The FAFSA itself won’t be available until Oct. 1, but in the meantime you can download the EFC Formula Guide to see how the sausage gets made. If you are a parent of a high school senior who will be completing the FAFSA this fall for whom the cost of college is important, here is a suggestion for how to…
Families getting started on the college search process are well-served by keeping a list of schools that the student is interested in. (This should be the student’s job, by the way.) But what does that list look like? What goes in it? Here’s my suggestion: Create a spreadsheet in Google Sheets (or your preferred online platform). The left-hand column will…
Clearly, test-optional admissions are here to stay, with more than 1,600 four-year colleges offering test-optional admissions for the fall. More than 80 others are test-blind for the 2021 admissions cycle, according to FairTest’s online database of testing policies. So students not wanting to submit test scores will have plenty of schools to choose from. But pulling back the curtain shows…
Many states offer free community college to some or all residents. But there’s some fine print that makes timely action necessary. Most states require students to apply for free community college during their senior year of high school. By now, most college-bound seniors have a pretty good sense of what their plans are, and those plans might not include community…
About 170 pages of 2020’s year-end omnibus federal spending bill were devoted to FAFSA Simplification. Sounds almost ironic, doesn’t it? The changes aren’t all that simple, but here’s a summary. Most important, the changes come into effect for the FAFSA that will be available in the fall of 2022, for the 2023-2024 school year. That means that students who are…
