001okay hi everybody thank you so much for being here um for the financial aid process um we have it's about three o'clock we know that folks are going to be trickling in after their classes um so we know you know people are going to be moving around we're really glad you could make it we are going to start off i'm excited to introduce we have three panelists today um kristen stacy and michael who are joining us from different colleges and they'll say a little more once we get rolling um but i'm gonna promptly turn it over to kristen um kristen thank you so much for being here i'm going to add you to the stream um for folks watching you can do live comments and we will try to get your questions each person is
002going to have about three to five minutes to talk and then we'll go through some kind of common questions so yeah that's about it all right i'm gonna send kristin up thanks great well i'm kristen crosby and i am the regional representative for ohio wesleyan university i actually live in new england um and typically i would enjoy traveling around new england this fall and meeting with students in person but here we are so i'm just going to um quickly introduce some general um financial aid information and then i'm going to turn it over to my two colleagues who are definitely the experts but this first slide here i think is really important to keep in mind financial aid offices are here to help you they're your best source for information they're your free source for
003information sometimes people think maybe they're a little bit hands-off or they shouldn't contact them but the financial aid offices do want to work with you and are very helpful and can answer all of your questions they can even assist you with the application process as you are applying for financial aid they're the ones of course who determine your eligibility so they can answer those specific questions and as you're going through the application process they can also give you an idea about the balance of free aid that might be available to you employment options student loans and things like that and they're going to be your representatives for your time when you're in college as well so it's great to take advantage of developing that working relationship with your financial aid officer right from the very
004beginning [Music] just trying to advance my slides here uh so there are types of financial aid that go into financial aid packages and colleges and universities might have various ways of packaging a little bit differently but financial aid is offered in the form of scholarships and grants as well as loans and student employment so what you should know is that scholarships and grants are free they're a gift that does not have to be paid back unlike student loans those do have to be paid back after enrollment ends and my colleagues will talk about that in a minute a work study might also be part of your financial aid package and it allows students to earn some wages during college you may be able to set up a payment plan to put some of those wages
005towards paying off your tuition but typically student employment is more towards paying for personal expenses and books and things like that [Music] so just a couple things about how and when to apply for financial aid the fafsa this is something that pretty much all us institutions will utilize and the good news is that it's after october 1st so you can start working on the fafsa and the website is fafsa.ed.gov it is only for u.s citizens permanent residents and green card holders um but if you know if you meet any of those then fafsa is what you want to use some institutions also require the css profile it's about 400 maybe fewer universities and colleges that require the css profile this is something that you would use your college board login to access it the css
006profile is not free it costs 25 to complete it and 16 for each additional institution but you may be able to request a waiver and it is also available to access after october 1st um you can complete the fafsa on the my slide looks a little messed up but you can use the website they also have a mobile app and there are lots of benefits to completing it online because it has skip logic that allows you to skip unnecessary questions it gives you the option to use your irs data retrieval to import your tax information and it also has a lot of detailed instructions and help for common questions there's also the mobile application which is very convenient because you can check in on your phone um and then in terms of some tips and
007tricks tricks for the fafsa before i turn it over to my colleagues don't wait to file it some colleges and universities may consider you incomplete if they're waiting for your fafsa you will need a social security number to use that for your fsa id and you could use a website the mobile app there's even a pdf you can only list 10 institutions if you want to add more later that means that one is going to come off the list and it doesn't matter in what order you list your colleges we're not going to be seeing that you can save it and come back later so that's great news you don't have to fill it in in one sitting and as i mentioned you can use the irs retrieval process to retrieve your tax information and
008if there are divorced parents you're going to use the parent with whom the student lived most the previous year if your parents are remarried it's the household income that includes the step parent but it doesn't include the spouse's income and don't forget that when you sign the fafsa electronically you're going to use your fsa id um i think i'm going to turn it over to my colleagues now so i'm gonna un stop sharing wonderful hi everybody so uh hopefully you can hear me okay i always have some fun technical parts i've got three different microphones on my computer can't ever decide which one to use so let me know anybody if it's coming through funny so my name is michael iron i work in student financial services at smith college just across the way in
