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2024 Financial Aid Presentation

Added Apr 22, 2024 •

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Dear Junior Families, we invite you to take a moment and watch the video presentation of our SPHS Financial Aid Night Workshop, held on April 10th. This workshop covers all income levels and will help you learn where to find free money for college. With the cost of higher education continuing to rise, it is essential to explore every financial aid opportunity available. Don't miss out on this chance to learn how you can make college more affordable for your family.

Show Transcript

welcome everyone my name is Trevor Mizrahi I just want to say thank you to the counseling team for putting this on probably not the most exciting topic that you want to hear end of a long work day but I'm going to try to do my best to keep this somewhat engaging and hopefully you're going to learn something tonight that you can actually start to put into action right away really my goal as I go through this Workshop used to help you become more informed with things not to do like common mistakes that families run into terminology that you're going to want to know ahead of time and really about how to formulate the best possible pathway for the student and the parent together the reason why I love doing these workshops is because I usually find when I speak with a student and a parent that they're not always on the same page when it comes to the college and ever so students use have their own points that they want to focus on when it comes to discovering a college list and what what makes sense to them and then parents we have certain goals and objectives that we want to have as far as you know getting a good job afterwards not being in debt for the rest of our lives being able to maybe buy a home start a family and so those types of disconnects I usually see so by the time I'm finished with this Workshop what I will promise that you'll walk away with some really good ideas techniques strategies that you can are putting this together as both both parent and student and really make this a worthwhile process I will say the biggest mistake that families will make in this process is just waiting till the very very last minute to get going on the financial aid side and so what I'm going to do is just be a little bit more practice with you give you a couple action items things that you should really just work on with the student to become more familiar with how the financial aid system so that you can make more informed decisions I usually can go about 2 hours with this topic I only have an hour with you so I'm going to keep it concise and then at the end will open up for humanetics any questions along the way that how to type into the chat feel free to do that and then we'll respond to it to those as well I'm parents I usually ask this question when I'm live and in person but I can't see your hand what I do know is that probably 99% of you would admit to what I'm about to ask if you have never ever ever as a parent sat down with your student and actually opened up your tax return and show them how much money you make each year I'm guessing the majority of you have never done that and it's typical and for you not to because we don't really do that in America but the reason why I say that is how are we ever supposed to know where our student how are they supposed to know how much College costs if they don't really understand where the family's situation is and so what I'm going to try to do is help you become a little bit more proactive in learning about net price calculator and doing some of your own home work without having to divulge all of your income to your skin if you don't want to I'm going to throw this in the chat so that everybody has access to the handouts here the first one is called the Trevor's notes to take home so if you not if I'm able to actually put this in the chat so you know what I'll just make it available afterwards so everybody will have access to this it's either just helpful things that you'll be getting access to the handout will kind of cover some of the bullet points I'm going to talk about in case you don't remember write everything down it'll be covered in there and then I also have a timeline that will show you step-by-step how to take advantage of each month moving forward until senior year miss share my screen so you you have PowerPoint it's available know when it comes to this whole financial aid process I usually like to think of it in three different categories so understanding the cost of the school. tell you so what you get out of the entire engagement with that school and then the outcome so what I'm going to show you here is the best way to I've really discovered that a family should be looking at a school from the very least so what I've done here cuz I put two categories of schools Tier 1 schools are usually the school that every student Knows by name these are schools at pretty much at all of their friends talk about everybody knows this name as well so Tulane UCLA Michigan to school so these are schools that aren't necessarily A Reach For Students may be in in most cases they could be really a Target school meeting that they're very good match chances of you getting cepted are probably a lot higher going through tear to school and getting admitted to a tier-one school so just so you know how to kind of differentiate these two what we're going to look at here is first a family who has an income of over 250 thousand dollars a year and the GPA is a 3.9 for the student so every category family has the same GPA for the student what you'll notice has the income does change so now we're going to look at a family that has $150,000 a year of income and then play let's say that has supposed to run 90,000 so what happens here at a school like two lane is there going to Discount this family because of the students overall academic resume their aptitude their GPA things like that so they're going to drop the cost through Merit Scholarships for this family this family is going to qualify for some merit scholarship but also it's called need-based financial aid so to lane ends up being quite a bit less and then this family's going to ebook Merit and need-based financial aid as well so there are school that do couple both merit scholarship and they add in