<p>Does UA allow you to appeal financial aid? I didn’t get as much as I’d like and I wanted to see if I could try to squeeze out a bit more. My parents were going to call the FA office on Monday blindly asking about it, but I figured I would ask here first. If there is an appeal process, how do I get started?</p>
<p>I don’t know the answer either way but suspect the first question that people who DO know the answer are going to need to know is: are you talking merit scholarships, grants for need or loans for need?</p>
<p>Grants and loans. I’m OOS and what I got doesn’t even come close to covering my need. There is a good $20,000 gap between what my EFC of roughly $12k and the COA is. I applied early for FA and everything and I didn’t get any amount of grant, or even work study.</p>
<p>The problem is that you’re OOS. </p>
<p>Publics rarely give OOS students grants, because grants are usually from state taxpayers’ money… Publics charge OOS students a high rate because their parents aren’t paying taxes in this state. They can’t justify charging high rates and then giving out grants to cover those high rates. If they did that, why bother charging the high rates. Plus, you can imagine how annoyed the taxpayers would be if Bama were giving tax-payer grants to OOS students, especially when there’s not enough money for the instate students. </p>
<p>Bama does give merit to OOS students because that money isn’t coming from Alabama taxpayers.</p>
<p>Like most state publics, they don’t have much “grant money” to give away. The small amount they have would have to go to instate students who have a much lower COA, because a public univ’s mission is to help instate students first. </p>
<p>Your EFC is a federal number. It doesn’t mean much to schools except to see if you qualify for federal aid. Your EFC is too high for a federal Pell Grant, so all you’d qualify for is student loans and work study. </p>
<p>Work study is very limited and usually goes to low EFC instate students first. Not getting work study just means that you’d have to find your own part time job to pay for personal expenses. WS doesn’t really help pay for tuition. It’s really for the $2000 per year that students spend on day to day expenses and maybe transportation.</p>
<p>How much will your parents pay? What scholarships did you receive?</p>
<p>When did you apply to Bama? What were your test scores and GPA?</p>
<p>I see that you’ve also applied to UT-K. You’re going to have the same problem there. UT-K isn’t likely going to be meeting your need, either.</p>
<p>Are you instate for USoCarolina? If so, then you might get good aid there, because they do have some kind of promise for instate students, right? </p>
<p>If you are instate for USoCarolina, look at it this way…if an Alabama resident applied to your state’s school with lots of need, USC wouldn’t give grants to that student, either. I know that’s upsetting to applicants, but state schools don’t even have enough aid to help instate students (whose COAs are MUCH lower), so they certainly can’t be giving grants to OOS students.</p>
<p>UNC-CH and UVA are exceptions in regards to giving grants to OOS students who have need. BUT, they accept few OOS students, and the ones that they accept have very high stats…so it could be argued that their awards have a “merit” base. Obviously, they’re not giving grants to OOS students with “just good” stats because those students aren’t getting admitted. And, since they’re admitting low numbers of OOS students, it’s not as costly for them to give those grants.</p>
<p>Other publics (like Bama) are accepting lots of OOS students (a good number with more average stats), so those schools can’t afford to give grants to OOS students.</p>
<p>My parents say they will pay just around what my EFC number was, which was $12,000. I only got a $5500 loan covering all of next year, and I plan to work to pay whatever I can, but the gap is still going to be extremely tough to cover. Unfortunately I applied after the scholarship deadline, so no scholarships for me, at least this year. It makes sense though what you said about OOS kids and grants, but I just don’t have any idea how an OOS kid without scholarships can afford such a high out of state cost. Is my only other option student loans?</p>
<p>There are a large number of students paying the full OOS costs. Their parents must be affluent. There are other OOS students receiving merit scholarships, and then they’re paying the remainder. </p>
<p>You can’t borrow more that your current loans without co-signers and that would be too nmuch debt. Your interest is journalism, so your income as a newish grad will not be that high. As it is, you’ll find paying back the Direct loans you’ve already been given to be a pain.</p>
<p>You can look into scholarships from outside sources, but it’s REALLY late at this point, most will be granting awards within the next month or two, so MOST deadlines have passed. Go to your guidance counselor’s office to see if they know of any local scholarships or go to a site like cappex and look for opportunities there. Don’t expect to get a lot of money, but you can try to get a few small awards to offset some costs.</p>
<p>A part time job that is not work study is not significantly different from a work study job. You can definitely look for a part time job and also look for a full time job in the summer to save some money before heading to school.</p>