009northampton although i am not living there right now here in amherst and and so you know thanks so much for having me here today you know kristin thanks for that that kind of introduction a few things that i wanted to focus on uh you know one i want to talk a little bit about uh some of those forms so the forms are are very important so colleges will often have deadlines so it's important that we all keep our eyes out on those deadlines some colleges say if you miss the deadline you may miss the opportunity for that year or maybe multiple years to qualify for particularly their institutional aid often federal financial aid is available no matter when you apply for it no matter when you fill out the fafsa form but many colleges will
010use that fafsa and also the css profile for their institutional aid and their deadlines are usually pretty tough uh and so you want to keep an eye on those deadlines so definitely definitely watch those in addition to those two forums the fafsa on the profile colleges will sometimes have their own institutional application so check their websites and make sure you're completing that piece of it also and some colleges like smith will ask for copies of those tax returns uh that they're going to want to look at and so for students who are seniors now in high school applying for the fall of 2021 seems like a long ways away but it's coming up they'll actually be looking at the 2019 income information so that's what you'll be filling out in the fafsa and that css
011profile so so chris mentioned a couple things about the fafsa where where it's the custodial parent or the custodial households information that goes on there with the css profile it's a little bit broader form that will ask for both the custodial and then later on through a separate process the non-custodial information that information is never shared back and forth between households but but with colleges that want the css profile they want data from everybody and so we're going to look at it all so that's that's a big difference between those two forms in addition to that they'll ask a little bit different questions the profile is going to ask a little bit more detail they'll ask about your primary home whereas the fafsa you do not need to put the value and information about your
012primary home the the profile is a little bit different on how it looks at businesses also whereas the fafsa is a little a little you know a little easier on the business side if you're if your business is a small family-owned business you don't need to report the asset value of that business you need to report the income but not the asset value so there are a few differences that you'll find with those forms as you go along the way the other thing that i find uh is very important in the process is once you get that financial aid award from a college feel free and to reach out to the school i mean just as christian said contact the financial aid office they are your friends so so you know reach out to us
013and and ask some hard questions say how did you come up with this financial aid award how did you how did you calculate this what went into that calculation and make sure that they've really accounted for for everything in your circumstances particularly if your circumstances as a family may have changed income may have dropped or you had a really big expense of some sort colleges often want to know that so that we can look at ways and things that we can change that could uh could be beneficial to you so it does not hurt to reach out to schools and uh so definitely do that even after you've gotten a financial aid award speaking of financial aid award remember for all these forms they are the students forms they are not our forms as parents
014they are the students form so that social security number that's your student's social security number not my mine will go in there eventually as a parent but remember the initial student the initial social security number is the students and the financial aid award the financial aid application that all belongs to the student now you're just helping them out along the way so remember that that part as you go two more things i wanted to share one is to use something called a net price calculator and the net price calculator is an online calculator that every college in the us has to have on their website it's a great way for you as a parent or as a student to enter your data and get an estimate for that individual college or what financial aid might
015look like so definitely take advantage of that to begin to get an idea of what it may look like you want to be careful entering the data because there's no validation of that data whatever you enter that's what the result is going to give you but certainly a great tool and the the final thing i wanted to share really quickly uh that here in massachusetts there's an organization called the massachusetts education finance authority known as mifa many of you probably know about it already from from information from deidra or from others and it's a great organization that they have videos on their website that will walk through this process a little bit what we're doing today but in detail for each of those different forms and about financial aid in general so definitely take advantage
016of what's available there for that i will turn it back over to my friend stacy hi everybody thanks michael and kristen uh this is a lot of fun um for michael didn't mention but michael and i are our long time colleagues and actually parents of students at arhs in the class of 2022. um so hopefully we have some some classmate families out there and i think we both know quite a few families in the class of 2021 as well so it's a double pleasure for us to be here today um gonna bring a little different perspective to the table um first in my professional perspective um like michael and kristen spent many years in college administration and i was a director of financial aid i've also been a vice president at jp morgan but for
017the last seven or so years i have been working for an organization called bright horizons college coach where we provide college coaching services to employees that are provided on behalf of their employers so basically free benefit everybody gets free college coaching um so my team really guides thousands of families through the college process every year at every college across the country and many international schools so hopefully i can bring a little bit different flavor answer a lot of the same questions that michael and kristen can but things are slightly different and i'm also going to bring a little different topic to the screen for us today as well i'm going to talk a little bit about merit scholarships so when we talk about merit scholarships they're not necessarily need based per se but what we