what they call need-based financial aid and I'll get into the what that means a little bit more families that are in this income range at AUC School are expected to pay the full price they don't qualify for what's called The Cow Grant or the middle class scholarship I'm in a family at this income range they're going to be below the middle class scholarship range so that's a that's a California Grant you can actually get and it is a deduction from the tuition and then the family that's around 90,000 would end up getting UCLA's costs down to close around 17,000 hopefully you've seen this already so what year noticing out-of-state public schools are going to remain constant and so if you're going to ever look at an out-of-state Public School the one thing you should know is that they do rely on Revenue coming from out of the families which means that they're not going to Discount you much at all and spray example University of Oregon University of Michigan University of Washington u-dub these are all really like well-known schools that students love to apply to their Great Schools but just know that there's a premium that comes with going out date to a public school real quick I am going to mention there is a Consortium of colleges in our neighboring states called the Western undergrad exchange for short they call it Woolley so wue and if you ever want to look into any of these schools there are some really really good programs that they had some of the schools and they give you close to in-state tuition so they don't charge you as much as the non we we suppose that you see here so if you're interested in Public Schools what I would suggest is the Western undergraduate Exchange now what you notice here is if we look at tier two schools they're going to also do the same thing they're going to give discounts but usually what you're going to find is that your two schools are going to be more merit scholarship then it's here once fully typically would and that's just going to be a general rule of thumb I want I want you to maybe write down your notes or just kind of have embedded in your head that the less selective the University the higher the likelihood that you're going to get a larger merit scholarship okay so that's that's how you can think of that and then the next thing that we should look at is the value so when I talk about value it many different things to a family but here's what all I'll start with which is graduation rates so 77% of students that go to Tulane will finish their undergraduate degree in 4 years retention rate meaning how many students after freshman year come back to that say and in earning potential so these would be considered value points that you should be looking at as you build your college list I have an ashtray here next to DePaul and the reason why this isn't I need to know so you see a very low percentage in comparison hear of students that graduate in 4 years something that the Paul does that is actually in my eyes is extremely valuable is they have a lot of programs that they combine masters programs that you could finish with an undergraduate degree and a master's in a total of 5 years and if you're interested in you kind of already know ahead of time that you're going to go beyond the Bachelors maybe consider a couple schools that combine than undergrad along with the Masters together because I could end up saving you quite a bit of money along with time as well so that's why you see the graduation rate little bit lower there same thing that you could also do here is just look at the retention rates and earning potential and then finally we're going to get outcomes for this means that whatever field of study your student might be interested in look at what the potential earnings would look like does anybody know who earns more on average a nurse practitioner or a mechanical engineer do anybody know before I actually showed this I was shocked when I was doing this research and I said I would have thought the other way around they got as you start to look at info fast forward to see what the earning potential it look like this would help you determine if it makes sense to let's say go to a school like Cornell and if you don't qualify for any financial aid doesn't make sense for you to pay nothing about 90,000 + 89,000 year or go to a UC school at half that price and you're going to end up learning the same so these are some of the things that we want to start thinking about as we approach this in the universe of colleges there are some that are considered buyers and what that means by definition is they don't maybe have the name cachet like some of the common school that everybody talks about but they have a really really good educational program the way that they recruit students is by offering them really really large scholarships so if you noticed on the spreadsheet that I have here school that are considered buyers are typically ones that will be a little bit more generous and how they award merit scholarship sellers bees are just by definition ones that typically get an overwhelming number of applicants so they're little less as generous they're not as generous as they buyers are with giving out scholarship money and that's just their practice that's how we can look at that so just to give you an idea of some of these fools like Johns Hopkins obviously very selective in high demand they'll be considered a seller RPI a good school is considered a buyer I can tell you the quality of their education with the job placement that they have I don't know why they're considered a buyer but these would be some of the suggestions that I would have is just expand your vocabulary and other colleges even though you haven't heard them does not mean that they're bad schools does this make sense so far about how I've kind of put together three different categories of how you can start approaching this if it does it's really going to help you in the navigation process parents are going to run into this issue pretty soon if you haven't already you're going to take your child on a campus tour and you might go to University of Colorado Boulder in the one thing that I hear back from students every single time they come back from that school is they say Trevor you have no idea how gorgeous the rock climbing wall is in their new gymnasium that they just built I like all right that's great you can