The First Offer Is Almost Never the Real Offer

The award letter arrives. There's a number on it. The family reads that number as a verdict.

It isn't. It's an opening position.

Mistake number eleven is assuming a college has already given you its highest and best offer. They usually haven't, and the ones who ask properly find that out.

Two examples.

A client was admitted to the University of Chicago with what genuinely looked like a good package. A scholarship of about $16,784, a Pell grant, some other grants, work study. All in, $28,829.

That's a real offer. Most families would take it, feel fortunate, and move on.

We appealed. It went from $28,829 to just over $49,000.

Then we went back a second time, because we thought they'd made an error. It finished at almost $53,000.

Second one, and this is a friend of mine. We watch St. John's basketball together.

His daughter's first offer from her top choice was $2,518. Effectively nothing, at a school with a very large price tag.

We appealed it up to $53,540.

That's the difference between she can go and she can't. And she went.

Here's the part I care about more than the money. She graduated with a marketing degree. A few years back she was named to a Forbes list of top marketing professionals under 40. Today she runs marketing for a cosmetics brand you'd recognize instantly.

Not the four years. The 40.

I don't think we get credit for her career. She did that. But we played a small part in making the door openable, and that's the whole business.

Now, the single most important thing I can tell you about how to do this.

Do not call it a negotiation.

Call it an appeal. Say "appeal" in the email, in the form, and on the phone if you get one.

That's not word games. Financial aid officers are not car dealers and they do not experience themselves as being in a haggle. The moment it feels like a negotiation to them, you've become an adversary, and they have complete discretion over the outcome.

An appeal, on the other hand, is a thing their office formally does. It has a process. It's part of the job. You're asking them to reconsider a file in light of something, which is a request they're set up to say yes to.

Same request. Entirely different reception.

The related rule, which I gave a client recently and which he was gracious enough to already understand: sit on the same side of the table. Don't be angry. Don't be aggressive. The person reading your letter did not set your award and has no reason to fight you, unless you give them one.

Around here, that advice lands harder than it should. Long Island has an edge to it.

The families who get more money are not the ones who push hardest. They're the ones who ask correctly.

Next week: what actually counts as grounds for an appeal, and the one lever that works better than any argument you can write.

Onward.

-Andy "Call It an Appeal" Lockwood

P.S. I wrote an entire book about this, which should tell you how much money is sitting on the table across the average award letter. The short version, plus the letter templates, lives inside the Lockwood Inner Circle alongside what we use with our private 1:1 college advisory clients. A dollar gets you in: lockwoodinnercircle.com