<p>If you didn’t get an automatic scholarship for freshman year, you won’t get one later and won’t get one as a transfer. There are some scholarship available through various groups for returning students, but they are significantly smaller amounts.</p>
<p>If you’re already planning on taking the max govt backed loan of $5500, then be VERY careful about taking more in private loans and make sure if you consider borrowing that you have a plan in place and a backup plan and a backup to that backup plan. For private loans you will need to pass a credit check or have co-signer. Private loans are how a lot of new grads wind up in financial trouble very early in life.</p>
<p>You have to be careful with outside scholarships since most are only for frosh year. That could mislead you into thinking that a school is affordable, only to find that the following year you have a huge gap again.</p>
<p>Are you instate for USoCarolina? What is your gap there?</p>
<p>I know this may not sound like the fun cool thing to do…but have you considered living at home, taking all of the freshman type classes at a local community college for your first year and working part time? </p>
<p>If you really want the SEC big campus experience it may be worth doing that for a year so you can have 3 years on campus at Bama or UT…you really don’t want the burden of large student loans once you graduate 
another thought is agreeing with your parents that you will be an RA for year’s 2-4 at college, although getting an RA position isn’t as easy as it sounds either…</p>
<p>Good Luck with your decisions :)</p>
<p>I’m in NC, so I’m not instate for SC, and the gap is even larger than Bama. I’m aware of the community college option, but I really just want to avoid that if possible. I know it does me good saving the money, but I feel like I would be so much more motivated if I attended the actual university. </p>
<p>The RA is another thing… I have 2 twin cousins that were both RA’s and they got free room and board. How do you qualify for being an RA? Because I’d definitely do that if I could.</p>
<p>No frosh are RAs. It’s very competitive to get to be a RA, so you can’t depend on getting that in a future year or multiple years.</p>
<p>Did you apply to any N.Carolina publics?</p>
<p>You could go to a CC for two years, have your parents set aside your EFC for 2 years, then apply to Bama or wherever for the last 2 years. Then you’d have the money.</p>
<p>I’m just curious, as a UNC graduate with parents who were both professors at UNCW. Why aren’t you applying to schools in North Carolina? You are looking at potentially taking on a huge debt when you have several instate options that offer strong academics at a far more affordable cost. My daughter is OOS at Alabama, but without her scholarship money we would have required her to attend a school here in Georgia.</p>
<p>??? IF both parents are profs, then wouldn’t the EFC be higher?</p>
<p>That said, can’t she attend UNC-W for free? If so, go there for 2 years and then transfer.</p>
<p>i don’t understand this either. our EFC is WAY higher than yours and there is no way that we would have paid full OOS tuition for our daughter to go to alabama. the only way it made sense for us was if our daughter got enough scholarship money to go to alabama at a similar or lower cost than it would have cost us to send her to a very good local university. it just wouldn’t make sense otherwise.</p>
<p>she may have still WANTED to go, but money-wise, we just wouldn’t do it.</p>
<p>i agree with the PP that you probably have some good options in your home state.</p>
<p>hope everything works out for you.</p>
<p>"??? IF both parents are profs, then wouldn’t the EFC be higher?"</p>
<p>yeah, that doesn’t make sense to me either. if each parent makes 50K as a prof (and that would be a low estimate) wouldn’t that make EFC more than 12K?</p>
<p>I didn’t explain well. My parents were professors at UNCW, and they are long retired! Shockingly, there was no tuition break for me attend UNC back in the 80’s. My DD was accepted to UNC, but she got no offer of merit money so it was never a serious consideration. We have HOPE here in Georgia, but with her Presidential Scholarship at Bama we are spending less than we would have in Georgia and she is banking money for a graduate degree. </p>
<p>When we moved back down South from the DC area, our first choice would have been North Carolina because of the number of solid schools that would have been available to our kids. In-state tuition is also fairly affordable compared to other states – I went to UVA for a master’s degree and at the time in-state tuition there was about 4 times what I paid at UNC. </p>
<p>My daughter will be coming back to Georgia after she graduates from Alabama to work on a degree in physical therapy. I don’t want her saddled with the kind of debt that some of my young teacher friends have taken on, especially given the uncertainty of the economy. And that’s what I hope the original poster will think about, especially since there are some good choices in his or her home state.</p>
<p>I may be reading it wrong, but I thought WhitLo was saying that <em>WhitLo</em> is a UNC grad and has parents that are profs. I thought it was just a question stemming from WhitLo having experience with NC schools and wondering what was wrong with NC schools that made the OP not apply to them.</p>
<p>EDIT: Never mind, cross posted. At least I was reading it right. :)</p>