definitely do that on your free time and then soon as I go to Arizona State they look at 1 do they have a lazy river outside the dorms and nice that would be the after a long fine I'll just go and kind of hang out in the Lazy River so these are the things that students are paying attention to when you're visiting the college is there looking at the sports program parents if you can start to really get them engaged with what are the programs look like what type of internships are offered that could also be part of the value proposition when you speak with her about schools Merit Aid is absolutely a marketing tool so what happens in the in the college recruiting process when they admit a student every college in the United States has historical data and what they do is they have per zip code in the United States they know how much historical he has it taken how much financial aid does it usually take for a student at this is zip code to commit to our school so they know price sensitivity based zip codes and so forth when do the things that happens is they award Merit Aid as a marketing tool to say hey if you'd like to come here's how much we're going to give you to make it that much more affordable believe it or not not every school is made equally so do you apply to lasell University of Oregon you might be able to get the stamps scholarship for around $12,000 per year which is good but imagine if you were to apply to school like Suffolk University in Massachusetts their tops our ship is around $45,000 per year so when you start to look at the differences in the school's some schools have a lot deeper Pockets than more generous than others and it comes down to how their marketing to your student what are some of the things that trigger a merit scholarship so you can get money from a college called a merit scholarship no matter where your income is on the tax bracket scale you can make over $1000000 a year you can make less than $50,000 a year it doesn't matter merit-based merit-based money is not tied to your income whatsoever it's purely based on the students overall academic profile so GPA Talent so I'm one of the things that colleges are really really interested in our innovators students that have taken the initiative and maybe bringing a cause to their school starting a club I'm playing an instrument these are things that are really really focused on so don't think that you you need to just do one extracurricular that is going to blow the doors off of any college it's what they're really happy to do what they get excited to do have them pursue that and this will be really the whole narrative in their college essay the college essay is a really big part of this merit-based scholarship window that y'all have some schools are bringing test scores back the major is also going to be indicative to how much money you can get so just to give you an example a couple years ago I had a student who went to UC San Diego for computer science and she was in the Jacobs School of Engineering at UC San Diego because both of her parents were engineers their income was over the amount that they would ever call apply for financial aid educ School but the cool thing that happened at the Jacobs school is they received a large Grant from one of the co-founders of Qualcomm so he asked the co-founder of Qualcomm graduated from the Jacobs School of Engineering and so she had her entire education subsidized through that Grant So based on the major that could also kind of build in some of the scholarship money as well choice of universities like we talked about on the office side of the financial aid scale comes need-based financial aid so for example the Ivy League schools and schools like Stanford they don't offer merit scholarship we do need based financial aid and pretty much every school offer some type of need-based financial aid so what they're looking at is your income your assets special circumstances and also choice of University I give you a quick idea on your taxes it's your adjusted gross income they sometimes refer to it as a GI and so if you're a self-employed individual you're never going to use your gross income it's always going to be your address think I'm assets that they're going to look at or going to be assets that are considered non-retirement so if we were to take a quick peek at a non retirement asset that would be set for example like a mutual fund stocks if you have income property a money market account these are considered assets general rule of thumb it's always better to have money say in the parents named versus having money saved in the child's name if your goal is to try to get need-based financial aid so let me say that one more time if the family looks a has $50,000 in savings and you're applying for financial aid always going to be better to have that money saved in the parents named versus having money saved in the child's name and it's simply because the college calculation looks at money in the child's name very very different 529 College Savings Plan these are assets that colleges will look at so just be aware a utma or ugma account that's a that's a child asset so just know how to differentiate those two choice of University did very quickly give you an idea if you are a family that I qualify for need-based financial aid but you chose the university that just doesn't do a good job of a warning that you're better off applying to schools that are more generous for need-based financial aid so that's what we're going to get into right now if you've never done this type of research this is probably going to be one of the first things that you could really start to do with this student is just go to the college's website so here I just pulled this off of USC's website and if you go to there missions page you'll see a full breakdown of all the different scholarships that are offered at that school with the criteria is application process deadlines things like that so I would certainly suggest that you do this as a add starting point to even see if the school that you're considering our offering scholarship okay so when it comes to need-based financial aid so let's let's remove a merit-based scholarships for a second just focus on eBay as we first need to understand the cost of attendance so if we're looking at 1 years cost of attendance which means everything in one year so the room and board transportation