<p>is anyone familiar with the fa award process? I am going crazy waiting for fa decision which is supposed to be here by April 15,</p>
<p>I have no experience with private schools, but the school my ex applied our son to is $34k a year, he got a 99% on the ssat and both homes have @70K income a year each with 5 people in it,
my son keeps telling me to think positive, but it it a far stretch for me to believe a school will hand us $30k which is what it would take with all his siblings</p>
<p>that's about how much financial aid I received and I'm an only child.
and I got a 99% on the ssat as well. Or maybe it was a 98%... I don't remember.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, the fa process for boarding schools may be slightly different than it is for private schools. My experience with boarding schools is that the amount of aid your student is offered depends on three factor -- your "need", how much the school wants your student and how much money the school has to work with.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, you just can guess these things -- they vary from school to school and year to year. One year, you might have many, many excellent student apply that need aid -- in that case, the school may have to select which students to award aid to. The next year, they may have many students who need aid, but those kids are just not up to par as far as their stats. In that case, the school may offer significant money to a few outstanding students. Yet another year, the school may find it more advantageous to offer small grants to encourage students to attend, even though they have very little need. the amount of one full scholarship spread out over five students may encourage those five students to attend.</p>
<p>I wish you the best of luck -- plan for the worst and then you will hopefully be pleasantly surprised.</p>
<p>I wish you could do the financial aid thing first and the application process second! I dragged my daughter all the way through, while DH kept telling her not to get her hopes up because we probably wouldn't get FA. </p>
<p>I wondered and wondered, and then actually I did a FAFSA calculator on finaid.com which produced a result which turned out to be a very accurate prediction of the EFC on the SSS.</p>
<p>Getting a certain EFC on the SSS doesn't mean you'll be offered that much money, that is up to the schools. But it very unlikely that you would be offered more than that figure.</p>
<p>We were amazed when we were offered FA, because we really had no idea what to expect.</p>
<p>Boarding schools DO sometimes offer more FA so that you actually have to pay less than your EFC. See hsmomstef's post above.</p>
<p>Yes, I do know of several incidents where students paid less (and sometimes significantly less) than their EFC. In general, these were students that the school really wanted to attract -- they offered the school something it wanted that year. </p>
<p>For those just starting out on the journey of applying to boarding schools, those schools that are the best "fit" for your student and where your student can bring something to the table (sport, talent, academics, connections, diversity) that is different/better than the average candidate -- those are the schools you are most likely to get decent FA at.</p>