How Students Successfully Appeal Financial Aid

HomeFinanceFinancial aidHow 2 Students Successfully Appealed Their Financial Aid AwardsThis page may contain affiliate links.Nov 16, 2018 It may not be as simple as marketplace haggling, but bargaining with your college’s financial aid office can be worth the hassle. Playing schools’ offers off one another can pay off in subtle ways (a well-paying work-study job) or change your whole college trajectory. All this because of a secret most college applicants forget: Sure, the student wants the college to say yes, but the college needs the student to say yes, too. This is the magic of yield, or what percentage of accepted students enroll in a school. According to US News and World Report, â€Å"Schools want their yield rate to be as high as possible, because it not only reflects popularity among applicants but also allows institutions to shape and set the tone of the incoming freshman class.† After acceptance letters and financial aid packages are out, students suddenly have power. Mali’o Kodis, a 2014 Brown graduate originally from Hawaii, recalled challenging some of the schools she was considering to match her best financial aid offers. â€Å"The smaller schools pretty consistently had better packages,† she said, and comparable schools were more likely to change their offers. She joked that the response she got to playing her Williams offer off Brown got a shrug-like reaction of â€Å"Cool, go to Williams if you want free textbooks.† Its not like I got into Harvard and BrownI didnt have that sort of leverage,† she said. I definitely developed a personal relationship with the financial aid office and that benefited meif I was speaking to students who were struggling with this, I would say go into the office and really work to understand how each element works,† she said. â€Å"The financial aid officers were always very friendly, very accessible. I never felt like they just wanted to make sure that Brown didnt lose money.† For Sophia (pseudonym requested), who attended one of the Seven Sisters colleges, bargaining made an even bigger difference. Her family was hit hard by the economic recession, and her self-employed dad’s business withered. I dont know if he literally didnt earn a dollar in any given year, but it was really bad we definitely had been planning on applying for financial aid all along, but we suddenly really really needed it,† she said. Which is why she and her family were baffled when her first-choice school acceptance letter came through with no financial aid attached. â€Å"As we flipped through it there was this weird silence We’re looking for the financial aid page and it’s not there,† said Sophia, whose parents originally assumed it was a honest mistake on the part of the college. The next day, Sophia said she came home to a less-hopeful scene. â€Å"My parents are both sitting in my dads office crying. They completely denied us all financial aidIt wasnt a mistake, they had rejected our financial aid application.† In essence, the college thought Sophia’s family hadn’t been truthful on their applications. She grew up in a suburb of New York City stereotyped as very wealthy (some people in her town can afford to pay out of pocket, she noted), but said theres a lot more economic diversity on the ground level. Her other two offers were underwhelming as well. â€Å"The scary thing was that at SUNY honors college really wasnt more affordable. Their entire financial aid package was loans, and really crappy ones.† Tufts seemed to have evaluated their family pre-crash, so Sophia’s dad appealed to them to re-evaluate. They then sent the Tufts offer to the Seven Sisters school and challenged them to match it. In the last week of April, the school finally sent them an offer. â€Å"If my parents had not done a lot of work that month, it probably would not have happened. My dad is just really determined and really meticulous,† she said. â€Å"Dont give up the other factors in your decision for financial aid,† Sophia recommended. â€Å"If you have a first-rate school that you really want to go to, you can play this little game of challenging them to match.† In Sophia’s case, the difference was massive: I thought on April 2nd I was not going to college and on May 1st, I was.† â€Å"Bargaining is worth a try, no matter what,† Mali’o said. Connect With Other Parents Trying To Figure Out How To Pay For College JOIN OUR FACEBOOK GROUP –  PAYING FOR COLLEGE 101    This article was written by April Crehan and was reposted with permission. The original article was published here. SaveSave SaveSave SaveSave SaveSave Road2College Debbie Schwartz is former financial services executive and founder of Road2College and the Paying For College 101 Facebook group. She's dedicated to providing families with trustworthy information about college admissions and paying for college. With data, tools and access to experts she's helping families become educated consumers of higher ed. View all posts CATEGORIES FinanceFinancial aid TAGS Brown UniversityFinancial Aidfinancial aid advisorFinancial Aid Appealfinancial aid counselorfinancial aid negotiationfree money for collegegrantsHarvard Universityhonors programmoney for collegePaying For CollegeScholarshipsSUNYTufts UniversityWilliams Collegework-study jobwork-study programNEWER POSTColleges Meeting 90% and More of Financial NeedOLDER POSTNo College Savings? Youre Not Alone