There is no way I am getting aid, my family knows that 100%. However, I have heard that you should still file it to show interest in the school? Don’t know how that is relevant but I keep hearing it. But I also do not want to file it because I don’t want the need-aware schools thinking I want their money, and therefore will look at me less favorably.
Everyone can get the federal non-subsidized loan. 5500 / 6500/ 7500/7500 throughout the four years. I believe you have to file FAFSA to get it, however.
Some schools require the FAFSA be filled out even for merit scholarships. I would contact each school you’re applying to and check.
Filing FAFSA does not demonstrate interest. Aside from the loan access as noted above (and accessing Pell grants, which seems to not be applicable to you), some schools do require FAFSA to be considered for merit scholarships…so check each website of the schools on your list to see if that is the case.
Your fafsa filing goes to the financial aid department which does not weigh your admissions application. Filing a fafsa does not show interest because the admissions department won’t know you did it.
There are three reasons to file in your situation:
- You want to be able to borrow the federal student loans.
- One or more of the colleges on your list requires it for merit aid consideration.
- One or more of the colleges on your list have the policy that no aid will be awarded in future years if you haven’t applied as a freshman applicant, no matter how drastic the change in your financial situation.
If none of those apply to you, then you don’t ever need to file it.
Don’t worry about an aid application causing problems at a need-aware institution. If you don’t need aid by their standards, you won’t get it. The people who will have problems are those students who need more aid than that institution is willing to give them.
You can ALWAYS file the FAFSA in future years and get federal aid. The schools can withhold their own aid if you didn’t apply or receive it as a freshman, but you can ALWAYS file the FAFSA to get federal aid in future years.
My kid got a couple merit scholarships he would not have received or even known about had we not bothered to fill out the fafsa. So we jumped through that hoop just to be safe and I’m glad we did.
There used to be (don’t know if there still are) a handful of schools that would give a grant just for filing FAFSA
We didn’t qualify for any aids. I didn’t see any reason to share my financial info without getting something for it. My older one applied to 12 schools and I do not remember any of them required us to fill out FAFSA in order to get merit. As a matter a fact, she was given a generous merit aid just based on her stats.
If a school requires FAFSA for merit then it is probably not a true merit, and if you don’t quality for need based aid then you probably wouldn’t get it at a school that requires FAFSA for merit.
I say file it when you need to.