018do know is that they are um part of the financial aid process and that they're being awarded by colleges and universities themselves so i'm hoping you can see my screen i can't tell if you can see my screen um let's see not sure because i'm no longer seeing you guys let's see hold on hold on hold on okay okay i believe you can see it oh no maybe you can oh goodness um hmm hold on well we're gonna go ahead and proceed without the screen because it does not want to seem to share at the moment let me try one more time okay nope does not look like you are seeing are you seeing okay i believe you are i still can't see the the other side so i'm gonna go ahead and proceed and
019hopefully you can so really what we are talking today talking about today is merit scholarships um merit scholarships are awarded to about 22 of all undergraduate students um i'm sorry it comprises about 22 percent of all student aid that is awarded to students in the form of institutional merit scholarships so very often families will come to us and ask about you know where should i be applying for scholarships and i think a lot of people think the universe of private scholarships those sort of ones that are awarded by outside entities are lucrative and they're great but they are nowhere near as lucrative or as available as those that are offered by the colleges themselves so when you think about the college scholarship process you really want to think about the merit scholarships offered by colleges
020in universities we do know that by and large the the vast majority of these are going to be coming from private colleges versus public colleges although it is no longer the the rule we do see a lot of exceptions to private and public colleges awarding merit scholarships when you think about merit scholarships i really want you to change your perspective for a moment you now know that i'm the parent of a high school student and part of my thinking is well i would love for my daughter to be awarded a reward or a scholarship for all the hard work she's put in and of course as a parent i'm going to think that but i want you all to think about this from a different perspective i want you to think about the way that
021colleges use their merit scholarship dollars and what they do is they use those dollars to recruit the students that they want the most so don't think of it as a reward think of it as a recruitment tool and in it being a recruitment tool how do you then become strategic in identifying those opportunities for your student well you're going to put together a college list and i think there's actually even a panel discussion on putting together the perfect college list from an admission perspective our admissions colleagues will cover all of that they'll talk about the likelihood of acceptance and they'll talk about you know the balance list and making sure you have the right mix and i completely agree with all that but what i'm going to do is ask you to take that same
022list and now shift it over to look at it from the likelihood of scholarship perspective if the student is applying to a college that is a reach or a challenging school for them you definitely want to recognize that there's probably little chance of obtaining a scholarship at that particular institution maybe it's a little bit out of their range from an academic perspective maybe their grades and scores aren't there or maybe it's one of those ivy league or highly selective colleges that do not award scholarships and i'm going to re um reiterate that point because it's something that a lot of families don't realize and that is that the most highly selective colleges and the um ivy league colleges do not award merit scholarships well you might want to ask why remember what i said on
023the previous slide colleges use their money to recruit the students that they want the most most of our highly selective schools and ivy league colleges don't actually need to recruit they're turning students away so they don't need to use those dollars to entice their students instead they have extraordinarily generous need-based financial aid policies so it certainly usually covers a lot of the same perspectives so when you think about the next tier of colleges so maybe you're thinking about your cul your student have applying to 9 10 11 12 schools you might want to think about three or four of those being in that challenging perspective everybody wants to go for those reach schools but make sure you're balancing that list with some of those schools that might be just right or no problem because what
024that does is it really gives the student an opportunity for a greater opportunity for merit scholarships at those schools where they sort of look like the the mix of applicants or maybe better than some of the applicants they might have a better chance but if those just there's no problem schools or safety schools as we used to call them the student has a much better opportunity you want your student to look better than the majority of the applicant pool another sort of minor strategy involved in that is thinking about other schools in those categories that might be competitors and i'll talk about why that matters in just a moment so when you think about how does my student or if you are the student with us today how do i stand out it's all the
025things it's your grades it's your scores it's the things that you're involved in it can even be things as simple as choosing a major at a college that might be new to that college so they want to enroll it might be that you're participating in programs that they don't have it could be that you're a student from massachusetts looking to go to college in north dakota maybe that school in north dakota has no representation from massachusetts so just know that when you're looking to stand out in your applications it's going to be sort of the entire body that makes up you so that's how you will ultimately stand out so if you're still looking to add things to your resume just know that those are some of the things that could make could differentiate differentiate
