Student story: Prioritizing financial aid in the college search
About this video
A student describes learning about financial aid, which each college handles differently. She discovered that some colleges cover 100% of tuition and board for families below an income threshold, researched the thresholds at schools she liked, focused her applications on them, and contacted a financial aid officer to learn more.
You'll be able to
- explain why you must research each college's financial aid individually.
- describe how income thresholds affect eligibility for full aid.
- name a way to get more information about a college's aid.
Key words
- financial aid
- Money that helps pay for college, such as grants or scholarships.
- threshold
- A cutoff amount; here, the family income under which you qualify for full aid.
- financial aid officer
- A college staff member who can explain the school's aid process.
Transcript
- The financial aid process was a long, arduous one for me to learn about. There are tons of different financial aid; each college does it differently. Sometimes you might have to learn about how one school does it and how another. There's a lot of similarities a lot of times so they can transfer, but you always have to be specific with any college that you look into.
What I learned is that some colleges give you a hundred percent, or a hundred percent of financial aid of tuition and board and that sort of thing. When I learned of that and I learned that your parents can't make above a certain threshold for you to qualify for these sort of financial aid, I looked into what the thresholds were for some of the schools I was interested in and figured out which one offered that sort of package, and I definitely keyed in on those and sort of emphasized those in my application process, worked harder on those a little bit.
It's a learning process, each college is different in some ways, one of the things I did is I contacted a financial aid officer at the school to learn a little bit more about the process, and so that's how I worked it out.
Video © Khan Academy, used under CC BY-NC-SA. Watch on Khan Academy. Puzzicle is not affiliated with Khan Academy.