2013 Federal Student Aid: Fill & Download for Free

The eight colleges that play sports together in the Ivy athletic league (Ivy League ) and many of the other elite Private universities like MIT, Duke, Stanford, Caltech, etc. offer Up To full financial aid to any student who Requested financial aid during the application process. (see below about Need-blind and need-aware).Most of those universities are Need-Blind for US citizens, permanent residents and legal refugees. However, most of those universities are Need-Aware in the admissions process for international applicants. Most need-aware colleges will Never provide financial aid to an undergraduate student if they did Not request financial aid during the initial application process (freshman application or transfer application). Whereas a Need-Blind university will provide financial aid whenever a student applies for the aid.However, the application can be a tedious process since the applicant and All of her/his parents must fill out a daunting amount of forms which must be verified by an independent agency in the applicant’s country (for the USA, the colleges rely upon the Federal IRS. Twice I had to wait for IRS verification when my son was requesting financial aid from Villanova in 2012 and 2013). You all fill out the FAFSA forms (US only) and the PROFILE forms (everyone else) and there may be another set of forms that are used.FAFSA - Free Application for Federal Student AidApply for College Financial Aid (PROFILE)I know families that:The college demanded complete bank statements for all of the siblings (under the age of 16) of the applicant to make certain that the family was not hiding money in the siblings’ namesThe college demanded a huge amount of additional paperwork for families that owned a small business. Many colleges look at small businesses as places to hide moneyThe Plus side is that some applicants get full financial aid. For example recently MIT stated that 35% of the MIT undergraduates received financial aid in excess of the cost of tuition (i.e. MIT was also assisting with the cost of room and board and books/supplies)NOTE: All of the colleges look to the Family and the Applicant to determine an Expected Family Contribution (EFC). The colleges all expect that the student will contribute to that EFC. Therefore, do Not think that each Summer you will be lying on the beach somewhere for the entire Summer. The student is Expected to get a Summer Job each and every Summer prior to being an undergraduate at college and Earn several Thousand dollars (US) from that and Contribute that money to their education. Or, Borrow from the Federal Government (Direct Loans). Indeed, roughly 30% of the 2017 MIT graduating students with bachelors degrees owed an average of $20,000 in student loans. And this is at a college that guarantees up to full student aid. Every student has “skin in the game”.I did Not borrow money to attend MIT as an undergraduate (1969 - 1973) and I worked an average of 10 hours per week as an intramural sport referee/umpire to make spending money. I graduated with no loans, but times were different back then.Need-Blind admission process, then you can apply for financial aid at Any time as an undergraduate.Need-Aware admission process, then you must apply for financial aid when you apply to the college or you may Never apply for financial aid from the college.FAFSA and PROFILE forms. Go online and read. Also use the net-price calculators that US universities are Mandated by the Federal Government to provide.Enjoy the financial aid application process (and for the males that includes registering with the Selective Service for the draft…) it is part of your overall education.

No.Let’s get this straight…There is no legitimate reason for college to have become as expensive as it’s become. Free College does nothing to reform the changes that have made college more expensive.The cost of a college education has skyrocketed since the 1970s with the Price Of College Increasing Almost 8 Times Faster Than Wages, according to Forbes Magazine.The cost of tuition has gone up at more than twice the rate of inflation.At times when the cost of energy has gone up by much smaller percentages, we’ve seen oil company executives hauled up in front of congress for questioning and verbal excoriation.So far, college and university presidents have been spared that kind of treatment, which is unfortunate.The fact is that there is no legitimate reason for college to have become so expensive so quickly. Contrary to widespread misconceptions, the issue isn’t lack of public sector spending. As Law Professor Paul F. Campos has pointed out…“In fact, public investment in higher education in America is vastly larger today, in inflation-adjusted dollars, than it was during the supposed golden age of public funding in the 1960s. Such spending has increased at a much faster rate than government spending in general. For example, the military’s budget is about 1.8 times higher today than it was in 1960, while legislative appropriations to higher education are more than 10 times higher.”The amount we spend on higher education has increased a increased more than 5 times faster than the amount we spend on national defense. The factors that contribute to the increase in cost are completely within the control of those running educational institutions, and at every step they’ve made the wrong decision.So what is making college so expensive.