Sergio Sanchez: Most Hispanic students and their parents think of college perhaps as a cost and not quite as an investment which is what it is.
Lourdes F. Oropeza: They assume, “Well, I don’t have any money. I cannot attend school,” but that when financial aid comes into place, the less money that the family has available. The more money financial aid we’ll be able to help them with.
Sergio Sanchez: One can make more than a million dollars with college degree versus not having a college degree.
Lourdes F. Oropeza: One of the most common misconceptions that we have found a student have is, that if the students is a US citizen and the parent is undocumented, that the student cannot apply for financial aid. The other misconception is that if the parents are working, the student is not going to be eligible to receive financial aid.
Maria Frias: So, a lot of what we see sometimes is family that takes up the mortgages and with educational credit cards, simply because they don’t even know that financial aid is possible.
Number one, you have to be a degree seeking student. Number two, you have to be a US resident or a US citizen, so you have to have legal status. Number three, you have to be attending an eligible institution, under the Title 4 program. The last thing is you cannot be in default of any federal loan that you may have borrowed in from.
So you have the Perkins loan program which is a low cost, low interest rate federal loan and those are institutional awarded. That program is not something that you can fill out an application for. That normally is awarded to the student by the school and then they have to fill out a truth and lending statement with the school. So that is normally through the general financial aid application process as they apply for that.
There is what we called FFELP for the federal family education loan program and then there is the federal direct loan program. This is direct from the government. The federal loans for the students come in two categories and those are Subsidized Stafford and Unsubsidized Stafford. They run in two programs, the federal direct programs which is directly to the government and the government is giving you dollars and then there is the FFELP program which is the Federal Family Educational Loan Program.
Now, the Stafford load has Subsidized Stafford and Non-subsidized Stafford. The Subsidized Stafford means that the government will basically pay the interest while the student is in school. The Unsubsidized means that the student will be liable for the interest while they are in school. You can rest assure as an undergraduate student that over the next year is you will not pay anymore than a fixed rate of 6.8% going down over the next you know, five years or so.
Anything addition—any additional dollars that a dependent student needs would come in the form of a parent plus loan, that is in the federal category. And that would mean that the parent would have to borrow on behalf of the child. The parent plus loan does not have a limit, the limit is the cost of education.
And a private loan is something that depending on the company your are borrowing from, may have a income criteria, may have a depth to income ratio. Usually, the federal loans have an interest rate that is half. The private loans usually have interest rate that is tied to the prime rate.
Signature Loan doesn’t require a student to have a specific income coming in, in other words we understand that student is not going to have an income because they are in school.
Sergio Sanchez: ‘2futoro’ is one of those options that are available to college-entering students and their parents as they decide which college financial option is available to them and certainly to the help of scholarships and grants that are available, one can always look for opportunities to really reach that objective and achieve the dream of a college education.
Maria Frias: Families and students need to realize that the final aid office is the number one source of information for that. It is very important that the families, once they make a decision as to which institution their child is going to go, they can schedule an appointment with the financial aid office.
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