OT: Have any of you had a kid that applied to......Duke?

[8893]

17 schools. I looked at it as an investment. Basically I can now use those schools financial offers against each other and negotiate for more financial aid. Sure, it costs some $'s to apply to 17 schools, but if that gets me another $10K from a school for negotiating, that is money well spent. So far, she is 5 for 5 from schools she applied to and she should get into at least another 6 of the 12.

I'll be interested to hear how the negotiating goes. What we've heard and seen in terms of a trend starting last year is that colleges are coming out of the gates with higher merit aid offers than in years past, but are far less willing to negotiate from there. Our daughter applied to 13 and has been accepted to 11 (including UConn) and is still waiting to hear from two. We're obviously happy with the acceptances and she's been offered some very nice merit aid packages at many of them, but so far we've had no luck trying to squeeze more out of any of them. Still waiting for a few to get back to us, but I'm starting to think we're not going to be getting any significant changes. Of course if you have truly elite student or one who excels athletically or artistically you will likely have a better chance, but that's not our situation. I've also heard that this change resulted partly from the fact that the CSS no longer lets schools know the other schools to which you've applied, so they are more in the dark about who they are competing with in terms of the odds of getting accepted applicants to enroll. Some of the schools have asked us to send them the offers from the others (which we have done), but others have pretty much made it clear that the offer is not going to change.

 

[Paesano]

Great discussion! Thanks for all the good contributions...