Financial Aid Basics
Education
Maria Frias: Families and students need to realize that the Financial Aid Office is the number one source of information for them.
Female: You know what college you want to attend, but may be you’re not sure how to pay for it. The school’s Financial Aid Office is where money miracles occur.
Maria Frias: It’s very important that the families, once they make a decision as to which institution their child is going to go that they schedule an appointment with the Financial Aid Office.
Female: Thousands, may be millions of high school graduates, miss out on advanced education opportunities because of faulty assumptions and misconceptions.
Lourdes Fernandez : One of the most common misconception that we have found that students have is that if the student is a US citizen and the parent is undocumented that the student cannot apply for financial aid, and that is totally incorrect. As long as the student has a Green Card, a permanent residency card, or the student is a US citizen, the student is definitely eligible to receive financial aid.
The other misconception is that if the parents are working, the student is not going to be eligible to receive financial aid.
Female: The biggest misconception is that students who can’t pay for tuition are not able to go to college.
Lourdes Fernandez: If the students think that if they don’t have money, that means they cannot go to school. But that’s when Financial Aid comes into place. The less money the family has available, the more money Financial Aid will be able to help them with.
Female: It bears repeating.
Lourdes Fernandez: The less income you have, the more money is available for you, both grants and scholarships. So I think we just need to get the word out.
Female: Finally, a big misconception is that if you are applying for Financial Aid, you’re affecting your chances of getting into the college of your choice. Not true.
Maria Frias: The Admissions Office simply admits students based on academic background. What the Admissions Office will do is they will notify the Financial Aid Office when a student is admitted to the institution. Therefore, that actually kicks off the process of Financial Aid.
Female: Once you do apply, the Financial Aid Office will determine your reward in 2 ways.
Need-based which is determined by household income, and Merit-based which is based on the academic performance and talent of the student.
Lourdes Fernandez: The majority of the Financial Aid available is need-based but a lot of the schools, a lot of the large universities also have Merit Scholarships.
Female: After contacting your Financial Aid Office and receiving the proper forms to fill out, it’s very important that you keep in mind the deadlines. Here’s the tip, complete your Federal Financial Aid packet and submit it in early January and you could get even more money.
Lourdes Fernandez: The grants sometimes are awarded on a first come, first served basis. If the student completes their packet early and the funds are available, the student will be given some of those grants that are limited.
Female: Ask the folks in the Financial Aid Office to steer you toward grants and scholarships first because they’re like free money. You don’t have to pay them back. Grants usually come from the Federal Government.
Maria Frias: From there, you also have parent loans and then you have private loans. We always try to say from a Sallie Mae approach, we use what we call our 1-2-3 approach, and that is number one, every family should apply for financial aid and receive as much free money in the ways of grants and scholarships as possible.
Female: And if you and your family don’t speak English very well, many Financial Aid Offices also offer bilingual services to help make the process easier.
Lourdes Fernandez: We go to community fairs. We have been participating in the Hispanic Scholarship Service for the last 4 years, so we go to town halls with them.
Female: In some states, California is one of them, there are laws aimed at helping students who don’t have a social security number.
Lourdes Fernandez: But what we do tell the student is that we have a program that could help them attend school legally without any impact whatsoever in their legal status and that is if they apply through the school using the AB540, they could attend school as long as they could provide documentation that they attended a high school and graduated from a California high school and attended for 3 years. The student could attend a community college or even a university paying resident fees instead of non-resident.
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