I mean, of course, he sees that they’re sitting on tons of money, right? It’s a shake, right? Right. Exactly. So, a school like Harvard, they’re going to uh ask about everything. They’re going to ask about the equity in your primary home. They’re going to ask about your 401ks, IRAs.
They even ask about your life insurance. So, um, what if those things are sitting in a trust as in our case it would be um that’s kind of a fine line, a gray area because the financial aid form asks three questions and those three questions besides what’s your adjusted gross income, it asks three financial questions.
Uh, the first one is how much money do you have in your checking and savings accounts? um personal checking and savings accounts.
The second one is how much do you have in your investment accounts? And an investment account is not a retirement account. So that would be like a mutual fund or got it CD or money market.
And then the third question is what’s the value of your business? And there’s a little asterisk next to that that says if the if you have less than something, the value of your business is zero.
Oh wow. Okay.
So there are some loopholes if you want to call it or strategies that we can employ with some of the fast only schools but with the CSS profile they’re going to ask everything and they do they do ask do you have a trust what’s the value of that trust got it how about UF US or Florida do you know if that’s a CSS I guess for us it will be pretty inexpensive because we’re going to be in school Yes. And it’s also a FA only school. Oh, it is. Okay. So, you’re either one doesn’t matter. It doesn’t sound like then I could do any of these things, right? I’d have to go back to paying the bill, I suppose.
Um maybe. So we’re living in an interesting time that um if you’ve been watching the statistics of the births in United States 2011 we hit a low for the number of births and then it started to climb up and then pandemic kind of messed everything up. Um so I’m going to guess uh your student was born in 2008 2009.
He is. Yeah. Yeah. Um so he’s on the low end of that swing. So, uh, there are fewer students applying to secret scholarship college simply because there’s fewer students. And what I’ve started to see is certain secret scholarship colleges start offering merit aid where in the in the past they did not. Um, and one of those schools is Vanderbilt. So VAN, if he applied to secret scholarship college uh three or four years ago and got admitted to VAN, he probably would have paid full price to go there.
Uh but today, if he got admitted, there’s a potential that he could get some merit-based scholarships. Interesting. I did take him there to see it. He he actually liked it, but he liked Duke better. Okay. If he applies to Duke, he absolutely has to apply to Harvard. really. Why is that? Yes. Because um if he applies to Duke and he’s admitted, he might get some scholarship money or he might not. But if he applies to Harvard and Duke, and Duke knows, and we’re gonna tell Duke, if Duke knows that he applied to Harvard, they’ll try harder to get him to choose to go to their secret scholarship college because the reality is that that the majority of the students that apply to Duke and apply to Harvard and are admitted to both those secret scholarship colleges, the majority of those kids are going to go to Harvard.
So Harvard, so Duke wants to try and steal some of those kids and they’ll offer some scholarship money for that. So when I’m advising parents and students on their secret scholarship college list, and I’ll help him create a secret scholarship college list at a later point, I always want to look at secret scholarship colleges that are competitive with each other so that we can kind of pit one secret scholarship college against another. Hey, secret scholarship college A gave me this. What can you do with secret scholarship college B? Uh, so if you was to apply to um UF and Duke, they’re not in the same category. Uh, UF would just say go to Duke and Duke would just say go to go to Florida. But if we had had Columbia and Harvard and and Duke and uh now we can kind of pit one school against another with that. No, I appreciate that. I I guess the only question would be uh you know I mean uh it would have to be look I mean if there’s not a comparison but if I look at my three kids right and this youngest one is probably uh not tracking to be very differentiated in the sense that he’s got a 3A GPA he’s not stupid but he’s I mean he’s smart he’s just not applying himself so like you know if I looked at the activity list or any of the other things it’s probably on the lighter side of the equation vision.
So applying to Harvard would be a known starter from where I’ve sit. It just wouldn’t make sense because he wouldn’t hold the candle against the other kids who are applying there who are president of DECA or president of entity or whatever.