The Insider: College Admissions Advice from the Experts

So you just clicked the “submit” button on your child’s FAFSA, and maybe you’re thinking, “Phew!  Glad to be done applying for financial aid!”  Well, take a deep breath, Moms and Dads, because you may not be done with financial aid applications yet.  Many schools (about 300 of the close to 4,000 colleges in the US, almost all of them private) require an additional financial aid application called the CSS/Financial Aid PROFILE.  Why the extra form?  The PROFILE allows colleges to collect more information than the FAFSA so that they can conduct a rigorous analysis some colleges believe provides a more realistic measure of a family’s ability to pay.  There are many differences between the FAFSA and the PROFILE, below are some of the most important ones for students and their families.

Applying for financial aid can be a bewildering process, and it’s all too easy for overwhelmed parents to make seemingly small mistakes that end up costing them thousands of dollars.  In a recent Wall Street Journal article, Rachel Louise Ensign, with assistance from the nation’s leading college finance experts including College Coach’s own Alex Bickford and Robert Weinerman, details some of the most common mistakes in college finance.  Examples include:

If you follow The Insider blog, you may have read about Alex Bickford and Marj Southworth’s latest trip to the Light House maternity home for young mothers in Kansas City or the work of Mary Sue Youn, Lisa Albro, and Sally Ganga with Big Brothers Big Sisters at American Express in New York City.  While College Coach has always maintained a commitment to community outreach, we have recently formalized that commitment with the formation of our Community Support Committee.

As a College Coach Finance Educator, I often speak with anxious parents willing to explore any means possible to pay for their child’s college education. How many more scholarships can we apply for? Should we refinance our house? Perhaps sell a vital organ? It surprises me, therefore, how many parents are surprisingly resistant to one financing option: student employment. Their concerns are legitimate — working students may have added stress and less time to study — but there are a myriad of benefits, financial and otherwise, that should be considered.

College students won a small victory this week when Congress, facing a July 1^st deadline, extended low interest rates on undergraduate Subsidized Direct Loans for a year.

As spring turns to summer, the challenge of applying for college ends and the challenge of paying for college begins.  Though that first college bill can be daunting, remember that you have 3 options to pay for college:  you can tap your savings (your accumulated past income), pay as you go (out of your current income), or you can borrow (committing your future income to pay down education debt).  Choose 1 strategy or combine all 3!

Student loans have been all over the news lately, and most of the news has been pretty frightening.  The Boston Globe recently reported that outstanding student loan debt now totals $870 billion, surpassing both credit card and auto loan debt as a fraction of the economy, with over 14% of borrowers currently delinquent on payments.  And the Washington Post detailed how Americans over age 60 still owe approximately $60 billion in student loans, borrowed either for themselves or to help put children or grandchildren through school, putting the retirement of older borrowers at risk.

A financial aid award letter can come with a lot of conflicting emotions:  excitement, disappointment, and, more often than not, confusion.  There is little uniformity among award letters, so comparing offers between schools often feels like comparing apples and oranges.  If you want to be a discerning consumer, you need to understand the differences between three main types of aid — grants & scholarships, loans, and work study — and understand which questions to ask about each.  It’s important to compare apples with apples and ascertain which college will provide your family the best value:

If you’re the parent of a high school senior, you’ve likely completed the FAFSA by now. And if your child applied to any private colleges, you may have also completed a CSS/Profile.  So congratulations!  The most difficult part of the financial aid application process is over.  You can now sit back, relax, and let the money roll in, right?