If your student comes home for the holidays unenthusiastic about their school and considering transferring, your first impulse might be to tell them to tough it out for the year and reconsider come summer. While that’s probably good parenting advice, it might not be good financial advice. In fact, students who are thinking of transferring are usually best off making…
Merit-based Aid
Any time things change, some people benefit and others are worse off. This is also true of FAFSA Simplification. While many of the formula changes benefit large swaths of the population– such as removing 401k contributions from income or changing child support from income to an asset– other are less advantageous. Two big ones are eliminating the sibling discount and…
Recently Stanford’s announced tuition hike made headlines: a 7% increase in tuition would bring 2023-2024 costs to over $82,000 for tuition, fees, room and board. This follows a 4% rise in the previous academic year and an average annual increase of 3.5% over the past 10 years. Less attention is being paid to Nacubo’s announcement that, headline tuition rates aside,…
Did you get waitlisted at your top choice school? Here’s what you need to know. First, most colleges don’t start calling students from the waitlist until after May 1. This means you should pay a deposit to secure your spot at another college before May 1, just to be sure you have a college for next year. If you do…
Outside scholarships can be a great way to stretch your college budget. And sometimes they offer more than just scholarship dollars: my daughter receives an outside scholarship that includes a career mentor who helped her find an internship that led to a full-time job offer when she graduates this spring. Outside scholarships can also be an exercise in frustration with…