The Insider: College Admissions Advice from the Experts

Is Student Loan Reform Good News for Federal Loan Borrowers?

If Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts gets her way, there will be good news on the horizon for federal student loan borrowers. Warren recently announced on her blog that she will be introducing new legislation to allow graduates with high interest rate student loans to refinance those loans at rates “at least as low as those now being offered to new borrowers in the federal student loan program.” Warren points out that “when interest rates are low, homeowners can refinance their mortgages. Big corporations can swap more expensive debt for cheaper debt. Even state and local governments have refinanced their debts.” But student loan borrowers cannot currently refinance their debt at prevailing interest rates through any existing federal program. The current federal student loan consolidation program allows borrowers only to lock in a weighted average of all of their existing interest rates, not necessarily get themselves a lower interest rate.

Reader Beware: Clearing up Student College Loans for Parents

In our developing “Reader Beware” series, College Coach finance experts seek to correct inaccurate college finance information shared in the popular press. The goal is to help families make well-informed college finance decisions rather than relying on assumptions, half-truths, and misinformation picked up from inexpert sources. In this second installment of the series, we take a look at a recent article in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch entitled College Loans Can Trap Unwary Parents.

Everyone knows that you can’t count on a stock tip emailed to you from a stranger with bad grammar.  But did you know that you may not be able to count on the information provided about college finance in the popular press? College Coach finance experts, all of whom are former college financial aid officers, were surprised recently when we found serious inaccuracies in the article Four Accounts Every Parent Needs For Their Kids published by the financial advising website NerdWallet on NASDAQ.com .  We hope that sharing these errors with you—and explaining why the information is wrong—will help you begin to separate the good material from the bad material so that you can confidently prepare your college payment plan.

With October here, temperatures are dying down and the college application process is just heating up!  Many high school seniors are contemplating making an Early Decision (ED) application to their first choice college, a binding admission process through which the student guarantees a college that, if accepted, they will attend and withdraw all outstanding applications to other schools.

It seems hard to pick up a newspaper these days without running into advice from College Coach finance expert, Robert Weinerman!

Education loan relief is on the way for today’s college students and their parents, at least in the short-term.  Congress just passed, and President Obama is expected to sign into law, a compromise bill that keeps student loan interest rates low for today’s crop of college students, while minimizing the cost to the federal government in the long run. This is great news for students on campus this fall, who have been anticipating borrowing at twice the interest rate of last year’s loans.

Do the college admissions and financial aid processes have you feeling a bit helpless?  Does it seem that your child’s college career, future earnings potential, and overall happiness in life is left to the random whims of inscrutable admissions and financial aid officers?

As spring turns to summer, the minds of many new college graduates turn from elation over graduation to anxiety over impending student loan payments. As a College Coach finance educator, and former college aid counselor, I’ve spoken with countless graduates over the years who express the same sentiment: when they signed for those student loans each academic year, they knew they would have to pay the loans back. Somehow, though, those payments didn’t seem quite real until graduation day came and the student loan bills actually were on the way.  That’s when loan amounts that may have seemed reasonable in the abstract can become overwhelming, especially when comparing minimum monthly payments to first full-time paychecks.

If we are paying for private high school for our younger children, will colleges recognize this expense and give us more financial aid for our oldest child?

Would you turn down $2,000 of free money?  No?