Sophomore FA package

Paying for College
1

<p>Last year I searched CC for information about whether or not colleges were offering similar FA aid packages to returning sophomores. Well now I can report firsthand that Swarthmore offered an award that was very similar to the one offered last year. </p>

<p>Our EFC was only a couple hundred dollars more than last years. The EFC was also accurately predicted by the NPC on college board. We are a two income family with 1 in college and one in middle school. We have home equity, but when entering the home equity on the Swat NPC I entered the purchase price of the house and the value of our mortgage. I did this after reading the FA office's 2008 response to a student groups petition about the school's FA policies. (link is below) One section of the response explains how Swat uses home equity</p>

<p>"Home equity—the difference between the current market value and the outstanding mortgage debt—is a standard part of the analysis but Swarthmore works to reduce the influence of home equity. Rather than including the reported home equity, we might instead base the equity on purchase date and purchase price or we might instead cap the home equity to equal family income—whichever way allows us the greatest reduction of the influence of home equity."</p>

<p><a href="http://www.swarthmore.edu/documents/administration/financialaid/petition_response.pdf"&gt;http://www.swarthmore.edu/documents/administration/financialaid/petition_response.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p>I highly recommend reading the entire document. Someone posted the link on CC several years ago and reading it last year helped me better understand Swat's FA policies.</p>

2

<p>Glad it worked out. In our case (different school), the FA package for the second year eliminated all the grants and WS resulting in FA that was all loans. Same EFC but we had lower assets. The school meets full need. To be truthful, we could never understand why the first year package was so good.</p>

3

I’m just checking in to give an update for my daughter’s senior year FA package. Once again Swat’s actual package was pretty close to the amount listed on the net price calculator. (It was $920 under the NPC estimate.