecedented situation. Here are four things they recommend.
1. Stall. Many colleges already have pushed back the May 1 notification deadline. If the college of your choice hasn’t and your child hasn’t committed or sent in a deposit to hold a seat, contact the school and ask for more time to decide. “99.9% of the colleges want their decision — does the kid want to go to our school or not — by May 1st,” says Ronald Ramsdell, president of College Aid Consulting Services in Minneapolis. “Based on everything going on here they should … extend that May 1st deadline, and I think they will.”
That will give your family time to take a harder look at the offers your child has gotten, decide what she or he really wants, and prepare for the next step, which might be done simultaneously with asking for an extension.
2. Let the schools know if your circumstances have changed. Did one or both parents lose a job or have to close down their business? Will your income be substantially lower in 2020 than it was in 2018 or 2019? You need to let the schools know.
“If the family is dealing with loss of income, medical expenses, things like that, they should contact the school right away to ask for a reevaluation and tweak the award,” says Ramsdell. Need-based financial aid to students starting college this fall is based on parents’ 2018 financial situation.
“Originally what the family reported … as income for the 2018 year, a lot of these families have now dramatically reduced incomes. Colleges can, and most will, reevaluate and re-crunch the numbers,” he says.
3. Be patient but ready to bargain. With campuses shut down, financial-aid officers are working from home like everyone else, and they, too, are living with uncertainty. That’s why Jodi Okun, founder and president of College Financial Aid Advisors in Seal Beach, Calif., who has been a financial-aid officer at Pitzer and Occidental College, recommends patience. “An entire community of people is now working from home and the entire university campus is sitting there empty,” she says.
“Contact the school, email them, they’re not answering the phone. Let them know of your situation,” she recommends.
One reason things are moving slowly, she points out, is that stressed-out aid officers are still working through the traditional aid process. The original awards were based on 2018 numbers, but families who file appeals — sometimes with the help of advisers like Okun or Ramsdell — are doing that on the basis of 2019 income.
Given the circumstances, though, Okun finds colleges are more flexible than she expected. “Colleges never say, ‘What can you pay?’ They say, ‘Here’s what we want you to pay,’ ” she tells me. But now, “colleges that I would have never imagined, some of them up there in tier one, are saying to families of mine, ‘What can you pay?’ ”
“I think the majority of private schools are going to be flexible,” adds Ramsdell. “Many state universities will be flexible.”
Parents shouldn’t overplay their hands, but neither should they underestimate colleges’ desire to get the students they admitted to sign enrollment contracts.
4. You may get a second shot in the fall. The big question is, what will happen in the late summer or fall, when school is supposed to start again? That all depends, of course, on the virus and the policies of the state in which the institution is located. So far, colleges haven’t made that momentous decision.
Ramsdell expects most colleges to continue holding classes online when the 2020-2021 academic year begins. “Based on my discussions with various people around the U.S., I think they will not have in-house classes. Everything will be done online,” he says.
That means no football, no bonding over beer, no lectures with 150 students and all the other wonderful things that make college life so special. But are parents willing to pay Harvard tuition for a college experience that’s more like the online University of Phoenix?
Not likely — and certainly not for room and board, which students won’t need. “At that point, they can request a reevaluation of what was originally quoted as a total college cost, meaning tweaking the tuition, tweaking housing,” he says.
So be patient but persistent, and you may get another chance to cut a better deal when fall comes around.
Howard R. Gold is a MarketWatch columnist. Follow him on Twitter @howardrgold. No-Nonsense College runs monthly.
