WSJ Your Money Briefing - How One Student’s Mission to Save $350,000 and Earn a Free Ride to NYU Paid Off

Episode Date: February 12, 2025

The gap between the sticker price of a college education and the actual price people pay is growing - which puts the weight of finding ways to reduce costs on students and their families. Wall Street Journal reporter Oyin Adedoyin joins host Ariana Aspuru to discuss how one student found a way to attend NYU for free.  Sign up for the WSJ's free Markets A.M. newsletter.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Register by March 15th. Additional terms apply. Learn more at wealthsimple.com slash match. Here's your money briefing for Wednesday, February 12th. I'm Mariana Aspuru for The Wall Street Journal. Ciara Bile wanted a college degree from her dream school without the $350,000 price tag. My parents had gone to college. They were not financially savvy. I grew up poor. And so my confidence that I could pay for NYU had nothing to do with the resources around me. Like it was like driven by this desire to go to my dream school.

Even if that meant I had to stay up until the 1159 deadline and like turn in that scholarship that I just found out about two days ago. Her journey to go to school without taking on student loans tells a bigger story of the growing gap between college sticker prices and what attendees actually pay. We'll hear from Wall Street Journal personal finance reporter Oyin Adedoyin about how students and families are finding ways to cut the cost of college education and how Sierra did it. That's after the break. To get her college degree without paying hundreds of thousands of dollars, Ciara Bile found luck in outside scholarships, financial aid, and old-fashioned negotiation.

Wall Street Journal reporter Oyen Atedoyan recently wrote a piece about this, and she joins me. Oyen, what were Ciara's options when she first started looking for ways to pay for school? Listen, NYU is one of the most expensive colleges to attend in the country. And Ciara knew this, but it was also her dream school. And so she basically, you know, she had applied early decision for this school.

So she had gotten her acceptance in February. And it was almost like she was blinded by just the excitement of being accepted by this institution that she had always wanted to go to. And so she just immediately accepted. And then when she checked her financial aid portal, she saw that she was getting no aid. And NYU estimates that that year it costs about $76,000 or so to attend the university. And that includes tuition, includes room and board and other fees associated with being a college student. She was hoping to get as many awards as possible. She started reading a bunch of books on scholarships and how to pay for college.

She started watching YouTube videos from scholars who had won a bunch of scholarships, getting their tips and tricks. And she started Googling and she created this huge spreadsheet that now has over 300 scholarships. Here's Sierra describing her process. The different columns were like name, like name of the scholarship, website, like amount, something like that I would show like the requirements. So I would write like two recommendation letters, 3.0 GPA, like resume, like all these things. And then I would have like another column that would be due date, important dates for

like semi-finalist finalist stage. And then I would also categorize it like yellow was like, okay, I applied, don't worry about it, Sierra. Because, you know, after a while you'd lose count, you'd be like, did I apply to this? Blue was like, I really want to apply to this soon. Like top priority of next steps of next scholarships I need to apply to.

Green was, I got it, yay. Red was, wow, that's so sad. I did not get that. WSJ Reporter Oyin Atedoyin is back with me. Oyin, Sierra chipped away at the cost of attending NYU with those scholarships. Where did she find them? She found them just on the internet. A lot of them were local. She said that she found that local scholarships, though maybe the award amounts were lot of them were local. She said that she found that local scholarships, though maybe the award amounts were lower, they were a little bit less competitive

than the big national scholarships. And so she just started to apply to local scholarships. She applied to scholarships that were major specific for the major that she wanted to have at NYU. She started with smaller scholarships and then stumbled upon databases online that had lists of other scholarships from organizations that she hadn't heard about before like the United Negro College Fund and even the Taco Bell Foundation and the Ronald McDonald Foundation.

And are those bigger ticket scholarships getting more competitive for students to land? Absolutely. The internet and social media, apps like TikTok and Instagram have made scholarships both more accessible but also more competitive. And that's something that I was hearing when I spoke to college admissions and prep experts. Sierra applied to these scholarships. She was also very proactive in her financial aid conversations with NYU. How did she negotiate with them? Financial aid negotiation is something that I did not know about until I had to write about it.

And so I'm thinking retroactively to my high school senior self and kind of kicking myself in the butt for not doing this. She first started out applying to those scholarships. She'd applied to over 70 scholarships by the time she finally decided to negotiate her financial aid offer. And she told me that she did this because she knew that the university may counter by saying, well, did you apply to any scholarships? She sent a few emails to a variety of financial aid administrators at NYU. And about a week later, they told her that they would review her case.

She said that she demonstrated financial need. She comes from a family where she is the first one to attend college, and she's also the US-born daughter of immigrants from Hungary and Cameroon. And so her parents really had never navigated the financial aid college system in America before, which is really different than a lot of other countries. And she detailed all of these hurdles out in her email

to administrators, and someone finally got back to her, said that they would review her case. And about a week later, she saw that she had been awarded a roughly $34,000 scholarship towards her tuition. And that plus the scholarships that she had already gained externally was enough to at least allow her to register for classes that year. And so these are some tactics and strategies that students and their families can use when they are doing a financial aid negotiation or more

formally known as a financial aid appeal. For students who are interested in trying to get the most out of the aid that's out there or parents of students trying to help them, what's a checklist they can have so that they've exhausted all of their options before they take out loans? Institutions are making their financial aid offers a little bit more accessible. A lot of colleges have revamped their appeals process, so instead of having to find the email for the right financial aid administrator and write a convincing letter, you can maybe look through your student portal and find

a link to a document and then fill out the document appealing your financial aid. And in some cases, you'll even get a note being like, here's when you can expect to hear back from this. So the appeals process has been streamlined at a lot of institutions and there are also a lot of state scholarships and institution-based scholarships that students should also look at even before they're waiting for acceptances from colleges. Maybe when students are even deciding where they want to go to college, some of that decision can be baked into how transparent these institutions are about the financial aid that they give

out. I know, at least on the college side, colleges are thinking about that and making their financial aid packages a little bit more explicit. And so students can access that information online before they decide to apply to this institution. That's WSJ Reporter Oyin Adedoyin, and that's it for your money briefing.

I'm Arianna Aspuru for The Wall Street Journal. This episode was produced by me and Jess Jupiter, with supervising producer Melanie Roy. Thanks for listening.