Financial Aid Basics

Families and students need to realize that the financial aid office is the number one source of information for them. You know a college you want to attend but maybe you’re not sure how to pay for it. The school’s financial aid office is where money miracles occur. It’s very important that the family, once they made the decision as to which institution their child is going to go, that they schedule an appointment with the financial aid office.

Thousands, maybe millions of high school graduates missed out on advanced education opportunities because of faulty assumptions and misconceptions. One of the most common misconceptions that we have found students have is that if students is a U.S. citizen and the parent is undocumented, that the student cannot apply for financial aid. And that is totally incorrect. As long as the student has a green card, permanent residency card or if the student is a U.S. citizen the student is definitely eligible to receive financial aid. The other misconception is that if the parents are working the student is not going to be eligible to receive financial aid.

The biggest misconception is that students who can’t pay for tuition are not able to go to college. If students think that they don’t have money that means they cannot go to school but that’s when financial aid comes into place. The less money the family has available the more money financial aid will be able to help them with. It bears repeating. The less income you have the more money is available for you, both grants and scholarships so I think we just need to get the word out.

Finally, a big misconception is that if you are applying for financial aid you are affecting your chances of getting into the college of your choice, not true. The admissions office simply admits students based on academic background. What the admission office will do is they will notify the financial aid office when a student is admitted to the institution. Therefore that actually kicks off the process of financial aid. Once you do apply, the financial aid office will determine your award in two ways: need-based, which is determined by household income and merit-based, which is based on the academic performance and talent of the student.

The majority of the financial aid available is need-based but a lot of schools a lot of the large universities also have merit scholarships. After contacting your financial aid office and receiving the proper forms to fill out, it’s very important that you keep in mind of the deadlines. Here’s a tip: complete federal financial aid packet and submit it in early January and you could get even more money. The grants sometimes are awarded on a first come first serve basis, if the student completes the packet early and the funds are available, the student will be given some of those grants that are limited.

Ask the folks in the financial aid office to stir you toward grants and scholarships first because they’re like free money, you don’t have to pay them back. Grants usually come from the federal government. From there you also have parent loans and then private loans. We always try to say, you know from the Sallie Mae approach, we usually call a 123 approach, and that is: number one, every family should apply for financial aid and receive as much free money in the ways of grants and scholarships as possible. And if you and your family don’t speak English very well, many financial aid offices also offer bilingual services to help make the process easier. We go to community fairs.

We have been participating in the Hispanic scholarship service for the last four years so we go to town halls with them. In some states, California is one of them, there are laws aimed at helping students who don’t have a social security number. What we do tell the students that we have a program that could help them attend school legally without any impact whatsoever in their legal status. And that is if they apply through the school using their AB540, they could attend school as long as they could provide documentation that they attended a high school and graduated from a California high school and attended for three years, the student could attend a community college or even a university paying resident fees instead of non-resident.