<p>What's been students'/parents' experience with their VU Grants over the years? Does it really stay consistent if your income stays consistent? And if income and therefore EFC go up, does the VU Grant get reduced, essentially wiping out any gains and still forcing the same level of debt? Thanks for your help.</p>
<p>If you need the money, they will provide it. If you don’t need the money, they won’t provide you the cash.</p>
<p>How “need” is interpreted seems to be relative. Currently VU FA believes that I can take on $25,500 debt for Yr 1 (which means $100,000 + interest accrual for a 4-yr degree), which is not something that my income numbers can support from my perspective. So it seems that one option is to try to increase my income so that I can pay more and not take on such extraordinary debt.</p>
<p>My concern is that if I am successful in increasing my income, then the VU FA formula might reduce my VU Grant, essentially requiring me to continue loan funding at that extreme level or even higher. I need to understand what might be likely to happen to my VU Grant and “family financing option” if I am successful in increasing my income and EFC. (I am very familiar with the federal EFC calculations and have a table relating Adj Gross Income to EFC number, so do not need input about that.)</p>
<p>If I could learn from the personal experiences of other students and parents, then I would feel more comfortable sticking with VU or knowing sooner rather than later that I simply cannot afford it.</p>
<p>I would assume that if your income increases, your EFC would decrease and your VU Grant would also decrease, based on the way EFC is calculated (I know VU also uses the Profile, but since there’s no way of knowing how they factor in the additional information, I can only compare our FA results to the FAFSA EFC).</p>
<p>If your income and assets stay about the same each year, your total VU FA package will likely stay the same but the components will change slightly. Here’s an example from our family:</p>
<p>2010-2011
EFC = 21224 VU Grant = 20,030 Direct Loan = 5500 Work Study = 3000
Balance we paid to VU = $27,220</p>
<p>2011-2012
EFC = 35359 VU Grant = 10,920 Direct Loan = 6500 Work Study = 3000
Balance we paid to VU = $36,452</p>
<p>2012-2013
EFC = 29788 VU Grant = 11,920 Direct Loan = 7500 Work Study = 3000
Balance we paid to VU = $36,418</p>
<p>You can discount the first year as we had two in college, S had outside scholarships and he declined the unsub Direct Loan. But from the last two years, you can see that our income went down (AGI decreased by $13,761) and our EFC went down (by 5571). At the same time VU increased their grant by $1000 and the max Direct Loan increased by $1000. Our out-of-pocket stayed relatively the same (but totals a higher percentage of the reduced income). This makes sense to me as I believe that most schools expect an increasing contribution from the student as they get older.</p>
<p>Just one story, and since over the three years our income had decreased by almost 30%, it may not have any bearing on your financial situation.</p>