The Insider: College Admissions Advice from the Experts

How Can I get Tax Deductions and Credits When Paying for College?

One of the most frequently asked questions that College Coach experts are asked is, “Can I deduct the payments I make for my child’s college tuition expenses?” This relatively straightforward question does not have a straightforward answer, but with careful planning families can take advantage of tax breaks that are designed to help them pay for their family’s higher education expenses.

How to Prepare for Financial Aid as a High School Freshman

During my tenure as a financial aid officer at MIT, Babson College, and other schools, I read thousands of financial aid applications and talked to hundreds of parents about how they could cover their share of the costs of their children’s educations. I learned very quickly that the earlier a family began to think about how they would pay for their children’s education, the more likely they would be able to do so without too much financial stress.

529 Savings Plans: How Bad are the Non-Use Penalties, Really?

Today is 529 Day, and I am sure you are seeing a lot of articles encouraging you to open and fund 529 Savings Plans for your children, grandchildren, nieces, and nephews. At College Coach, we talk to thousands of families a year who are thinking about saving for college, and 529 Savings Plans are one of the most popular ways our clients choose to save for college.

Congratulations on your college acceptances and success in receiving scholarships and need-based financial aid! If you don’t mind, I’d like to give you a little assignment.

Part Two: Where the FAFSA needs Improvement

Yesterday I suggested that the FAFSA has too few questions and does not collect enough information to allow colleges to allocate federal financial aid funds to the students who most need them. Many colleges use the College Scholarship Service (CSS) Profile application to collect more information than the FAFSA collects, and these colleges took some heat recently when critics suggested this form is a barrier to access to higher education for low income students. I'd love the FAFSA to ask enough questions that schools would feel it was completely sufficient for allocation of their own funds. Let’s look at a couple of deficiencies in the FAFSA that lead colleges to use a separate application for institutional funds.

Part One: Confusing perspectives, confusing timelines

A few weeks ago, Representative Elijah E. Cummings of Maryland issued a report that called out 111 private colleges for publishing financial aid instructions that did not clearly explain that the FAFSA was the only application students needed to submit to secure federal financial aid. In our February 6^th blog post, we pointed out that Representative Cummings’s claim about these instructions, while accurate, was more likely to hurt lower income students than help them because federal funds are not the largest source of financial aid for students from low and middle income households.

Lawmaker Misleads Students in Critique of College Financial Aid Practices

This week, the New York Times published a story reporting that Representative Elijah E. Cummings of Maryland has asked the Department of Education to investigate whether top colleges are misleading financial aid candidates about the requirements to apply for federal financial aid. My colleagues, (fellow admissions and college finance consultants at College Coach), and I have reviewed his concerns and while we agree that he may technically have a point, we feel he is both exaggerating the issue and not giving these colleges the credit they deserve for supporting the educations of talented financial aid eligible students.

In part one of this blog, we explored some of the reasons why using a 401k/403b loan to pay for college can be a risky strategy. In part two, we will talk about some of the additional challenges of that strategy and some alternative options.

Most companies allow their employees who use retirement plans like 401ks and 403bs to borrow from these accounts to pay for things that occur before the employee retires. These are not considered withdrawals, and the employee pays the loan back, with interest, over a short period of time. Employees like the idea of “borrowing from myself and paying myself back” and the ease of setting these loans up. However, a 401k/403b loan is a risky college finance strategy that does not always work. In part one of this blog, we’ll look at a few of the reasons why.

Parents often tell College Coach’s Saving for College experts that all, or a large part, of their plan to pay for college involves loans or withdrawals from their 401ks or 403bs. We try to help them find an alternative college finance strategy, as using these accounts to pay for college can be expensive and ruin a parent’s retirement security.