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Also would I qualify for low-income and what is the average amount of financial aid an out-of-state city college offers?
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<p>???</p>
<p>Are you asking about OOS public univs? They rarely give need-based aid, so the avg would be low.</p>
<p>Is your father alive? If so, then a school like Barnard would likely require that his income/assets get reported.</p>
<p>The results for Boston College is out in december.
No im looking at mostly private institutions.
Would my father’s income change how much they give me? He is currently in another country</p>
<p>@doolly, you probably have a lot of good options… but you really need to take a few hours NOW to assess the financial situation. We did not really understand this when we started looking for colleges. We thought, “well these are good schools with things we like and they all cost about the same amount of money so they’d all be about the same for us.” But we were VERY wrong. Schools have very different ways of giving need-based aid (based on your family’s income and assets) and merit-based aid (if your stats are great and they want to entice you to go there.) You absolutely cannot count on outside scholarships. For one thing, those are usually small amounts, and only for one year. For another thing, they are usually subtracted from any need-based aid the college awards you, so they don’t help much with you out of pocket costs.</p>
<p>Here is what you need to do: Sit down with your mom and her tax returns and investment information. You are probably going to need to factor your dad’s income in, too. You will want to run the Net Price Calculators for several schools. I found the easiest way to do this is to start an account at the College Board (SAT) “big future” website, here: <a href=“https://bigfuture.collegeboard.org/”>https://bigfuture.collegeboard.org/</a> Sign up for an account, then type the name of the college in. You can create a “My Colleges” list that will remain every time you come back. Then on the college page, click the “net Price” button and sign in (not as Guest). That way, it will retain all the numbers you type in and automatically fill them in for the next school, so you don’t have to endlessly retype everything :)</p>
<p>At the end, it will show you how much you can expect in need-based aid from the school (grants), how much they expect you to take out in federal subsidized loans, how much they expect you to earn as work-study, and what your family contribution (out of pocket) is. I think you will be really surprised to see the differences in the schools. We ran these for a bunch of schools we thought were very similar in all other regards, but the amount of money we needed to come up with varied by $20,000 in some cases!!! This is usually because some schools have large enough endowments that they can “meet full need” (which does not really mean they meet your family’s ACTUAL need, it is just the term they use for what their methodologies compute as your family’s need based on the income and assets) but most schools only meet partial need. This is called “gapping.”</p>
<p>As far as your dad goes… I’m betting his income is going to matter for a lot of the schools you’re applying to. Some big state schools only require filling out the FAFSA for financial aid, but most private colleges also require the CSS Profile, which does take non-custodial parents income and assets into consideration. Here’s a great resource for all things financial aid, this page specifically about divorced parents. <a href=“Divorce and Financial Aid - Finaid”>Your Guide for College Financial Aid - Finaid;
<p>I really, really urge you to take the time with your mom to go over all this stuff NOW. Because you do not want to spend all this time and energy researching colleges and applying, assuming you will be able to afford them, and then come April find out you can’t afford the ones you get into. Much better to use finances to help you narrow your search NOW, so that you know there are schools on your list you will be able to afford.</p>