(1) Bloated AdministrationThere has been a shockingly large expansion in the number of administrators on college campuses. That expansion has created an artificial demand that has driven up the pay in that field. Again, Professor. Campos puts it better than I could.“a major factor driving increasing costs is the constant expansion of university administration. According to the Department of Education data, administrative positions at colleges and universities grew by 60 percent between 1993 and 2009, which Bloomberg reported was 10 times the rate of growth of tenured faculty positions.Even more strikingly, an analysis by a professor at California Polytechnic University, Pomona, found that, while the total number of full-time faculty members in the C.S.U. system grew from 11,614 to 12,019 between 1975 and 2008, the total number of administrators grew from 3,800 to 12,183 — a 221 percent increase.”Not only is the number of administrators exploded, the amount we’re paying administrators has skyrocketed.“On the other hand, there are no valid arguments to support the recent trend toward seven-figure salaries for high-ranking university administrators, unless one considers evidence-free assertions about “the market” to be intellectually rigorous.”In many ways the administrators have helped create an atmosphere where they are needed. If you’re going to implement a student speech code to make students be nice, you’re going to need someone that students can complain to if someone has “handyman” instead of “handyperson” and that person might well have a total compensation package over six figures.According to Ivy Kaplan in The Globe Post, “between 2003 to 2013, many four-year institutions spent more on administration, student services and academic support than they did on instruction, according to the Delta Cost Project.”(2) There is no REAL price to tuitionThe bloated administration tells us where all the extra money is going, but it doesn’t explain the mechanism used to rip-off students and parents. In this section I’ll attempt to explain the practices that are legal, but shouldn’t be.Let’s say that a college has too many Asian students and too many white females, and it really wants to create a student body that meets certain ethnic goals. It’s going to charge “more desirable” students a different price. So the price basically changes depending on where you’re from or where you’r ancestors are from. According to Adam Davidson, This could be the 'single most important' reason why college tuition is skyrocketing.In essence, the higher the tuition cost, the easier it is for universities to recruit the exact type of students they want by offering them tuition discounts, according to Kevin Crockett, a consultant with Ruffalo Noel Levitz, a firm that helps colleges and universities set prices."I've got to have enough room under the top-line sticker price," Crockett told The Times Magazine. Davidson explained: "A school that charges $50,000 is able to offer a huge range of inducements to different sorts of students: some could pay $10,000, others $30,000 or $40,000. And a handful can pay the full price."The “starting price” of the Toyota 86 is $28,000 for the GT version.Now if car dealerships operated the way colleges did the base price for the same car would be $60,000. If there are too many Asians driving Toyota 86s, then Mr. Nguyen is going to pay the full $60,000. If there are too many white females driving 86s than Ms. Anderson is going to pay the full $60,000. But let’s say Toyota decides that there aren’t enough Samoans driving Toyota 86s, so Mr. Leota is going to get his for $20,000, with part of Mr. Nguyan’s and Ms. Anderson’s $60,000 paying part of the cost of his car. Maybe Toyota wants someone more athletes driving Toyota 86s so the price drops to $15,000 for anyone who ran the Boston Marathon. Maybe Toyota isn’t selling enough 86s in northern states so they reduce the price for drivers living in Virginia Minnesota and Helena Montana to $18,000. The full $60,000 price paid by drivers in California and New York subsidizes the drivers in Montana and Minnesota. Maybe Toyota realizes that the average person can’t afford a Toyota 68 that costs $60,000 so they create special prices so that a whole bunch of people get to buy the car for less than half the sticker price and anybody who can afford the full sticker price has to pay $60,000 for a $28,000 car.If that sounds like a crazy system, it is. But it’s exactly the way the price of tuition works. Basically, for the last couple decades colleges, especially private liberal arts colleges, have used the kind of business practices that would be illegal in the rest of the world.