tuition books all the cars that will be encouraged for one year at Cal State University is around 30,000 So Cal State Long Beach season a u c school right around 40,000 for your private schools can be as high as 94000 example how to say public schools and Community College so these are your starting point costs and then you obviously are going to look at this as a 4-year costs and then if you have more than one child the number starts to grow quite a bit so when you start to look at this it helps you build a starting point to say okay why in the world would I apply to a school that cost this much if I can go here or here or here hold that thought we're going to dive into that right now if I were to give you a suggestion on how to engage in a really kind of a fun way with the student I would say start with a net price calculator what this is is a website that is attached to a college to the college's website that you can go to and start to figure out am I even in the ballpark to be able to afford this college so if you were to consider a school don't know like Gonzaga let's say and you type in Gonzaga net price calculator it'll take you to their website always thinking about maybe 5 to 10 minutes to fill out some of the questions there and it'll spit out a number that says here's what your final cost would look like if you were accepted to our school so this is a really really good kind of way to get to know if this will make sense for us parents just to give you a heads up the most call conversation that you probably will have is if your student gets into their top top school and you end up looking at them and seems like I just can't afford to send you their you as a parent should actually be proactive in this so that conversation never has to come up you'll have these this data in your hands before you even apply so where does financial aid ever actually come from how was it broken down and how does it get awarded so we're going to look at the trend has been as a notice my dog got excited sorry I'm in Jackson so we're going to look at here we have federal grants which is called Pell Grants every low income family to qualify for a Pell Grant you just really need to fill out the FAFSA if you are applying in the state of California and you qualify for the Cal grant that I could be a huge benefit to down your tuition institutional Grant so this is money that comes directly from a university there something called endowments and this is a big area everyone that you should be taking advantage of so this is mine raised through a lot and I threw all different events that they put on and they put that money to work on campus they update facilities but they also use it to recruit students if you think about it endowment money is free-flowing sometimes colleges are looking for violinist maybe next year they're looking for entrepreneurs so they kind of Target that money and are market for based on where their priorities are for each but just know that these grants are a big source of where you can get the money from what I want everybody to to also understand is when I called her and said that we give financial aid a college considers loans that they're going to give you automatically to be financial aid so you just need to be aware of a smarter question to ask which is what do you really mean by financial aid because they always consider loans to be part of the financial aid package so just know that going in when you visit ecology speak with the time how do I apply for financial aid so the first form that you want to familiarize yourself with is called the FAFSA and that's a government for you're going to be able to get signed up on the government website and that's going to be Universal so every call is that you're going to apply to will use the FAFSA form it's a simplified form that will ask for very basic information the good thing on the FAFSA family's is when they ask about your net worth meaning all your assets the one asset that is really going to help you out on this that you don't have to include is the primary home so the home that you live I will never ever ever be added to the FAFSA application as an asset some schools won't take not just the FAFSA but they'll look at what's called a CSS profile and so more the private schools maybe the very selective schools will use the CSS profile one of the questions on the CSS profile ask do you have any aunts or uncles or siblings that can help you pay for college not going to give you. how to fill that out but they want to know everything about you on the CSS profile so if you are a rising seniors are for juniors right now that are going to be seniors next year you're going to start the College in the fall of 25 you can actually start to fill out your FAFSA form they say that it's going to be either October or December or they don't know definitively yet but just be on the lookout so at the end of this year you should be able to start feeling that you're funny and do it early as much as you can cuz a lot of the grants from the college's on a first-come first-serve basis when you if there's a family situation where let's say they're divorced or there's a separation and the parents are actually filing separately because there have been in fact separated or divorced when you fill out financial aid you're only filling out one parents information and not both so just be aware of that if you're business owner there may be some documentation that you'll have to fill out in addition to that when I was filling this out myself when I was applying for college I was a soccer player and I was banking on getting a soccer scholarship and pretty good I was getting some some recruiting offers and then Senior Year I ended up tearing my ACL which was kind of the end of the road for my soccer aspiration what I ended up having to do is forgo that and I ended up applying for financial as much as I could and I made a mistake on the form by listing assets that I actually should not have so be very diligent or Vigilant I should say and how you feel this out because some schools may just process the information not really knowing what your true circumstances are you can make updates to the FAFSA if you realize that you made a mistake but just be very cautious of how you fill this out another term everybody should be familiar with is called the base year this is the year that the college is