Keys To Determine What Colleges Are In Budget

Wed, Apr 10, 2024 11:30 AM

When your student starts applying to colleges, it’s important to consider the financial fit of each of their schools. Specially, do they fit your family’s budget? If not, will you or your student be forced to take out loans to cover the remaining funding gap?

There are three key strategies to determine if a college is a good financial fit.

#1 – Have the College Money Talk. Sit down as a family and talk about how you and your son or daughter are going to pay for college and how each of you are going to participate. It is better to have this conversation up front than to have to say no to your student in the spring of their senior year when you discover their top college it out of everyone’s price range. The easiest way for students to help reduce the price is by applying to colleges that are going to give them scholarships to award them for all of their hard work or set up a plan to identify and apply to outside private scholarships.

#2 – Run the Net Price Calculator for each of your students’ prospective colleges. Located on each college’s website, a Net Price Calculator (NPC) allows a family to run a projection of what it might cost to attend that college. However, these NPCs vary on their accuracy, so proceed with caution when trusting what they claim you will end up paying. You may get a nasty surprise when the final Financial Aid Award Letter arrives in the spring and the numbers are dramatically different.

#3 – Go to https://mycap.collegeaidpro.com to set up your free account and do the onboarding process. This will give you and your student critical details every family needs to know before entering the college funding maze. It will calculate your Federal and Institutional Student Aid Index (SAI) amounts based on the financial and factual details you have input. It will also tell you if your student is eligible to receive need-based grants or meri-based scholarships at their selected colleges. It will show you the net prices of the colleges your son or daughter is applying to and help you understand what the colleges are expecting y0u to pay out of pocket each year.

By doing your homework upfront, you and your student can be on the same page so that s/he applies to the right colleges, at the right price! Wishing you the very best as you have your future College Money Talk.