Federal Student Financial Aid Packages
If you think your student college federal student financial aid paperwork reads like a Greek 101 exam, you are not alone. Sorting through the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) form can be a little confusing at best and an incomprehensible nightmare at worst.
If you have not filed an FAFSA yet, you need to get on it. This form must be completed if you want your son or daughter to be eligible for federal and state financial aid. A lot of federal student financial aid is distributed on a first come, first served basis, so the sooner you file the better off for your student to be.
After filing, you will then receive a Student Aid Report (SAR). Your SAR report will also be available online at the FAFSA Website.
This report will summarize the information submitted on the FAFSA and will also list your expected family contribution (EFC), which is the amount of money the government will expect your family to pay for college educational costs. The EFC is used to determine your student’s eligibility for federal student financial aid.
Be sure you are sitting down when you open that envelope; the money you will have left after the EFC is deducted will not be too far from the poverty thresholds determined by the Department of Health and Human Services.
The first thing you should do is make sure the information on the SAR report is complete and correct. In case of any errors, resubmit the form to the central processor as soon as you can. Corrections will go through in a couple of weeks, and each college that your student applies to will have access to all the updated information.
Student’s who have estimated their earnings may need to re-submit the form if their guesses were far off. A quick glance at your W-2 forms should tell you how close your estimates really are. Most students should not have a problem since their final pay stub of the year will show how much they have earned for the year.
Most colleges and universities will start sending out admission acceptance letters in March and federal student financial aid award notices will come very close behind. Expect a federal student financial aid award letter to arrive within about two weeks of an acceptance letter. Many schools send out acceptance and federal student financial aid notifications on the same day.
In a federal student financial aid package, a college or university will try to make up the difference between the cost of attending school and a family’s expected contribution as will be spelled out in a SAR report. Some will do better than others do. Three schools with similar costs may offer completely different federal student financial id packages.
Much will depends on a student’s past grades, a family’s federal student financial aid need and how much federal aid is actually available from a school. Private schools will tend to have deeper pockets than state schools. Many middle class families could find themselves in a hard spot. They will have too much money to qualify for a need based financial aid, but too little money to cover college costs on their own. Therefore, parents or students — or both — take out private student loans.
If your student is determined to go to an Ivy League school, you do not need to despair. Following Princeton’s lead in 2001, all of the Ivy League schools have adopted a need blind acceptance and most will also offer grants (which do not have to be paid back) instead of private student loans to qualified students.
