Johns Hopkins is making another power play to support its undergraduate students, this time for those who are among the first in their families to attend college.
Tag: financial aid
Hopkins Joins Initiative to Enroll More Low-Income Students
Johns Hopkins University has jumped into a group of 30 top colleges and universities sporting high graduation rates that will aim to enroll and graduate tens of thousands more students from humble beginnings.
Clark Foundation Awards JHU Engineering Program $15 Million in Scholarship Funding
John Hopkins University has more than enough academic prestige to its name to draw some of the country’s best undergraduate prospects to Baltimore. Now, thanks to the charitable foundation of a late construction magnate, the school is better positioned to attract promising engineering students.
Johns Hopkins Tuition Is Less Expensive Than You Think
If you look at the sticker price, the cost of college tuition has gone up alarmingly in recent years. Luckily, many families with children attending top schools don’t have to pay full price to do so, thanks to scholarships, grants, financial aid, and other funding sources. Take Johns Hopkins, for example.
Johns Hopkins (Still) Has One of the Highest Tuitions in the Nation
For the privilege of attending Johns Hopkins in the 2013-2014 school year, incoming freshmen (or, let’s be real, their parents) will pay $45,470, an increase of 3.5 percent over the previous year. Room and board will rise to $13,832, 3.3 percent more than last year, making the grand total a whopping $59,302 (and solidifying my desire to never have children). The university is consistently one of the ten most expensive schools in the country.
More Private School Families Seeking Financial Aid
CNN Money reported this week that more wealthy families with children in the private schools are requesting financial aid.
In the 2010-11 academic year, about 20 percent of families that filed for financial aid for private school earned $150,000 or more a year, up from just six percent in 2002-03, according to the National Association of Independent Schools.
Many parents have been hit hard by the recession and declining home values, the story goes on to explain, and can no longer afford an expensive private school education. But it’s one expense they aren’t willing to give up.
“There’s this pressure to give your kids what you think is the best,” said Robin Aronow, a school admissions consultant in New York.
Read Making 300K and Getting Financial Aid for a First Grader at CNN Money.
In College Decisions, $$$ is the STOP Sign
I wish someone had warned them that this day was coming, or that it was going to be so hard. Last week was college admissions decision week. By now, high school seniors have learned they have been accepted at dream schools – their dream schools. They are also learning that they can’t go because the financial package didn’t come through or it wasn’t enough. One of our daughter’s friends has been accepted to six selective colleges and universities, any of which she would be thrilled to attend, but the friend is likely to stay in Maryland and enroll in-state. There just isn’t room in the family budget for the extra $55,000 for tuition and expenses, and the financial assistance she was expecting from the colleges has not materialized. Our daughter’s friend had a certain vision for her college experience, but the financial reality has brought it into focus.
What are kids supposed to do? What are parents supposed to do? We teach them to reach for the stars, but sometimes, when they are lucky enough to grab one, we tell them they have to throw it back. I feel for the kids – all those years of hard work geared toward an impressive college admission, and once achieved, rendered useless. I feel for the parents – who are surely working hard, earning a living for their families, but unable to cover the costs of private colleges. Something has gone terribly crooked on this road to higher education. Sadly, the only road sign some kids are seeing right now is “STOP.”
What to Do Once College Apps Are Done
After all the transcript-forwarding, SAT-prepping, and essay-editing, students who’ve sent in their college applications may find themselves with a strange sense of… loss. Now all there is to do is wait. Right? For those who aren’t able to sit patiently until decisions roll out in mid-March, here’s a few things to do with all that spare time:
- Get your financial aid information sorted out. Students who hope to get grants, loans, or work study money should fill out the FAFSA and any other school-specific forms in the coming months. These are often the most complicated and irritating forms a student (or a student’s family) will have to fill out, but they’re also crucial to helping pay for college. Get an early start.
- Apply for fellowships, grants, and scholarships. It’s not too late to search for other ways to fund your college education. For example, Johns Hopkins’s Woodrow Wilson Undergraduate Research Fellowship awards $10,000 to incoming freshman to conduct original research; its application deadline is March 1.
- Keep your grades and activities up for the mid-year reports. Many schools ask for updated transcripts and/or mid-year reports. This is not the time to slack off in class — nothing is more distasteful to an admissions committee than a student who professes to love learning, but whose grades start sinking once applications are turned in.
- Don’t pester admissions offices with questions. Schools will almost always send an email saying that an application is complete, or if any materials are missing — although this may not happen for a couple weeks, as admissions offices have thousands of files to sort through. Don’t call the office to find out if they got your extra recommendation letter, or your SAT scores; they’ll let you know if they didn’t. And if there’s one group you don’t want to get on the wrong side of, its the admissions team.
Will the Class of 2034 Have to Pay $400k for College?
Talk about sticker shock: this year’s babies may end up paying over $110,000 a year for college, if costs keep rising at the same rate. Nope, that’s not a typo. As of last year, the cost of a year at one of the nation’s ten most-expensive private schools ran to $56,659 (that’s including tuition, fees, room, and board… but not textbooks). Factor in the 3 percent annual increase that’s been the recent norm, and the class of 2034 (or their parents) might be shelling out $422,320 for a four-year degree.
No matter how much financial aid tempers the cost, that’s a prohibitive price tag. (Consider the fact that families with at least one child have seen incomes grow only about 1 percent since 1987.) Some schools are trying to stem the tide themselves. Harvard pledges that students from families earning between $65,000 and $150,000 annually will pay a maximum of 10 percent of their family’s earnings each year. For the sake of the class of 2034, let’s hope that policy stays in place.
