Taking the mysteries out of the system

With the costs of attending post–high school technical or academic institutions climbing and household incomes not keeping pace, there’s increased interest in applying for financial aid—and a great deal of confusion over the process. That need not be the case. Here’s what you need to know about applying for financial aid for your student.

Financial aid comes from two main sources: grants and scholarships, which do not have to be repaid; and self-help aid, which includes loans that must be repaid and work-study programs.

The key to most financial aid comes from filing the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA). The application is a series of questions designed to gather data about par- ents’ and students’ income and assets, the number of people living in the household and the number attending college, as well as the age of the parents. The information collected does not include home equity or value of retirement accounts.

All applications are judged in the same way under guidelines set by Congress. To complete the electronic filing, students must apply for a PIN to use as Federal Student Aid identification at www.pin.ed.gov. It’s a good idea for a parent to also get a PIN to use when signing for the student and verifying the financial information submitted.

Before starting the FAFSA, visit the site at www.fafsa.ed.gov to review the materials needed to complete the questions. Be aware that there are look-alike sites on the Web that will try to confuse you, so use only the .ed.gov site, and not a .com site.

Once the form is completed it can be signed with the PIN and submitted. You have the ability to come back later and amend any of the answers and resubmit the form.

Each year the earliest you can submit the form is the first day of January for the following school year.

The next step is the receipt of the Student Aid Report (SAR). This report, which is also submitted to the schools or universities listed in the FAFSA application, contains a valu- able number: the Expected Family Contribution (EFC), which is the dollar amount the family is expected to be able to contribute to the education of that student in that specific year. All submissions are treated the same way. The schools that receive the SAR will use the EFC in ranking the students for receipt of financial aid.

The EFC can be a source of confusion, since it is just one part of a formula and requires each family to take another step. The formula to remember is: The cost of attendance (COA) at each school minus the EFC equals the financial aid the student qualifies for from that school. Remember, the cost of attending is much more than tuition and books. It includes those, plus lodging, meals, fees and transportation—all direct and indirect costs. You can get the COA from the websites of the schools you are applying to.

How does the formula work? If your student is applying to Bellevue College and the school’s COA is $15,000 and your EFC is $18,000, your student would not qualify for financial aid. If your student is also applying to Washington State University and WSU’s COA is $23,000, your student would qualify for $5,000 in aid. The net cost to your student would be $15,000 at Bellevue College and $18,000 at WSU. In many cases the net cost of attending a higher- priced state or private college can end up being very close to the cost of attending a community school. But you must take the steps to compute the net cost to attend each college.

Assuming that your student is accepted at each school he or she applies to, the next step is the receipt of an award letter from each school. Read each one carefully, and compare and contrast. The award letter will spell out what your student is being offered in grants, loans and/or work-study programs. Obviously, grants are preferable because they don’t have to be paid back. Federal Pell and Stafford loans come with repayment programs following graduation.

If one school is your student’s first choice and its offer is not as good as other schools’, you can call the financial aid office and explore their flexibility to change the combination of grants and loans. Due to the increase in students applying for financial aid, your student may not be offered all the aid he or she qualifies for. In that case, you can qualify for a PLUS loan to fill in the gap.

It is valuable to complete the FAFSA even if you do not think your student qualifies for financial aid. The form is the universal way to compare and rank students, and is even used when institutions are looking to award merit-based scholarships.

You must refile a FAFSA each year. If your family situation changes it can make a big difference in the amount your student may qualify to receive. The addition of a new child or the enrollment of a second child in college, for example, will change your EFC.

To summarize, these are the steps you need to keep in mind in regard to student financial aid:

❉ Start with loans available from the federal government, then turn to the private sector.

❉ Complete a FAFSA even if you don’t think your student qualifies for aid.

❉ Submit a FAFSA as soon as possible after January 1.

❉ Send a renewal FAFSA each year.

❉ Inform the school’s financial aid office if your financial circumstances change.

❉ Attend the Education Expo on January 19 to hear more on the subject. ❖

What are colleges really looking for?

for parents with a child looking ahead to higher education, it’s vitally important to know what Pacific Northwest universities, colleges and technical schools are looking for when admitting new students.

Admission to college has always carried with it a little mystery, a lingering sense of the unknown. How is it that one high school student with a 3.75 grade point average is accepted to a well- respected college while another with the same average is not? In preparing this article, we solicited comments from 16 public and private colleges in Washington, Idaho and Utah to find out what the admissions teams are looking for, and along the way discovered some surprises.

overview

Students are sending more admis- sions applications than ever. A generation ago, the advice to students was to apply to three colleges: one “wish” or “reach” college and two in-state “safe” schools where acceptance was likely. Now, students are applying to upwards of 20 colleges. Applications at the University of Washington have risen from 15,995 in 2005 to 24,539 in 2011, an increase of more than 50 percent. At the same time, there are more than 4,000 degree-granting colleges and universities in the United States. According to the National Association for College Admission Counseling, the percentage of applicants who were offered admission was 67 percent in the fall of 2009.

