By RON LIEBER
For all the program’s limitations — including the requirement to live and work in the state after graduation — the most immediate response came from jealous families elsewhere who want their own states to step up. They may be waiting a while, since the National Conference of State Legislatures reports that just eight states have created anything like this. Twelve more have bills in the works.
Still, free tuition does not solve every family’s financial challenge. Qualifying families in New York may still need to cover more than $50,000 over four years for fees, room and board.
The Institute for College Access and Success reported this week that schools generally are still asking families with the lowest incomes to pay a higher percentage of their incomes toward college than any other groups do.
There is another, very particular group of families that suffer at this time of year, too — people near and dear to my heart (and those of my colleagues). They are New York Times subscribers, people with median household incomes of $99,000 (digital) and $167,000 (print), and others like them.
Nobody sympathizes with them much, and they do not ask for you to do so. But hear them out — as I do in ever larger numbers each year around this time.
All week long, I spoke to them: at midnight as they worried aloud about the aid offers yet again; and at sunrise when I emailed them with thoughts and suggestions. A word cloud of their emotions about the system of paying for college would include large-font renderings of terms like “disillusioned” and “bewildered” and “disbelief.”
Their own parents had sacrificed and sent them to the best colleges they could get into. Or, they had worked their way through school mostly on their own. But as this month winds to a close, they and their children still found themselves haggling for more aid based on their income, assets or academic accomplishments.
Many of the teenagers are disappointed: Yes, they got in — often by putting in the biggest efforts of their young lives — but no, they may not be able to afford to go to their dream schools after all. And as the deadline to make a choice nears, many families find themselves asking complex questions about whether they should pay five figures more per year — and six figures more over four years — to reach for a first-choice college that simply will not discount any further.
Families with five-figure incomes sometimes do quite well when it comes to financial aid, especially if their children are particularly bright or their schools are particularly flush. It also helps if a family has more than one child going to college at the same time.
Mary Lou Smith was hoping that her triplet sons, who are high school seniors, might benefit from all of that. She is a part-time home health aide, while her husband is on disability, and the federal financial aid formula said that her Philadelphia family could afford to pay nothing at all.
Still, all the schools that accepted her boys wanted them to take out loans. Ms. Smith, who once worked as a bank teller and eventually rose to management, is furiously communicating with all of the institutions amid a haze of confusing financial aid award letters and jargon-filled emails.
She said she wanted as much time to negotiate as she could get. “I can totally understand,” she added, “how a high-performing, lower-income student would get lost in this process, or not even know they should be applying for help.”
She also has a question for her governor, Tom Wolf, a Democrat: Where is our state’s broad-based free tuition plan?
J. J. Abbott, his spokesman, said that in a perfect world — one in which the legislature was not dominated by Republicans, as he put it — he would gladly provide even more support for working families. “Unfortunately, the legislative dynamic and the state’s current fiscal situation are not amenable to such a policy shift,” Mr. Abbott said.
In New York, families a bit beyond that $100,000 line that the state has drawn face their own set of difficult choices.
Emily Schottland is the mother of a senior who plans to enroll in college this year. She once worked in the arts, and her husband, Thierry Royo, is an immigrant who arrived in the country without family money or the career network that might come from graduating from an American college. They did not own an apartment until they were in their 50s. Read full article here.