going to look at when they're determining your financial aid eligibility your Junior now like we just said going to start college in the fall of 25 so the colleges are going to look at you or 2023 taxes when you apply for financial aid that's called your based year so forward sophomores right now in high school 2024 where we are currently that is your base year really what that means is let's say if in your base year you had some hardship or you had to take money out of your retirement account or let's say you sold a property and you had a cap game if the income that's on your base year's taxes are not really in line with all the other years and what your typical earnings are you need to let the college's know that there's new information that you need to buy them at that the base year is actually not reflecting your true circumstances if that's not the case then just know that you'll reply using your base years information every year it jumps up a year so when they go into sophomore year in college there use the next year's taxes and so on and so forth if you're lucky enough to get a merit scholarship from a college let's say you apply to Loyola Marymount University and they give you a $30,000 scholarship stays intact so that has nothing to do with your income so when you apply again next year that's still going to be there the grants are what can change from one year to the next the federal government gives Pell Grant see all grants college work-study so the student could have an opportunity to work on campus and get some of their tuition paid Down based on work-study and then if the parents under the assumption that the students were going to be able to pay for college on her own one thing that you do need to realize is that the government puts a limit on how much is an undergraduate student can borrow on their own and that's called the Stafford Loan program as a freshman they can borrow $5,500 through the Stafford Loan they don't need to have a cosigner it's just the promissory note that they'll pay it back the next year goes up by a thousands over the four years if they are on a four-year track to graduate they can borrow up to 27 thousand over the four-year education but not more than that unless they get a cosigner so if there is an amount that the fan has to pay beyond the student loan that's where the plus loan comes in this is a parent loan for undergraduate students keep in mind that these loans are there as a safety valve if you don't have the means to pay for college out of pocket this is the way that families will send their child psychologist to the PLUS Loan program so don't be discouraged that you haven't maybe saved enough for college just know that you have this as a backstop if you need it I just want to caution you the Plus Loans or non discharge Walter bankruptcy so should be very cautious with how you borrow from the apparent lumps the state of California we have What's called the Cal grant and the middle class scholarship so there's a certain income thresholds that I have here and so if your income is below 226,000 adjusted gross income then you can still qualify for the middle class scholarship and that's going to be a deduction from the tuition at Cal State or you see school last time I checked for the Family household size of or I want to say it was close to like a hundred and twenty thousand with the income threshold so if you're below 120 then you can get the cow grants which is any school in California so if you paid out of the Pell Grant then you just get bumped up into the middle class scholarship if you're on this webinar and you're like well earn more than 226 I'm not going to get anything that's not true remember we talked about institutional money which is the endowment and then also merit scholarship so that's kind of where your focus would be sorry if I'm going fast I just want to make sure that I cover most of the heart that are going to be pertinent to getting you started on the right foot so right now it's expected family contribution is converting over to What's called the student aid index and now it's going to be known as essay istudent it says the government the Department of Education will measure your financial strength based on the need-based calculation so income and assets household size age of parents number of students enrolled in college and special circumstances are those things that I mentioned like if you took money out of your retirement account and that normally doesn't happen or you have some type of anomaly on your taxes. special circumstance so you say Okay Trevor is there a formula that is actually applied so that I know if I'm even able to get financial aid the answer is yes so you have burst the cost of attendance what they're going to do is take the cost of attendance and then they're going to put that side-by-side with your student aid index is what they assume that your family is capable of pain and then the difference between those two figures is called your financial need so if we were interested let's say in applying to Pepperdine 70,000 for the year and our essay I was 25 the difference equals 45 is 45000 is what we are eligible for it to receive in need financial aid pretty straightforward another family was looking at a Cal State School 30,000 there sa eyes 10 so they're eligible for 20,000 this is the very start of the need-based process one of the things that colleges don't really advertisers is not listed on their websites it's just something that you need to know is that there's something called a financial gap that happens a lot like this is the one reason why families will end up paying more for college and what they assumed they would and it comes down to how much of a gap they end up getting what this mean so if we're interested in applying to a school that they like Caltech and we have a $50,000 need what school is like Caltech can meet a hundred percent of our need so they're really really generous but schools like let's say Cal State Long Beach that don't have the same type of Revenue that they are bringing in or they don't have the same and they might meet 40% of our need or 65% or a number that's less than 100 so if ever you are applying to a school that does not meet 100% of need which is a lot of them you're going to end finding that you're going to be gapped and all that that means is you're going to pay a higher amount per