financial aid: Confidential

Supplemental information  to the profile:

There are some additional facts that you should know.

Perhaps I did not make this  clear enough  when we requested  mid semester emergency financial aid and were granted none.

I am currently the sole employed parent.  My job  as a school psychologist does not pay much more than the cost of MIT tuition and room and board.

My daughter's step-father lost his job in November. My daughter's father lost his job in January,  however, even before this he was unable to contribute much financially.  

For a number of years  I was the sole support of my two children. 

When I remarried my husband sold his house,  took this money and set up a college fund for my children. He earned a middle class income  in a job  that had no pension,  so he had to set aside money for retirement.  Now he has no job, his 401k has lost at least half its value, and he has had to go back to school to get retrained. 

Must we use up all the cash he had saved before any financial aid becomes available for my daughter? 

Would we have more chances of getting support if we got divorced?

My  daughter is not a minority student, but she did overcome her own disabilities.  

She worked very hard in her studies and held a job in order to make this dream of attending MIT come true.

I am very proud of her  and the contributions she wants to make towards  bettering the world by doing fuel cell research as a chemical engineer. 

I am willing to make whatever sacrifice I need  so that she can have this education.

Still,  I wonder if this school is really for  middle class families like ours.

 Or did we do something wrong when we filled out the forms?

Tomorrow the president of your college will be at the high school where I working. She will be speaking to  the success of this "inner city" school at getting so many students into MIT, speaking of the need to train students who are not afraid of numbers, not afraid of new ideas, who are our hope for " the innovation based economy" that will solve the problems we are facing now.

It will not be possible for me to talk to her about our situation, as I am just an employee, not a parent at this school. But if I could I would ask, is there something wrong with this picture, that I who have worked so hard, devoted so much of my life to helping others in this and other schools, now find myself hanging so precariously on a financial precipice as I try to fund my own daughter's education? 

I would also tell her that financial aid or not,  debt or not, I cannot imagine a better education, a more exciting place. Considering the real cost and future value of an MIT education, it is a bargain.  

As I write my blog, my daughter writes hers about this first year experience she is having, being in what she calls the happiest place on earth. It is  happiest because she is fully immersed in learning about  what she loves. That is what truly matters. Whatever the cost, it has to work out.