Which is why they hadn’t given us any need based aid. So we filed everything on Monday but won’t hear from them until late next week. I’m almost sure they won’t offer us enough to be competitive with UMD, but we are stuck still waiting.

I will say the whole application and admission process has been a customer experience disaster from a parent perspective. First, while things are sort of centralized now, most schools still have some special requirements with either the application or the aid process, and you have to hunt that down for each school.

And second, all admissions info is firewalked behind internet application portals, and are only provided to the student. And further, aid offers are often split between multiple sites requiring separate logins for an individual school. None of them have a single landing page that just tells you the full offer, both scholarships and need based aid. And all the fragmented and confusing info they provide has to be extracted from a lazy, uncommunicative teenager since as parent I get absolutely no info, despite being the one who is actually paying for things.