I am feeling a lot of guilt here. We have a bigger sized family. Basically, in our mid 40's, we had a surprise baby. Surprise!! And even after the birth, I laid in my bed in postpartum, looking at his sweet little face thinking "how are we going to pay for college????" I already had 2 children in college at this point. My 11 yr old visited me at the hospital and pointed out that I will be 63 when the baby graduates high school. To top it off, my husband has a heart problem, so we did not want to wait until 70 to retire because we don't know how long he will be able to work, or live.
So here is how the financial aid has gone. One of the older kids has full tuition and fees scholarship, plus stipend (but does not pay room and board). The FAFSA at the end says our EFC number is $6100 per child. Another child has financial aid and scholarships, including outside scholarships, and work study, getting what we have to pay down to the $6100 about. It varies. We told him he did not have to take out the unsubsidized loans. And here is where it gets tricky. That oldest has a work study. I pay his bill at the beginning of the semester. Then his work study money just goes to his bank account. Our agreement was supposed to be that I took the money from his bank account. But I feel like a thief!!!! I cannot do it. He is supposed to save it to put toward the next semester. However, he keeps eating out and on occasion, buying Steam games, so as a result, he has no money left and we keep paying. He can sign something at the college letting them take his paycheck to put toward his bill. I think we need to do that in the future.
Do you think we are obligated to pay the full EFC even if he has enough money to make this number lower? And for the record, my oldest was in the NICU and seriously medically needy so we postponed starting to pay our own student loans. For both of us, our parents did not pay at all. As a result, with the interest rates being as high as they were, and we had unsubsidized loans too, our loans kept going up while we were paying. We are now with Direct Loan and interest rates are much lower now. But we currently owe just over $75K. On the bright side though, we have saved enough money we could pay that off now, except that we are keeping that money to the side to pay for the rest of the children's educations. We have not been irresponsible with money.
So the bottom line is..if your child can afford to pay for school, do you let them keep that money and pay anyway? Or do you make them pay? Assuming you have a tight budget and younger kids to put through college. If we had tons of money and no more kids to pay for, this would be a no brainer. We would just pay. But that is not the case.
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