(3) Financial Aid May Be Driving Up TuitionLet’s go back to the car analogy for a minute. Years ago I purchased a new Jeep Wrangler for about $14,000 by basically telling the dealer that was the total money I had and I wouldn’t, under any circumstances, pay more than I had.The dealer eventually let the car go for for $14,000. But what if there was a government program that would add $10,000 to whatever I had to spend. Do you think the dealer would have let me drive my new Jeep off the lot for only $4000 from my pocket? Hell No! If they knew the government was kicking in money they would have charged me $24,000.Writing in Forbes, Preston Cooper explains How Unlimited Student Loans Drive Up Tuition through a similar process.A 2015 study found that a dollar of subsidized (non-PLUS) student loans increases published tuition by 58 cents at a typical college, with larger effects once reductions in institutional financial aid are taken into account. An NBER paperissued last year concluded that changes to federal student loans are more than sufficient to explain tuition increases at private nonprofit colleges. And a 2014 analysis found that for-profit colleges eligible for federal student aid charged tuition 78% higher than that of similar but aid-ineligible institutions.(4) Proliferation of dubious courses, majors and departmentsWhen colleges had a smaller number of majors and those majors had a more prescribed path to completion, there was a certain economy of scale. If you are paying an English professor $100,000/year and he teaches a mandatory course on Shakespeare to 100 students, that’s pretty good value for the money. If another professor paid the same amount is teaching some bizarre interest of the professor to 20 students, it basically costs the same as the 100 students in the core class.Granted, there should be some room for individual interest within a major, but students have been able to satisfy graduation requirements at various schools with:Deconstructing Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Emerson College)Tree Climbing (Cornell)Philosophy of the Simpsons (UC Berkeley)Calvin and Hobbes (Oberlin)Queer Positions (Oberlin)Tattoes in American Popular Culture (Scripps)Getting Dressed (Princeton)Seminar in Transgender studies (CSULA)Lady Gaga and the Sociology of Fame (U. South Carolina)How to Watch TV (Montclaire State U)Makin’ Whoopi: Goldberg’s Canon (Bates College)History of Surfing (UCSB)Demystifying the Hipster (Tufts)Transgender Poetry (Hunter College)Surviving the Coming Zombie Apocalypse (Michigan state)OK, I actually like the last one.One can debate the merits of any particular course, but the fact is that offering a smorgasbord of exotica is a lot less cost effective than having a clear defined path to a degree. It would make far more sense, and be more cost effective, to have fewer and more academically rigorous choices. And I can live without my Zombie Apocalypse course if you can live without your Lady Gaga course. And neither of us getting what we want can make college more affordable.But the exotica doesn’t stop at individual courses. U.C. Santa Cruz has a History of Consciousness graduate program where students get to navel gaze on their own political beliefs.Give me another hit of that consciousness man.You can major in Sexuality at San Francisco State University. You can major in Canadian Studies at a number of universities including Duke, John Hopkins, SUNY and U of Vermont.Having specific majors in Canadian or any other studies is an example of something that can be more effectively covered in previously existing legitimate majors. There’s no reason a scholar interested in Canada can’t just study History, Literature or Politics and do individual research projects or their senior thesis on Canada.Unless we address the four trends that are driving up the cost of education and actually reverse the direction of those trends, the price of college is going to keep going up and up. Making college free just means somebody else is paying for it and might actually make the problem worse.

I was lucky in that I did not need any student loans when I was a college student (1969 - 1978 for undergraduate and graduate degrees). Indeed, back then college were Very affordable.My sons graduated college in 2013 and 2014 and Each of them had $25,000 in total student loans.If you can keep your Total student loans to earn a bachelors degree to $27,000 or less, then you Merely need to fill out the:FAFSA - Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA)and possibly the PROFILE forms: Apply for College Financial AidYou and All of your parents fill out sections of the FAFSA and the PROFILE online and indicate to which colleges you are applying. FAFSA is free and the PROFILE is a nominal cost per college. The results of the forms are sent to the colleges’ financial aid offices and they will then make offers to you for:merit scholarshipsgrants from college moneyPell grant from the Federal government (if you and your family are relatively poor)Federal Direct Loan ($5,500 $6,500 $7,500 and $7,500 max for each of four years)Your parents merely need to assist you in filling out the forms. Your parents do Not co-sign a Federal Direct loan with you. You merely go online and take a 30 minute informational “course” before you electronically sign for the Federal loans (first time only). You have to start making monthly repayments starting six months after you have completed attending college as at least a half-time student.If you need a student loan and are a US citizen or permanent resident then use the Federal Direct loan first and hopefully only.If you need a Private student loan to supplement your federal loan (not advisable), then you may very well need a co-signer.One son paid off the $25,000 in three years and the other is doing it over five years. You are required to pay off the Federal loans in ten years or sooner.All the best.