026differentiate you in the process now if you need to do a little research on where you can find out whether or not colleges have merit scholarships there is no magical list i wish there was in fact some colleges make it complicated to even find their merit scholarships on their websites but i would suggest starting with the college's website check for scholarship pages check departmental scholarships as well often we'll find that colleges within larger universities award their own scholarships and also michael mentioned a moment ago complete those net price calculators a lot of colleges and universities will include their um their scholarship offering in their net price calculator as well so you might have a sense of whether or not your student will qualify sometime college sometimes colleges will go as far as even putting what
027their metrics are for determining scholarship eligibility so you may even have an idea of where your student will fall based on their qualifications although i will tell you those are a little more rare if you are looking for some other websites to maybe gather some quick information you can use a site like college navigator at nces.ed.gov or the college board website at bigfuture.org a lot of you are probably already using that i can tell you i use that particular site every single day then as you kind of think through the process a lot of questions we get are about how do i apply for those scholarships is there anything that i need to do realistically more times than not there is no separate application for merit scholarships most colleges will allow your admission application to
028serve as your merit scholarship application but not always so my suggestion to you and i think my colleagues would back me up on this is create a spreadsheet include on that spreadsheet what forms are required for financial aid fafsa profile taxes what are the deadlines for financial aid what are the requirements for merit scholarships what are the deadlines for merit scholarships a couple of pro tips that i will give you um if you are looking at merit scholarships we are starting to see that a lot of colleges are asking students to apply during an early application process to be considered for merit scholarships so you might find that students applying for an early action program might have priority at merit scholarships and in fact the schools might not accept merit applications during regular decisions so
029make sure you're paying close attention to those also double check the school websites to make sure that they are not in fact requiring anything separate sometimes there can be um a different scholarship program that maybe a donor has requested specific scholarship information so you just want to double check to make sure nothing else is required and if possible and you know the specific requirements of a particular scholarship program you might be able to tailor some of your admission application to that scholarship finally um i do want to mention that there are some colleges that will will be would be willing to discuss the offers that you've gotten from their competitors as a former financial aid director i load the idea of playing let's make a deal but i like to think of it a little
030bit differently now and that is if you've been offered something significantly different from one school than another and you think they're competitors and you think they may have seen something differently just go back to them let them know that you have another offer and you'd like to discuss the particulars michael mentioned it earlier they want to help they want to know if they're reading something differently particularly with regard to merit the worst that they can say is no but i will encourage you to go back and ask because i can tell you from our perspective we find that about 40 to 50 percent of the time schools are willing to take another look um so i think at this point we are going to throw back uh and see if we have any questions that
031came into the queue okay i don't know if all three of us are back in the screen there we go okay you're on your own okay i'll go ahead and read them unless i don't know if amanda wants to to come back in but um first question and i think michael you covered this a bit but you might want to dick dive a little deeper and that is what if you share custody 50 50. actually i'm sorry kristen i think you covered it um what if we share a custody 50 50. yeah i'm happy to we could play tag team so yeah so yeah deciding who the custodial parent is it's you know it's a it's a part of the game it and so you could have 50 50 custody but technically you want to
032pick the parent who the student lived with the majority of the time during the year so sometimes it's hard to figure that out you know if it gets down to a one or two day difference you can go go with a parent you know you gotta pick one of them and that's the number one criteria and that's usually the one you want to use ideally because the second criteria is which parent provided more financial support and if it's a fafsa only school ideally you go with the custodial parent based on that where where you live as a student the most most of the time and possibly the parent that earned less money and then the other one so that's those are the those are the two primary criteria uh as you move down the line
033to determine who the custodial parent is and that's that's for both the fafsa profile ultimately the profile will want information from both of those the non-custodial and the custodial parent but the fafsa again is just the custodial parent who will go on there anything else i want to add on that one either nope i didn't see anything else come in okay okay kristin i think this is your specialty what should international students do yes so i work with international students and i review international financial aid forms all the time and i think my colleagues have provided some incredibly helpful information and as a starting point stacy provided some great information about making your list so if you are going to need financial assistance paying for college as an international student you'll definitely want to do
