(4 of 7)
Take, for example, Hong Kong-born Yat-Ming Judith Leung, valedictorian of the class of '98 at Nova High School in Davie, Fla. Leung, a poster child for the kind of diversity and achievement sought by colleges, earned a 4.0 GPA, taking 14 advanced-placement classes, and was accepted at Harvard, Yale and Stanford, with a generous aid package from each. By her calculation, Stanford's package was the best--a mix of loans and outright gifts. Her father earned just under $30,000 last year, and she felt her family couldn't afford to contribute as much as Yale expected. So she let Yale know. She wrote the financial-aid office and asked that the amount be adjusted based on the award from Stanford. "Since my father is in the process of opening his own business," she argued, "I fear that paying for my college education will drain our family's financial resources and jeopardize this chance he has to fulfill his lifelong dream." As a result, she got an additional $4,000 offer from Yale, lowering her parents' contribution to $6,000. Ultimately, Leung chose Stanford because of its psychology department, but she made a point well worth emulating.
A newfound willingness to bargain is even more likely to be found at colleges generally less successful than Yale and Stanford in attracting the most qualified students. Many highly competitive schools have begun to use a thinly disguised form of merit scholarship to land prized applicants. If your family income is not low enough to warrant a need-based scholarship but your daughter is seen as something of an academic catch, she may well be offered an additional stipend to make her decision easier. Don't hesitate to ask.
When applying for aid, however, don't assume that you can go around collecting scholarships from different sources outside the college and still get the same amount from the financial-aid office. Sparlha Swaby of Oyster Bay, N.Y., won a combined $12,000 in scholarship monies and assumed it would simply be tacked onto the more than $20,000 in grants she was getting from Stanford. But Stanford's policy at the time (it has since been changed) was to count that outside help against its own contribution--and so reduced the total awarded Sparlha by more than $11,000.
Such zero-sum policies are the focus of widespread debate on campuses, with some schools ignoring outside help completely and others applying formulas to reduce their own offers. The growing use of merit scholarships to snag the best students will only intensify the controversy. Since merit-based and need-based aid come out of the same till, there is a larger downside risk that this trend will come at the expense of the poor. So far, the effect is marginal, but, as Tim McDonough of ACE notes, "there's enough movement for people to be concerned about it."
GEOGRAPHY COUNTS
Since the college market is a two-way business, with admissions officers trying to buy the best students and students trying to get the best deal, it's important that you scour the landscape for all possibilities. In some cases, you may find a better bargain far from home, on a campus that values geographic diversity; in others, you may find a steal right under your nose.