college then we are actual index has measured for you so give me give me an example of how that works if we're looking at school that costs and our calculation for what were expected to pay is 10,000 and we're eligible for 20,000 right but let's say that we chose a school that the most they can actually help us with his 50% so we have a guy that's 50% what that means is that they're going to give us financial aid so they're going to give us a $10,000 financial aid offer but the Gap the other $10,000 now gets added to the family's total so this case even though we started with a student aid index of 10 because there was a gap of 10,000 the family has now come out of pocket $20,000 that school all because they only meet a very small amount of that need I probably didn't explain that that well I'm sorry but just know that Gap happens to be one of the things that is hidden and if you choose a school that meets less than 100% of need it just means that your costs will go up higher than your initially calculation would be cut into that make any sense the way that I explain that so now if we break this down just to give you a heads up if you're applying to school like you sees they're going to average around 80 to 84% need Matt Brandon given year to Lane 94 University of Oregon you can have a pretty big gap couple years ago bu and USC increase their need-based need met 200% which is nice they got a lot of good PR from that can you do buddy think of what happens when a college increases Financial need calculations do you think that less people are going to apply their do you think that more students when applying will they saw a huge uptick in the number of applicants that applied to the schools because of that what happens when that takes place so let's just assume so Boston University Alicia say they used to get $20,000 locations a year and now they get 30,000 applications here will know it's not like they're building that many more it's for new freshman they're just saying no to 10,000 more students what happens to their selectivity right now because they get to deny that many more students now they become a very highly selective school because they get a lot more students applying there so this is a little bit of a kind of a teeter totter or seesaw if you really think about it about how this works sorry guys I'm a nerd when it comes to discussing the gift aid this is money that we know or ever have to pay back so this is the best type of financial aid that we can get if you get a scholarship from a school you get a grant that just means that the school has awarded you and they recognize your talent and they recognize that you have a financial needs of their going to give that to you it's called gift aid and then we have something called self-help remember when I said earlier that colleges consider loans to be financial aid So This falls under the self-help category which is money that you'll have to pay back or you're going to have a work-study program that you need to work for so that's how to differentiate gift and self-help parents when you getting ready to visit these colleges or even if you want to reach out to colleges speak with a financial aid office or if you're at the school that I believe you're going to have a college fair coming up pretty soon to the Reps will be able to answer some of these questions for you so for financial aid the question I would ask is what percentage of need a meat that's going to be a very important question to ask if you can applying to Pepperdine and I qualify for $50,000 a year in financial aid I mean want to know like what percentage of meat desert school help with the follow-up question what percent is gift what's the percent of help you break that down NFL 3rd question parents it's going to sound so you have to prepare you ask this question but it's a real thing that happens did you know that the majority of colleges in the United States struggle to graduate students in four years so the question that you're going to have to ask is how long will it take my child to graduate from your college if they go to if if you're ever researching a college and they have what's called an impacted major what that means is that the school struggles the gift ins all the classes that they need in the right sequence to finish their degree in 4 years so if you find that the school has an impacted major just kind of think or plan ahead knowing that you're probably going to spend more than four years there may be an extra semester and maybe even the next a year so the third question is how long does it take my student to graduate I'm going to run to just a few more case studies and then I'll close it out we can open up for 2 in a.m. realize that some of you are probably eating dinner so you don't want to do math I'm going to walk you through this very easily so if we have a school that cost $80,000 and let's just say that our Sai is calculated to be 20 what that means is that qualify for $60,000 a year in financial aid what's the first question that were going to ask that we just talked about we're going to ask what percentage of need does your school meet so here School a happens to meet 100% that's good we already know that we're on the right track the second question that were going to ask what percent is gift what percent is broken down a self-help so now we know that this school offers 90% of the gift aid award and then the other 10% is cell phone so we know that this gift a to 54,000 they get to keep Duchess money that they put in their bank that's won't benefit in their bank but that's money that did not have to pay and then the self-help let's just say the family did take the the loan so we're going to add the self-help to the Sai and this family paid $26,000 a year at the $80,000 years so that's all on the number same family is looking at a local school would say 30,000 and they're looking at still 20,000 their need is 10 what's the first thing that you notice here it would obviously be yeah right so the Gap here they only meet 30% of their need so what that means is 70% is now the parents are the family's responsibility right so automatically we know that there's a huge gap question how much is gas how much is self-help so they break it down 50-50 at the end of the day the family is going to get a $1,500 gift but the rest of it including their Gap is going to break down their numbers to 