How to Get More Financial Aid and Scholarships for College

Now that I've set my retirement number, I'm working on another big financial number -- how much I need to save to send my kids to college. Of course, I'm also interested in how I can save on college and/or help my kids get some financial assistance. So when I saw this piece from U.S. News on uncovering the many secrets of financial aid, I knew I had to post on it.

The key for me was their list of ways students can increase their chances of getting scholarships. Their suggestions and my comments:

Most schools give bigger grants to students who prove their abilities through grades, test scores, Advanced Placement classes, and other indicators. But an analysis of more than 300 award letters sent out by over 100 public and private colleges around the nation reveals a strategy likely to improve a student's chances for merit aid. No matter what the student's SAT score, those who applied to schools in which their scores put them in the top 25 percent of the school's student body tended to get more and bigger grants. On average, letters to students who were in the top 25 percent contained grants averaging $11,144, meeting 81 percent of the student's need. Award letters to students whose SAT scores were at least 200 points below the top 25 percent floor offered grants totaling only $7,800, meeting just 64 percent of need.

This seems to be good news all the way around. Not only doesn't your child have to be Einstein (he/she only has to be in the top 25%, an achievable goal for most determined students), but the payoff is pretty big -- over $3,000 per year. That's some real help in paying for college!

This idea worked well for me when I went to college. As a result of being a good student and involved in many extracurricular activities in high school, I got thousands of dollars of aid in academic and leadership scholarships.

Schools are more likely to give generously to students who set off bidding wars. David Lang, an economist at California State University-Sacramento, found preliminary evidence that students accepted at several schools get as much as 30 percent more in grants than similarly qualified students who get into just one college. The head of financial aid for a medium-sized private university in the Midwest, who did not want to reveal his own school's practices, said many aid officers will look at a student's FAFSA to see what other schools are listed. "It is not so much how many schools as what schools you've applied to," he says. If the student has listed schools with similar costs and rankings in the same geographic region, the officer may say: "Wow, we compete with those, and we have to up the ante," he says.

Applying to several schools also pays off for students who think their initial aid offers were too low. More schools now up awards to students who have better offers from competing schools. In April, Harvard, which gives aid only to meet need, announced that it would match more-generous awards to low-income students.

The key here is for the student to be desirable enough to be accepted at several colleges. If he/she isn't, then there's no bidding war to work in your advantage.

I wish I had known about this tip when I went to school (though I did have most of my schooling paid in other ways).

At math-heavy schools like Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, where females are in short supply, being a woman is one of about 100 factors that can increase a student's award. A growing number of universities are using aid to address the opposite problem: a shortage of males. Just 43 percent of all current college students are men.

Ok, I have a serious and a not-so-serious comment on this one.

Serious comment: seems like a good tip and is worth a try.

Not-so-serious comment: Man, I missed out! Why couldn't there have been 43% guys when I went to school? My school was something like 55% guys.

Students know, of course, that there are scholarships set aside for those with in-demand athletic, musical, or other skills. But they may not realize that there is extra aid for students who choose majors that governments, schools, or donors want to encourage. The federal government is starting to hand out grants of up to $4,000 to low-income students who study math, science, or foreign languages. And many colleges funnel extra aid to students who beef up majors the school wants to strengthen. Kellie Laurenzi, dean of enrollment services at Robert Morris University in western Pennsylvania, says she awards more aid to students who apply to the school's new majors such as actuarial sciences or media arts. "We are trying to entice students" who wouldn't have considered the school before it started those courses of study, she says.

Interesting. And certainly worthwhile if you're interested in the subject area where they are giving away money. But of course I wouldn't change the course of my life just to save a few thousand dollars. It's just not worth it for me to be stuck working in "actuarial sciences" for 40 years. ;-)

That's it for all of the "best" ideas in the piece. Here are the others just to round it out:

• Although court rulings and local laws have made some schools leery of race-based scholarships, schools are eager for diversity of all types and thus use aid to attract students who can bring cultural differences to a campus.

• Many schools try to recruit from far away so that students get to meet all sorts of people. But some schools, like the University of Redlands in Southern California, give bigger grants to locals.

• Most schools admit a higher percentage of students who apply early. Only a handful of those schools, however, also give those early applicants better treatment in financial aid. Students who risk waiting and apply along with everybody else at the beginning of the year may lower their odds of admission but raise their chances of getting bigger offers from schools, says consultant Maguire.

• If previous graduates from the student's high school performed well at the college, or the high school is known as a tough grader, many colleges bend the rules to offer more merit aid.

• A study by educators in the state of Washington showed that the higher the student placed the name of a school on the FAFSA, the more likely the student was to attend-and thus, the less financial aid the school might need to offer.

I suggest you stop by U.S. News and read the entire article. There's lots of great stuff there that I couldn't include in this post, and if you're close to applying for college, listening to their advice can save you thousands if not tens of thousands of dollars.

Comments

[cory]

I went to Rennselaer Polytechnic Institute, and basically every woman who applied for Financial Aid received what was called, if memory serves, the Emily Roebling Scholarship. This became affectionately known as the "I Have Boobies" Scholarship.