One of Financial Aid's Dirty Little Secrets

Financial Aid Leveraging – Bad News for the Less-than-Wealthy

The way I see it, the main job of financial aid officers should be to help the newly accepted and current students find a way to afford to go to their colleges or universities. In some universities and colleges, this is the way it is. However, there are some colleges that actually plan that some students will not receive financial aid packages that will allow them to enroll. This is called financial aid leveraging, and it maximizes the amount of money paid by students, while balancing that with the goal of meeting enrollment goals. Because of this, richer students, who can afford to pay their Cost of Attendance (COA) will get more spots at the college than they would if ability to pay didn’t play a role in who would enroll. Facts of life, folks.

Why Colleges Leverage Financial Aid
With colleges losing big chunks of their endowments when the stock market tanked, they’ve got to make it up somewhere. Some cut costs; some raise tuition and fees. (The Board of Regents of The University of California system just raised the undergraduate tuition 32 percent over the next two years.) Others cut costs and raise tuition, and some leverage financial aid. There are even companies that help colleges and universities figure out how to do this so they will get the tuition income they want. It’s a rough world out there.

Christian College Parents to the Rescue
This is why you need to get reliable information when facing the daunting task of selecting the right college, applying to colleges, and finding financial aid for college. A woman I met in, of all places, a mammogram waiting room, told me that someone had asked her for $900 to find scholarships for her child. Totally unnecessary!

More Information on Financial Aid
There are lots of places to find reliable information on financial aid without paying someone $900. Christian College Parents is one of them. You can also find a wonderful FREE scholarship search at FastWeb

Blessings,
Bonnie