It has been a bad college-planning day, and I just need to vent here because I'm being "calm mom" for DD and DH is absolutely worse than useless in financial conversations because he'd borrow the moon if DD just asked for it.
DD was rejected by Wellesley. Disappointing, but I think she was more or less prepared for it. She saw some of the numbers of rejected students over at College Confidential and realized that this year's crop has just been insanely competitive. It is hard to take it too personally when kids with 1500+ SATs and a dozen or more AP 5s are getting rejected, you know?
Besides, she's been getting more and more excited about San Francisco. The research opportunities there are a clear cut above any of the other schools she applied to, other than maybe Tulane, and she really, really likes the Jesuit college atmosphere. But their financial aid offers came out today, and ours is dismal. The net price calculator was off by more than $20,000! So here she is, really excited about a school she applied to as an admissions and financial safety (their NPC was well within our budget, even assuming a margin of error of a couple grand) and leaning on that as a "this was meant to be" answer to being rejected from her top choice, and bam! We get hit with a bottom-line price that is laughably out of reach. She actually texted me while I was in a meeting tonight to ask me to come home, something she's never done through all the years of me getting my degree and now being back to work in a job that sometimes has me at 4 evening meetings a week.
The difference is entirely in their need-based award; she qualified for their second-highest automatic merit award and was invited to apply to the Honors College, but the grant is about a third of the NPC estimate. Seriously, what even is the point of HAVING a net price calculator if it can be off by that much?!? And they don't use one of those crappy, check-the-income-range NPC that clearly aren't more than the vaguest of estimates - they use the College Board calculator with a few university-specific questions added. I am so frustrated with this whole thing that I could scream. And of course, being me, I'm Googling like mad and poking around College Confidential and can't find anyone who has had a similar experience at all. Not like it matters, but I can't help wondering what went wrong, you know?