Regional tuition exchanges are a great tool for kids who want to go out of state but don’t want to pay out-of-state tuition. These programs allow students from neighboring states to attend one another’s colleges for (typically) a slight premium over in-state tuition but well below full out-of-state cost. Each of these programs has its own rules and processes,
Just because the FAFSA is available earlier this year doesn’t mean you have to complete it now. Most school and state deadlines haven’t changed. For example, the Oregon schools still have their end of February/beginning of March deadlines. Why is that? The goal of making the FAFSA available earlier is enable families to understand their financial position in advance of…
Want to know what the people evaluating your admissions application are really looking for? Here is a helpful article from a UC Berkeley (Go Bears!) application reader.
FAFSA does have a minimal income protection allowance. For parents, it tracks the federal poverty line fairly closely but has an additional variable of number attending college. For students, it’s a flat $6,420. Here is the table from this year’s FAFSA for dependent students:
There are four components of EFC: parent income and assets, and student income and assets. Each is assessed slightly differently in the formulas. Since parents generally have substantially more income and assets than students, their portion of the EFC gets considerably more attention. Let’s look at the student side because it can cause