28,000 they're almost paying full price for school if you look at it that way right so when we look at this family's I want you to understand that if you are planning to go beyond just a bachelor's degree maybe you want to get a masters it makes absolutely no sense whatsoever to pay full price for an undergraduate education there is so much money available through different Awards through the endowment through merit scholarship that if you play This Crew play new build a good list of schools you should never get close to paying full price for college at least for the undergrad when you apply for graduate school that's really where the money starts to fall off and you're really having to borrow a lot for the graduate program sir pragmatics know that at a certain point it doesn't make sense to pay twice as much for a school if the outcomes are going to be the same was this helpful so far everyone getting you some kind ideas on how to navigate this I just want to go through three quick quesadillas just to give you an idea of how this works and then we'll wrap it up so this student her family's income was above $500,000 years they're not going to be qualified for any need-based financial aid but out of the final three school that we narrowed it down to so Drexel George Mason University of Delaware she ended up choosing Drexel so they gave her a $36,000 a year scholarship the reason why it went ended up working out best for her is they have what's called a bsms program for psychology at Drexel so she actually can get she's going to get her Masters in the total of 5 years undergrad and she gets the bank on that scholarship each year to so you know when you really look at it the family saving plus about $140,000 altogether this family's income was a row 180000 per year and we narrowed it down to the final three schools so Santa Clara Wabash College and you see Santa Cruz and these were the annual totals here remember one of the first slide that we talked about was the outcome one of the things that Santa Clara boasts that their graduates sold as soon as I graduate from Santa Clara there in the top 12 Nationwide for the highest starting salaries for for college grads so that was a huge value-add for this family so they ended up choosing Santa Clara and then this family income was below 90,000 so they're going to be need eligible at pretty much any school these final three schools were broken down and then she actually and he ended up actually going to college of Wooster really good school for research if you if you're interested in doing undergraduate research College of Wooster is actually phenomenal place to look at by the way I remember when I mentioned the net price calculator to everyone how you can do that online college of Wooster they are so cool they have a concierge service where you can literally call them and they have someone that will do the price calculator over the phone with you I thought that I was actually pretty cool so definitely look at that families this is really kind of a good starting point for you to understand that it does take some time put these things in the play I understand that it almost seems like it's a second job but you will save yourself a tremendous amount of money if you really start to look at this proactively just like your students are going to be prepping for the AP exams think of this as the same type of discipline where you want to really start to figure this out it's only going to help save you quite a bit of money at the end of the day if any of your families let safe after this meeting are looking at okay we kind of covered a lot of ground but I have some personal questions that maybe I can't answer for you right here because we have other families you are more than welcome to reach out to my office the next two weeks I am book with all my seniors but I will start scheduling one-on-one meetings two weeks out for now and so if you wanted to meet with me and ask me personal questions I'll be happy to meet with you and give you some ideas of where you are in the financial aid process some suggestions that I can make as well and then for families let's say that wanted to get on the right track with building a college list one of the things that I do help families look at is how to build the list based on school that are generous for need-based and then also schools that you should consider based on merit scholarship so these are all things that we could talk about together one-on-one I invite you to do that just reach out to my office from your college guide and we could schedule but otherwise I hope that this was helpful for everyone I want to thank you all for being part of this and let's open it up for you and I thank you Trevor yes we have about 10 minutes for questions and I'm just going to read go down to the first question is talking about if one parent is not going to provide any info for FAFSA will still be eligible I think you might have touched on this yeah so let's say if a family has a situation where there's one parent that really is not choosing to participate most likely that would be a separated family were divorced Derek Carr will receive the information from the one parent and they will ask additional follow-up question of the college well to say hey we need information from What's called the non-custodial parent but if you don't have any con set the timer for not providing any support you can get what's called a noncustodial waiver and the college can override that so yeah you can actually do that I know that we're going to share where are the documents that you mentioned earlier Trevor is going to be available as well child's College savings account in their name okay so when it comes to savings if the if a college looks at money that they've just in the child's name they assume that that money is saved that can be applied towards College expenses but that's just their logic if the money saving the parents name there's all sorts of different allowances based on emergency funds just different the equation is quite a bit different so it's best to have money saving app if you're trying to apply for need-based financial aid if you're not eligible for need that doesn't matter or Merit Scholarships awarded automatically or do you have to apply yeah I'm good question 3 are applied autumn likely so let's say if you apply to a school like Buckner they're going to