Thursday, April 4, 2013

How Final Is a College’s Financial Aid Offer?

This is an excerpt from a New York Times blog Q & A with Brian Lindeman, the director of financial aid at Macalester College in St. Paul:
 Families should know at least four things when they compare financial aid offers:
  1. How much will I need to pay to the college (how much is my bill)?
  2. What other costs do I need to be prepared for (textbooks, travel to and from campus, personal expenses, other fees)?
  3. How much will I need to repay after college? What will be the required monthly payment and how long will it take to repay my loans?
  4. Are there factors that might cause my financial aid to change after the first year? (Issues that can sometimes cause year-to-year fluctuation include grade point average requirements for renewal of scholarships, family members who graduate or enter college, or significant changes in family income.)
There is a lot of information in a financial aid package so at Macalester we offer this video tour to our families.

Q: How does a student improve his or her chances of getting financial aid that doesn’t need to be repaid?
A.There are some obvious pitfalls that should be avoided:
  • Don’t be tardy with your financial aid application.
  • Make sure you check the answers on your Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or Fafsa, and other application materials to be sure you haven’t overstated your assets.
  • Avoid the common Fafsa mistakes.
  • Don’t be shy or embarrassed to let the college know about unusual circumstances that may affect the family’s ability to pay for college. Unusually high medical expenses or a recent job loss are examples. My recommendation is that you write a short letter describing those circumstances before you receive a financial aid result. If you then receive a financial aid package that doesn’t seem to fit your circumstances, follow up with the school’s financial aid office to ask how they took your special circumstance into account.
Please note that there is no rainbow you can follow to a pot of gold. You don’t need to visit campus and meet with the “right person” or make sure that the financial aid officer is impressed by the student’s wonderfulness. (If there is money for wonderfulness, it will be distributed during the admission process in the form of a merit-based scholarship.)

Q. How final is an institution’s financial aid offer? Is it etched in stone? Penciled in? Drawn in sand?
A. Most financial aid offices will not respond positively to simple requests for more aid. We generally won’t improve financial aid packages in response to a financial aid offer from another school. In my office, our goal is to provide a financial aid package that makes Macalester financially feasible. We know that the student will almost always have a lower-cost option.
Over the years, I have had hundreds of conversations with parents that start with, “My daughter loves Macalester, but we are really struggling to figure out a way to make it work financially.” The next step is a conversation about the content of the financial aid application. We sometimes uncover factors that were either misinterpreted initially or weren’t reported. Sometimes we can provide more aid.
Families who are wondering whether to ask questions about financial aid should know: You will not be the first or the last to do so. A parent of a student who asks for more aid needs to be ready to hear “no,” but there’s no reward for silence.

Q. What’s the worst thing a student could do when comparing financial aid offers?
A. I think the most common mistake I’ve seen is the failure to understand cost and value in the long term. Too often, I talk to parents who are choosing between schools based solely on the first year’s cost.
Students and parents should be thinking about the total cost for degree completion. How many years will it take to graduate? What will student and parent debt load be at graduation? How might sibling enrollment affect financial aid availability in the future? Are there other factors that might affect the availability of financial aid in future years?
Similarly, families should be considering each institution’s value as a multidecade return on investment. For traditional-age students, the college years can be a crucible of intellectual and social development that shapes a person’s life far beyond the first job after college. That doesn’t mean that parents and students should sacrifice everything else to choose the “perfect” school but it can sometimes mean that it’s a good idea to stretch for the right fit.

http://thechoice.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/04/03/how-final-is-a-colleges-financial-aid-offer/?src=recg

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