034your research and zero in on schools that actually have financial assistance or merit scholarships for international students because not all do once you've made your list you will have to provide some kind of application and many colleges and universities that provide merit scholarships or financial aid for international students we'll take something called the international student financial aid form we just call it the isfa that is unfortunately not a form that you can fill out on a website it's a pdf that you have to print out um pull it out by hand and pen or pencil actually don't use a pencil and run it and then university as i mentioned only about 400 colleges and universities require the css profile and it is harder to get a waiver for a profile for an as an international
035student but it certainly doesn't hurt to ask for a waiver you could also sometimes submit what's called a certification of finances form in place of the isfa but whether it's the isfa or the certification of finances form basically colleges and universities want to determine what sources of funding you have that you'll be able to contribute towards the cost of education and what this scholarship is applied do you have savings do you have assets do you have income that's going to allow you to cover the cost of the first year of education so it's especially important to submit that information with your application so don't wait to get an admission decision and then submit it we won't read your application if we don't have it typically excellent i will grab the next one and it is
036uh what if like so many in the pandemic 2019 doesn't reflect your current situation i think this is the question i've answered the most in the last three months um and and i think it is just globally uh something that's affecting so many people so as michael said earlier when you're applying for the fafsa and or profile they are going to be primarily looking at your 2019 tax information if you are a senior this year um if you are a class of 2022 they'll be looking at your 2020 and so on so for the fafsa profile for fafsa you will provide your 2019 information as it is on the profile they're actually going to ask you for information a little bit about uh 2019 they're going to ask about 2020 and 21 although they're going
037to be doing the analysis based on 2019 on the profile they also ask for any special circumstances so there's a small box you can provide there however my best advice is that if your circumstances have changed from what is being reported on the fafsa you should be prepared to communicate that information with your colleges and universities and i would do it with all of them and i am also in in my colleagues can can jump into i'm advising that folks do it up front this year a lot of times families would wait until after they've gotten their initial award and then go back to appeal but i think this year we're seeing such major changes in people's lives that they want to make sure that information is reflected up front schools may or may not
038be able to respond to it up front so what you want to do is provide to them in writing um explanation of what the change of circumstances are whether it's a loss of income medical expenses gosh we have had everything a natural disaster you name it if your 2020 income or your 2020 family circumstances look different than 2019 document it share any corroborating information that you can in schools can and will take a look at that information yeah yeah i i totally agree with that i mean you have stacy that's exactly right and doing it ahead of time is is a great time to do it the narrative section on the profile is helpful but but an additional letter with any supporting documentation is always appreciated too and and the other piece to remember is
039you know as as kristen talked about in the early on is is the facet does not have a narrative section so if the colleges you're looking at are fafsa only there's no place to write anything so you definitely want to send in a letter an email something that that's a little more formal and gives a fair bit of detail financial aid folks we love numbers and so if you can give us numbers that's great i mean we don't have to come back and ask you what those numbers are so so definitely when you send in an additional letter like that say that give us those numbers like instead of i lost my job it's like oh i lost my job and so i anticipate zero income for 2020 or i anticipate six thousand dollars of
040unemployment income and zero wages that kind of thing so additional so actual numbers are wonderful we like to see those yep absolutely and one sort of quick caveat we do know that there are you know some of the larger colleges and universities are going to make their initial offer based on what's on the fafsa so if you do get competing offers that look nothing like each other because maybe a smaller school was able to able to read the details and the larger wasn't just double check and go back to those schools to make sure that they in fact were reading the appeal information it's a tricky time everybody's going to try to do everything they can but i think we want to make sure we're giving everybody sort of you know understanding that not everything's
041going to happen the same way okay another question and i'll throw this out i'm just arriving i filled out the fafsa what is the next step i heard you mentioned something about other financial aid forms i can uh you gotta stop me i'll just keep talking so uh yes that's a great it's great you've done the fafsa and and uh and so uh i'm i'm i'm hoping that's the student that's on the fafsa it's the students ssn that you started with that's a that's an important piece and what you want to do is you want to check the website for the colleges that the student is applying to because they may have additional forms maybe it is a college that requires the css profile so so as kristen said they're somewhere in the neighborhood of
042400 colleges that require that form to make sure that your schools are you know does not require that form additionally they may have an institutional application of some sort that they want they have some just some more detailed questions that they want to want to know about some places will also ask for a tax return or a business tax return if your parents own a business so so check individual college websites to see what they are asking for and and then send that into them most colleges now will have some kind of portal system that they're going to give you a password and id for once you apply for admission there and you can log in to see what they've received and what they're still looking for at the college for both financial aid and
