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.
College Coach learned today that the Department of Education (DoE) is changing the way the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (the FAFSA) defines a student’s family. Starting with the 2014-2015 FAFSA, which becomes available on January 1, 2014, students will be required to provide information about the adults in their custodial household without regards for marital status or gender. You can read the DoE’s announcement of these pending changes here: http://www.ed.gov/news/press-releases/education-department-announces-changes-fafsa-form-more-accurately-and-fairly-ass.
Spend 10 minutes speaking with the parent of a high school senior and I guarantee that I will spend some time dispelling some half truths that have emerged from today’s college financing process. Anecdotal stories – you know the thing you heard that happened to your neighbor’s son’s friend’s cousin – all seem to have these magical happy endings that we desperately want to replicate.
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?
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 is tough for students who have parents married to one another. It’s even tougher for students whose parents are divorced, remarried, or were never married.
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?
College Coach experts, all former senior admissions and financial aid officers, are available to work privately with your student to achieve admissions success.