say Hey you qualify for the presidential scholarship $25,000 a year guaranteed over four years so they'll spell that out for you in your acceptance letter what acids should not be on the form they said you said you made a mistake other than if a parent owns a home what else should be left off yeah so if you think of it any type of retirement account you do now I need to include acting some families include like their boats and their cars and jewelry like that's definitely not considered assets for financial aid if you own a portfolio of paintings wine and other things that you do not need to include as well when applying for financial aid I understand the look at the latest tax returns what if a parent is laid off just prior to Applications how can you demonstrate need very good question so that's going to be consider the special circumstance and so once you get accepted to the college you're going to follow up with their financial aid office right away and do what's called a special circumstance they're going to ask more recent taxes cuz member the base years two years back and they're going to ask for a more recent tag and then let's say you did get laid off or just going to ask you your termination letter or are you collecting unemployment don't have a way to substantiate. I'm but you'll do that once you get accepted to the college if a student has a Roth IRA does that affect faster results a Roth IRA is one of my favorite vehicle how to save for college because it never gets this close to a school and money that you pull out of a Roth IRA and look I can't get financial if I speak with your tax person but if it's use for education from what I understand you don't have to pay the 10% earlier withdrawal penalty so that's really good on the slide about Cal grants there was mention about teachers what was that about you are interested in going to specific programs one of them being teaching profession they have programs that will help forgive your loans Teach for America for example so there are certain government programs and also in certain industries you can actually get loan forgiveness is there a standard Sai calculation across all institutions that is due some schools count some assets and not others very good point so I haven't visited this website recently but usually you should you should be able to go to the fafsa4caster which is a government website and that should give you your federal regulation for your essay I my student would like oh sorry but if the school uses the CSS profile they do look at the primary residence as part of your overall ability to pay for college we're at the FAFSA schools don't look at that so that's going to be kind of the biggest difference there my student would like to study architecture which is a five-year program how does that change outcomes is it better to attend Community College First Financial Aid you know that's such a good question because it is a five-year program I wonder though if if you were to have I'm sure the process of applying to the colleges and let's say that they awarded your student with a pretty good scholarship that you can actually Bank on for the for the five years maybe it doesn't make sense for me to start at the community college at that point cuz then you're in with a good song then you can kind of go as a full you don't stay there for all five years if you don't get into your top school you can always start your path at a community college absolutely for the merit scholarship we would like to know if they received the scholarship with acceptance letter or if they received after they commit old with the acceptance letter yeah so you'll know once you get admitted and this is usually private schools that do this some out-of-state Public Schools will also do it like Oregon let's say they will give you an acceptance letter and still out scholarship on there usually offer you see school unless you're a Regents scholar you're not going to get any type of Merit Scholarship from UC school it looks like you don't have any other questions now and the human Aid great I thought it was some really good questions and we kept it on time so not bad really work differently when you're a transfer student it does not exactly the same the only nuanced or the difference I would say if you can transfer in as a fall admit nine times out of ten that's the best way to go because usually spring admit don't get nearly as much if any type of financial aid as if you were a fall admit I know that may sound ridiculous but colleges usually build their financial aid budget at the start of the year so if you are going to transfer I'm best to do it during fall semester if ragi meets the criteria for the middle class scholarship is that further affected by our assets yes so I would encourage everyone to go to the middle scholarship website that's you just me or do a search for middle class scholarship it's going to be the California Student Aid Commission website csac and it'll show you on there exactly what the income and the asset limits you can actually just download that time forum and then do CAL States give Merit Scholarships for example Cal Poly Pomona I have seen a few things in the past actual a scholarship it's so rare that I hate to say that yes I'm almost inclined to say no precaution when someone ask can you talk more about the Roth IRA is it special for Education fund yeah I mean a Roth IRA in my opinion I would prefer that all day long over a 529 College savings plan because like I said it's a retirement vehicle you fund it the same way as you would have 529 that's tax money but as it grows that money never have to get this close to a college cuz it's in Under the Umbrella of the retirement account where's a 529 you have to let all the schools know about it so it's it's kind of a it's a no-brainer to me okay I think that that's what it's just about it's 7:30 I don't see any more questions so I just want this has been really helpful families we we recorded tonight so we'll go ahead and share this if you want to come back and reference it and will also share Trevor's handouts but he mentioned earlier thank you to the team for putting this on I really appreciate all the efforts and thank you all for being part of this I really hope that this was helpful for you I think everyone I hope you have a great night thanks

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