043for admission that's kind of important because sometimes at a college they may think they need something but they really don't and it could be we interpreted a question it's like oh we need this form and they will consider your aid application incomplete until they get whatever that is they think they need so if they have an outstanding document either send it into them or send them an email and ask them why they're asking for that thing so that they either waive it or they say it's received because you want you want your application to be complete are there other pieces i should add stacy curse [Music] i would just add um it might be stating the obvious but be sure to keep checking your email because college colleges and universities will email you if something
044is missing if they're having a webinar on the financial aid and scholarship process if there is some kind of scholarship competition and you would be surprised at how often we email students and they don't check their email and um they didn't know that they had to submit something extra for their financial aid form so be sure to check those email accounts regularly and i think both kristin and michael have hit on something let's put a fine point on it we keep saying you because i think we're talking to students right no so if you haven't cleaned this yet uh parents of seniors you are no longer relevant to the conversation except maybe paying that bill um colleges are going to communicate directly with the students themselves so if you're looking for information and it's not
045coming tap your student on the shoulder and remind them they need to be checking their email going forward everything's going to go to and through them they can certainly give waivers and allow you access to information but do know that most of the communication is going to happen directly with students and that's where we see things fall apart all the time so just another sort of quick tip we do have a lot of time left and hopefully there are more questions so please send them in christian michael anything that you think we missed that we should be covering oh there is plenty we can the three of us can just talk financially all day so uh so we could certainly do that you know one one piece that came to mind for me uh you
046know i was actually i was taking notes while both uh christian and stacy were talking because oh there's some good tips they have in there and so so one piece that came to mind for me i think you know i'm thinking about merit scholarships particularly so you know i think as stacy said many of those come from colleges themselves so that's a great place to get additional money outside of that there we often call them outside scholarships so that's certainly a good source too one thing there's not but at this point there's not too much we can do about that as parents necessarily but you want to be aware of the policy that colleges have on outside scholarships what the colleges do if your student gets an outside scholarship or a lot of outside scholarship
047money what will they do to their own institutional financial aid it doesn't often impact too many students but but it it can sometimes if your student gets ten thousand dollars in outside scholarships it could be particularly at need-based colleges they may reduce a portion of their need-based grant it's just a piece to be aware of i mean that for outside scholarships and also you know particularly in in where we live in uh in the pioneer valley there are a number of colleges here so there are parents who work at colleges they will sometimes have a tuition benefit so that's as an employee of an institute of an organization they may provide some kind of help to pay for your kids to go to college so certainly ask your employers but then be aware of what
048individual colleges will do with that money so that's great i gotta you know i have this tuition benefit to help my kid pay for college but if i also had a need based grant and they're gonna reduce that need based grant i just need to be aware of that so that it's not not a surprise when it gets time to pay the bill a little bit later on so be just a piece of be aware of so that's fun i think i would just add that when it comes to a few months from now reviewing all of those financial aid offers you want to make sure that you're comparing apples to apples so what i've noticed sometimes when students share with me other offers is that one university might be showing the current year expenses
049which might go up the next year and another college or university might be showing the expenses of the upcoming year so make sure that you're looking at the right anticipated charges of the upcoming academic year and when they're putting in costs for a meal plan or housing make sure that you're looking at that two equal things because i've worked at an institution um before ohio wesleyan that would package everybody with a 14 meal plan but if you're a student who's going to eat three meals a day you want to know what that meal plan is going to cost you make sure you look at those fine details and actually i would add to that um i was gonna make a very similar point and that is when you're comparing those apples to apples make sure
050in fact they are apples to apples you may look at one offer and say oh good this school has offered me 50 000. this school has offered me 20. look at the cost of the school and do the math before you make that decision and also take a look at those components of that offer some colleges will award um financing or loans that families are expected to cover the balance but that's not an award that's something you actually would have to qualify for you may or may not want it as a family every school could do that so what you want to look at is those are those attributes that would that would actually reduce your overall cost and then make that sort of final decision based on your out-of-pocket cost one thing that we
