Carol Stack - The Financial Aid Handbook, Revised Edition

Praise for The Financial Aid Handbook

The first two chapters alone are worth the price of admission! The Financial Aid Handbook offers studentsand their familiesa lot of wise and practical advice on making the cost of college to be more affordable and more acceptable. A topic like student loan indebtedness is never an easy subject for a family to discuss at the kitchen table of life. Carol Stack and Ruth Vedvik have produced a comprehensive review of the financial aid process, with the purposeful intent of helping students to make wise choices. Their message is spot on! Honestly, you cannot afford to not take their advice!

Phil Trout, College Counselor, Minnetonka High School, past president, National Association of College Admission Counselors (NACAC)

I use The Financial Aid Handbook to train admission counselors and financial aid staff new to the profession on the basics of financial aid. My favorite chapters are myths, basics, parents, and everything you need to know. After 24 years in the profession, I sometimes forget the need to initially coach young enrollment management professionals without using terms that are too technical. While FSA Coach is the expert technical coach, The Financial Aid Handbook is written in a manner that makes the information more digestibleit can be read over a weekend. Plus, the Handbook is helpful in coaching staff on how to communicate with families and make financial aid less daunting. A stack of edition twoand previously edition onesits on my bookshelf to give to every new hire on my team.

Kim Johnson, vice president for Enrollment Management, Vanguard University

As a parent of a college-bound teenager, I found this was the right book at the right time for me. Each chapter felt like a one-on-one financial aid session with the authors. Theyve literally written the book on how to find the best-fit, best-value college. I cant imagine trying to navigate the world of college financial aid without the help of this book. Whenever friends my age talk about untangling the financial aid process, I tell them to stop guessing the secrets and simply read this book.

Colin Sokolowski, education communication professional and high school parent

REVISED EDITION

Getting the Education You Want for the Price You Can Afford

CAROL STACK and RUTH VEDVIK

Copyright 2017 Carol Stack and Ruth Vedvik

All rights reserved under the Pan-American and International Copyright Conventions. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, in any form or by any means electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system now known or hereafter invented, without written permission from the publisher, The Career Press.

THE FINANCIAL AID HANDBOOK, REVISED EDITION
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Printed in the U.S.A.

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SPECIAL THANKS to Barbara, our secret weapon!

Lots of love to David, Craig, Krista, and Ian for their patience and support, and Krista for her contribution.

Wed like to extend an enormous thank-you to our agent Joelle Delbourgo. And to the staff at Career Press for encouraging us to do a Revised Edition.

Wed also like to thank our colleagues who aided us enormouslyeither by reading, critiquing, or just plain listening. You are all brilliant, helpful, and kind. Thank you for your help, your conversation, and your friendship.

This book couldnt exist without all of the students, parents, and guidance counselors we have had the privilege of serving throughout the years.

WHEN WE WROTE The Financial Aid Handbook in 2011, our primary focus was to help students and parents gain control over the extraordinary cost of a college education.

Since then we have had hundreds of wonderful conversations over email, phone, at conferences, on planes, trains, and at PTA meetings with families who have read, enjoyed, and benefitted from this book, and weve learned a few new things about what youre looking for. Many things have changed in the past five years: the web has become more robust, and there are new (and terrific) websites out there with brand new sets of data and information. The federal government has made some changes to the FAFSA, and now it is both easier to complete and available to students earlier in the process. The testing companies have changed, too; there is a new SAT as of March 2016, and ACT has dropped the ACT PLAN. We have used old SAT scores in this edition, knowing that many students will have both old and new, but they can easily be converted to one another at the collegereadiness.collegeboard.org website.

In this new edition we updated almost all of our numbers, but the central focus of the book remains the same: to help you understand the process and guide you through the cost-conscious search.

We look forward to hearing feedback about this new edition from a new generation of students and parents, on planes, on trains, in school auditoriums, boardrooms, and over email anytime.

Yours,

Carol Stack and Ruth Vedvik

THE TIME is finally here to send your baby off to college. We recommend kick-starting the process with two books: ours (more on that in a minute) and Letting Go: A Parents Guide to Understanding the College Years by Karen Levin Coburn and Madge Lawrence Treeger (a fabulous and insightful description of what it really means when your child goes off to college).

You cant help but notice that weve addressed this book to studentsour reasoning for that is simple. Even though we know that the decision to select a particular college or university is usually a family decisionthe process itselfranging from the first request for information to the application, essay, letters of reference, and many of the financial aid formsis for the student to complete. It is vital that students take ownership of the process with the best information possible. Like you, we know the difficulty of engaging the attention of a high school student in a confusing process overlaid with information that is boring at best. Our goal for this book is to help students understand the convergence of roles (theirs and yours) in college choice and payment. We know not only because weve each worked in the world of college admission and financial aid for more than 40 years, but weve each coached our own children through the processsometimes kicking and screaming.

There are more than 4,400 colleges and universities in the United States. This book will help your student find a great college, maybe one youve never even heard of, that will value her academic ability, talent, or special characteristics (embraces being green, a commitment to Amnesty International, or Ultimate Frisbee) and will fund her education. Really, thats how it works.