Advice to parents

As with most advice, it’s important to understand the concept of balance. On one hand, admissions staff will tell you to make certain your student takes the most rigorous curriculum available, such as honors, advanced placement (AP), International Baccalaureate (IB) or Running Start classes. On the other hand, admissions staff are also concerned about over-involved parents who fill their children’s days with soccer, music lessons and club activities, so that the kids have no time to relax and enjoy high school. Find a balance, and remember that you are there to guide and help, but it is your child’s journey and not your own.

Advice to students

Look at your high school years in terms of a personal timetable.

Freshman year: Even though you may not know if you are college bound, take classes that are of interest to you and find one or two activities outside class that you enjoy.

Sophomore year: Take challenging classes in the five core areas—of English, science, social studies, math and foreign languages. Continue with one or two activities. Junior year: In the fall, take the PTSA and begin attending the in-school presentations by visiting college reps. Introduce yourself to the career counselors at your school and use them as mentors. In the spring take the SAT and/or ACT college entrance exam. Plan to spend time in the spring and summer visiting colleges or technical schools to get a feel for where you are comfortable.

Senior year: Don’t slack off. Continue taking courses in the five core academic areas. Begin to apply for college admissions in the fall. Most applications are due between November and January. Apply for free financial aid after January 1, using the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA, form. Start hunting for scholarships.

Also consider several other issues. Your personal email address may tell admissions and future employers more than you want them to know. By the time you are a high school freshman, you should change your email address to some- thing very vanilla. Replace the hotmama@hotmail.com with first name. last name@hotmail.com and stick with this for all your school-or job-related interactions. Begin to cull any photos of you on Facebook or other social networking sites that show you misbehaving. You need to control how you are seen and per- ceived; do not let friends posting photos do it for you.

Finally, learn to write using real English. Admissions staff will downgrade applications where texting style is used. Texting abbreviations may be fine among your friends, but persistent use in an application will help ensure that you continue to live at home.

Key information from the admissions staff survey

❉ If you had lower grades during high school for a time, address this directly and explain what you have learned from the experience.

❉ Use the essay portion of the application to explain who you are beyond your GPA and activities. Flesh out personal information so the staff gets a feeling for you as an individual.

❉ Leave the thesaurus on the bookshelf. Don’t waste your time and theirs trying to sound sophisti-cated. Instead, be genuine and use your own voice. Don’t try to be clever or dramatic if that is not you. Write like it matters, not as if you are texting.

❉ Visit the colleges you have an interest in attending. Don’t make a selection just because a parent or family member went there. Try to visit when school is in session so you can sit in on a class, talk to students and see if you are comfortable there.

The following are the answers to the questions about admissions we posed to selected colleges and universities in the West. If you would like to go directly to the school’s admissions page on their site, simply click on their logo.

Every rider counts

By Jo Porter

Each school day, the Issaquah School District Transportation Department transports about 8,500 students on 150 buses to 23 schools on routes covering 7,200 miles. Optimal routes are designed by experts using complex computer systems and gPS data. A typical run wastes no time between picking up and delivering high school, middle school, early-start and late-start elementary school, and half-day kindergarten students. The bell times are so interdependent that starting secondary schools just 15 minutes later or dismissing elementary schools 15 minutes earlier without shifting the entire system would require an extra 41 buses costing $4,242,000 plus an additional $1,123,006 per year to operate the less efficient routes. (Not to mention the expense of an extra facility to house the buses and the effort to recruit an additional 41 bus drivers.) The operational cost alone of such a schedule change represents about 15 teaching positions! We never lose sight of the fact that we are here to educate students. That means our drivers put the utmost priority on getting students safely to and from school. What you may not realize, however, is how vigorously we try to ensure that our bus operations spare every penny possible for classroom instruction.

The state funds only about half of the district’s actual transportation costs, which means we bridge the $3.2 million annual shortfall through local levy dollars that would other- wise go to schools and classrooms. Because the state’s funding formula is based on a head count of students riding our buses, we can maximize our revenue by getting every regular rider on the bus during count days.

In past years, drivers counted every student rider for the state during a specific week in October. This year, there is a new methodology: Drivers will count student riders every day for one month in the fall, winter, and spring during the morning and afternoon routes. The state will use the three consecutive days of highest ridership during each season to determine the district’s overall transportation funding, so it’s very important that all regular riders take the bus to and from school whenever possible. This has the added benefit of reducing gridlock on and around school campuses before and after school.

The flip side of maximizing reve- nue is maximizing what we do with it. On top of underfunding school transportation, the state over the past three years has cut more than $16 million from the district’s annual operations budget—a gigantic hit. That means it’s more important than ever for the Transportation Department to run efficiently to keep dollars flowing to classrooms. While several communities have been directly affected by becoming “walking areas” (the state expects students who live within one mile of school to walk and provides no bus funding for them), every family feels the effect daily. How? School start and dismissal times are so tightly interwoven around efficient bus routes that they could hold water.

Please remember: get all regular riders on the bus whenever possible, and never hesitate to contact us at 425.837.6330 if you have questions about routes or anything else throughout the school year.