051spend a lot of time talking about is not necessarily your expected family contribution or the cost of the school look at your net price what is coming out of your pocket as a family and then make those comparisons looks like actually we have a very related question so let me the next question is once you complete the fafsa does it tell you how much financial aid you will receive or is it tied to a specific school's tuition anyone can grab that okay i'll go all right so so that's very interesting so the fafsa itself it will give you a number they call it the expected family contribution but the number you know it's marginally helpful you know kind of but in my mind really it's it's more you know colleges use that more as a
052comparison between students and families so so the reality is you really have to wait to get the actual financial aid award from individual colleges to know what it really is going to look like because i mean just as stacy said you know you could get piles and piles of financial aid from one college and less from another but if positive positive financial aid is a giant parent loan that's that's not money you necessarily want to have it's a big loan that you don't necessarily want so you have to wait the you know colleges interpret that expected family contribution number differently and their costs are different so definitely wait uh until you get those actual awards from colleges and then do your comparison one thing i think that we we find a lot is that families
053don't realize that when you complete the fafsa and the profile actually they're both centrally processed so you complete them you list the number of colleges that you have and i know kristin mentioned you can list 10 at a time that is then sent to a central processor and that information is all sent out to the schools and then the schools themselves do the analysis that michael is talking about so every school is going to read things slightly differently and they're going to make their offers differently i think we've mentioned too that there are some schools that meet full need about 80. only about 80 schools that meet full need that's kind of important to know so if you're looking at that efc number and you're thinking wow you know our efc is only whatever it
054might be in the school cost this we're going to get a lot of money you're only going to get a lot of money at 80 schools the rest of the schools are going to give you as much as they can but then there might be what is called a gap the gap between the cost and what you've been given also becomes the family's responsibility so just know that it's really important to wait to see what each individual school comes back with and then you make those comparisons other questions it's so early in the process but yet it's going to be over before you know it i i always think about october and it's like oh may is you know tomorrow i'm already starting to refer to my daughters as an almost senior because it feels
055like it's that close so um for parents of seniors this is not an easy time we definitely recognize that especially now it's it's astonishing to me going through this right now but you know go through it and just know you know in a few short months it'll be may 1 and you'll be making that decision and hopefully everything is is a little a little a little brighter then other questions hmm it's looking pretty good it looks like we've hit everything answer all the questions all the financial aid yeah exactly or you have no idea what to ask right right whether it's the good or the yield you can probably find us so yeah actually there's the massachusetts they have something called fafsa day.org and normally and and uh dj's probably send something out to families
056about this but normally we would do an in-person uh fafsa night at the high school and we're not doing that this year but uh fafsa day.org they're they're doing online process where they go line by line through the fafsa so if you have not done it yet and there's time before your deadline definitely take a look at that website and it's an opportunity to to sit in with a zoom or however they're doing it electronically to walk you through the process and uh in case you have individual questions about specific lines that that seem a little funky and if you get to a place in the process the the department of ed can sometimes help there's a there's a phone number you can call with fafsa questions or you could call a financial aid office
057if you if you're grappling with a video question and uh if if i were you i would just call smith college oh actually our phone systems are down right now you can send us an email don't call us but you can certainly send an email to smith and uh and ask questions there too okay looks like actually it looks like we just got a question that we really haven't spent much time on so let's let's dive into the pr the notion of private scholarships and i i'll start and i know we all will have something to say so what is our perspective on big national scholarships i'm going to go broad and just talk about private scholarships in general so we've spent a good amount of time talking about school-based scholarships and we know that
058a lot of those are available we do hear a ton about families saying what scholarship should i be searching for what kind of private scholarships are out there and i don't want to be a naysayer but i do want to encourage families to spend their time on the things they have to complete first and what i mean by that is college applications financial aid forms homework life if you have extra time searching for private scholarships can be worthwhile however i would do it in a way that you're you're focusing locally first and i know that our college planning office at the high school is extraordinary with providing these opportunities start there then look locally have you been in big y lately and seen the big banner that says we award thousands of dollars in scholarships
059annually then focus sort of more broadly what types of clubs and organizations are your family associated with um or what types of groups that would be my next my next stop and then finally if you have the time and the inclination to continue this process i would then look at some of those big national scholarship programs not that i don't think they aren't wonderful and some of them are extraordinary but the reality is the universe of folks applying for those is vast so you have to meet all of the qualifications um i've seen families apply for 100 private scholarships and get none i've seen families apply for four and get two so what you really want to do is do sort of a real analysis how much time do you have what is the benefit
