Web chat focus was financial aid

BY CATHY JETT
Michael Farris fielded a variety of financial aid questions during the monthly Money Talk$ webchat Tuesday on fredericksburg.com.
Below is a sampling of the inquiries and the answers provided by Germanna Community College’s coordinator and director of financial aid. A complete transcript of the webchat is archived at fredericksburg.com/News/chat3/Archive?chat_id=140.
;”>My daughter is headed to Virginia Tech next year, and financing it will be a stretch for us. Our FAFSA [Free Application for Federal Student Aid] indicates that our EFC [Expected Family Contribution] is well beyond what we will pay, but we don’t have anywhere near that much money set aside.
Are there any good ‘tricks of the trade’ you can offer? Should she get her own apartment next summer to get the aid based off her own income vs. her parents?
–TS in Spotsylvania
Unfortunately, there are no “tricks” to gaining eligibility that way. Her dependency status is not associated with her place of residence or whether or not she earns an income of her own. It is based on her age, primarily. It is very difficult for a student under the age of 24 to gain independency for aid eligibility purposes.
I would recommend her possibly pursuing on-campus student employment for her first year, and maybe balancing that with a low-interest student loan. There are also parent-specific student loans that are available to folks in your situation.
This is a great opportunity to reach out to the folks in the financial aid office at Virginia Tech for more detailed information about what types of aid they have to offer.
Tip: There is no substitute for engaging the financial aid office at the school that the FAFSA is being sent to. Having worked in several different financial aid offices, at schools on both the East and West coasts, I know how critical the conversation between student and family and the college or university is. Plus, each school awards its financial aid differently. As soon as the FAFSA has been completed, call the school.
;”>Do parents’ financial obligations and credit histories have a significant impact on what financial aid is available to their children?
–KD in Fredericksburg
As a rule, no. The FAFSA examines income and assets as opposed to credit scores and familial expenses. The exception would possibly be if a parent is trying to borrow a parent-specific student loan on behalf his or her son or daughter. Federal parent loans require a credit check.
;”>What about students with disabilities does the state work with the college to fund someone that is physically disabled and has no income? Does the college offer funding for disabled students?
–BA in Stafford
Great question. In short, yes. The Federal Application for Aid takes this into account, and is able to identify and assist students with documented disabilities and supplement any existing federal or state disability benefits with additional federal funds for eligible students.
Cathy Jett: 540/374-5407
Email: cjett@freelancestar.com

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The Choice Blog: From the Mail Bag: On Taking a Gap Year

Over the holidays, readers flooded The Choice’s mailbox with thoughtful comments and observations, including on the initial student postings to our first-person “Envelope, Please” series.
In response to Robert Clagett’s essay on gap years, some of you also weighed in on the value of taking time off before college. Many were supportive of taking a break, though several wondered about the financial feasibility of doing so.
As one commenter wrote in response to Mr. Clagett’s advocacy of taking a year off between high school and college:

Great advice in theory, but for some families, like ours, the financial aid consequences can be prohibitive. Our younger son probably would have benefited from a gap year, but when we ran the financial aid calculators, we discovered that it would end up reducing his older brother’s financial aid by about $20,000 and reduce his own financial aid in a few years by about $25,000.

Similarly, another commenter wrote:

Lots of kids can’t afford to support themselves for a year without education because they actually derive financial benefits from being a student, whether it be the ability to take out loans that displace expenses for living or an existence in a town that has the amenities that their hometown doesn’t.

Another reader provided an example of financing her time off through work abroad. She wrote:

I took a gap year to study French in France, and it set me on a path of lifelong intercultural learning. I paid for it (mostly) myself by being an au pair nanny, which in France (unlike the U.S.) is structured to ensure one gets enough time off for school and cultural immersion each day.

As it turns out, Mr. Clagett, former dean of admissions at Middlebury College and a former senior admissions officer at Harvard, was following the discussion. On Tuesday morning he weighed in by e-mail, writing:

To address the economic factor, it’s true that many of the organized programs cost a great deal of money, and that can be a limiting factor for many.  But some of the programs (I know of financially needy students who have attended programs like Thinking Beyond Borders and Global Citizen Year in particular, but I suspect there are others as well) offer financial aid to those who need it.
More important, however, taking a gap year does not have to cost a lot of money.  But then it entails more initiative and creativity on the part of the student.  I know of one Middlebury student who spent a third of her gap year working at a monastery in North Dakota, a third working for a judge in Oklahoma, and the final third working in an orphanage in the Dominican Republic, all activities that she found on her own.  Since she was doing volunteer work for most of the time, her living costs were mostly covered, with little cost to her and her family.

Mr. Clagett also addressed the concerns some readers raised about an uneven socioeconomic spread of students who take time off, citing research to dispel the argument that the higher-than-average G.P.A.’s of those who took gap years might actually stem from separate factors of privilege. He wrote:

It’s true that since many students who currently take gap years come from more affluent backgrounds, it may not be surprising that most of them would perform more strongly once in college.  However, in the analysis that we did with gap year students at Middlebury, we controlled statistically for that factor by comparing their actual G.P.A.’s with how we would have predicted they would perform on the basis of their various academic credentials from high school (in the form of an academic rating assigned by the admissions office that is arrived at on the basis of H.S. grades, rigor of academic program, scores, etc.; at many colleges like Middlebury this academic rating is the best predictor of actual academic performance in college).
So when we looked at the G.P.A.’s of gap year students when factoring in their academic credentials from high school, on average they still performed better than we would have expected.

What do readers of The Choice think of Mr. Clagett’s response? Keep the conversation going by sharing your reactions and general thoughts on gap years in the comment box below.

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