Word: aides
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...history: For more than three decades, something called the Overlap Group, a collaboration of financial-aid officials from the Ivy League and a few other top private colleges, compared notes on scholarship applicants to equalize aid offers and thereby prevent bidding wars over the best and brightest students. Then in the early '90s, the U.S. Justice Department argued that the Overlap Group was essentially engaging in price fixing and forced an end to the program. Now only the government monitors need, through its FAFSA process, and, though the colleges claim their policy is not to award scholarships purely on merit...
...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...
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...
...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...
Another guaranteed-savings vehicle Wiener recommends for families that may not qualify for aid is a term life-insurance policy--one that will expire just at the time your child is ready to enter college. If you are a parent under 40, for example, for less than $1 annually per $1,000 of death benefits, you can ensure that the money will be there when your child is ready to enter college, even if you are not around...