060and how many of the criteria of those programs do you meet if you don't meet all of the the large national ones move on um they're great but you know we used to hear back in the day there was that sort of big book of scholarships that left were left unclaimed every year i don't think that happens as much anymore um but that's just my perspective and i'd love to hear others yeah stacy that was a great assessment i mean i think that's exactly true i mean those big national ones that uh that we'll periodically see in our college fund in our financial aid offices incredibly competitive incredibly rare and uh and you know and stacy said i mean we all we all have limited time and we need to focus decide where to focus
061our time and energy and i i think the order you gave stacey was right on the money with college applications for admission for financial aid do those do a lot of homework and uh and then live life and uh and if you get a little extra time i don't know hour here and there you know look start by looking locally and then move out from there yeah i totally agree with that yeah i don't have anything to add you both i love this question um is there an income level that you would say it would not be worth completing financial aid forms i know we could all cover this one michael you can take take the first shot oh dear that is a great question there um so so the person asked about income you
062know is there an income level where where we shouldn't bother with the process uh you know i would try the net price calculator at individual colleges to see what impact that has because income comes into the into the calculation assets come into the calculation and even the number of dependents number of kids that you have in college comes into the equation and that can have a big impact so uh in the expense of the college so an expensive college like smith college where the cost of attendance is over seventy thousand dollars a year you know somebody with a fair lease significant income could still qualify their kid could still qualify for financial aid so um so again i would i would test that out uh with a net price calculator on individual colleges websites to
063see if if you're in the in the neighborhood of qualifying for eight and uh and then use that as your as your deciding factor um do you want to say anything about loans i mean you can still benefit from being eligible for loans and you don't have to accept the loans you could always get the loan look at the parameters think about it as a family and if you decide not to accept the loan then you can do that but it might be nice to have that in your back pocket yeah yeah that's a great point yeah the the fafsa form the federal form is what gives you access for students to federal student loans and then there's a federal parent loan also and uh you know for good or bad the student loan interest
064rate is actually pretty good right now and uh i wish i wish i could qualify okay so uh swap it out with uh other ones that i have so it's so uh so that's a great point kristin is that you know if even if you say to yourself i don't really want my kid taking that alone if you're if you're fortunate to be in that place that you want you don't have that expectation you may want to consider that as part of your broader financing perspective and say hmm maybe i will have my kid take out a 5 000 loan that only has 2.75 interest as opposed to me as a parent having to take some other type of loan or borrowing from a retirement account which i don't generally recommend or there's some other
065way of financing so uh so it's certainly that's that's an excellent point that that you may decide that that you want to put that into the mix of options you have available to uh to help pay for school i would agree and i would say to take it one step further i think in addition to the what happens if our income is different than 2019 question the question my team is seeing the most issue here is do we have to file the fafsa and the answer is you absolutely do not have to file the fafsa but you want to think about everything that we've talked about today do you want to have eligibility for student loans do you want to see if you are eligible and i will give one other thing one other note
066because we work with so many colleges and universities we do know that there are colleges that have policies that if you do not apply in your first year you would not be permitted to apply for institutional funds in future years you might think well i'm not sure we'll ever need it well you never know if your financial circumstances change from year to year you might want to just have that freshman year fafsa on file and make sure that schools have the the data to benchmark against um not hugely a thing but it is something that we see and in fact i've seen it at a couple of schools here in the valley um one of which i worked at so um it it is something to consider that you know you might want to just
067use sort of filing that fafsa as an insurance policy for future years and the option of borrowing um i don't think we can underscore enough that student loan interest rate is very reasonable and if it's not if it's if it's a subsidized loan which means the interest is not accruing it's pretty much a zero percent loan if you decided at the time the student graduates you want to pay it off then you've just floated some cash for a couple years so just another option to think about [Music] well it looks like we have uh exhausted our folks and we did a pretty good job of covering all the bases so i think we've got most of it and there's another session i think that starts at 405 or so so imagine folks are going to
068want to jump on to that absolutely right all right i think i think uh i'm not sure amanda wants to jump on and say anything but uh um hi excellent it's nice to say a big thank you to you all and a big thank you for all of our great questions um we really appreciate you taking the time to be here this is such a fantastic resource so thank you all so much and uh thanks for tuning in arahs community all right i think we're going to wrap up does anyone have any final final goodbyes good luck all right all right good job everybody ask questions exactly all right thank you take care bye you