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Every university estimates how much it costs for an average student to attend a particular campus. This is called the Cost of Attendance (COA). It is based on some things that are certain (e.g. tuition, fees, campus health plan) and some things that are uncertain (e.g. books, supplies, transportation), so if you’re smart with your money, your actual costs can be less than the estimated costs represented by the COA.</p>
<p>There are three main categories used for calculating COA, depending on the housing plans you indicated on the FAFSA. [url=<a href=“http://www.fao.ucla.edu/publications/2011-2012/Estimated_budgets.pdf]Here”>http://www.fao.ucla.edu/publications/2011-2012/Estimated_budgets.pdf]Here</a> is the COA breakdown for all three categories at UCLA (pdf).<a href=“The%20%22Commuter%22%20category%20is%20for%20people%20who%20indicated%20their%20housing%20plans%20as%20%22with%20parents%22%20on%20the%20FAFSA.”>/url</a> Take a careful look at the first two categories to see what is different and what is the same. Your enrollment fees, books and supplies, campus health insurance and (potential) loan fees are not affected by where you live, so the costs for those are the same under all three plans. However, students living off-campus are expected to have lower housing costs, higher transportation costs, and more miscellaneous personal expenses. The bottom line is that the COA at UCLA is $2,859 less for off-campus undergrads than for undergrads in the dorms.</p>
<p>How this affects you personally will depend on your particular financial aid package. As a general rule, when receiving federal aid the total of all forms of aid you receive cannot exceed your COA. That includes grants, scholarships, subsidized loans, and federal work-study. There is also often a certain amount of money that will not be covered by need-based aid, either from your Expected Family Contribution on the FAFSA, or from a Student Self-Help Expectation determined by the university. On your financial aid award summary, you should see an indication of something called “remaining need” or “unmet need” or similar. If this amount is $0, then you have maxed out your need-based aid, and that means that when your COA goes down by $2,859, that same amount will have to be removed from some part of your aid package. And it’s not going to be removed from your subsidized loan offerit’s probably going to come out of a scholarship or grant.</p>
<p>This is because you are expected to have lower costs. If you have lower costs, you can get by with less aid. However, in most cases, if the dorms would be covered by need-based aid, an apartment off-campus would be covered as well. For instance, let’s say your fees are $10,000 and you’re staying in the dorms which is another $10,000. If you have $25,000 of scholarship money, the first thing that happens when school starts is that the school takes what you owe them for the fees and dorms. $25,000 - $20,000 = $5,000 left over, which the school will give you directly in whatever form the office uses (check, direct deposit, prepaid VISA, whatever). Next year, you decide to move off-campus. Now, the school doesn’t know where you’re living off campus and they don’t know how much it costs, but they estimate it should cost you about $8,000. This is $2,000 cheaper than the dorms, so your COA goes down $2,000, reducing your scholarship from $25,000 to $23,000. When the semester starts, the school takes out its $10,000 fee from your scholarship, but since you’re not living on-campus, they don’t take out any money for the dorms. That leaves $13,000 which the school will give you directly so that you can pay for your off-campus housing, based on their estimated cost of $8,000, plus the same $5,000 you got the semester before (for things like books and transportation).</p>
<p>There are some situations where you can live off-campus but in apartments which are directly affiliated with the university, and in those situations it’s possible the university will take out your housing costs anyway to pay the apartments. But usually if you have a monthly rent, it’s your responsibility to pay, and the university won’t do it for you. Keep in mind that the numbers I used in my example are all fake, and in the real world you don’t get your entire scholarship for the year all at once; it gets divided between quarters or semesters.</p>
<p>The bottom line is that if you choose to live off-campus while attending UCLA, your financial aid will probably reduced by $2,859. However, if you live cheaply and spend less money than UCLA’s estimate, you can actually wind up with more spending money when you live off-campus. This is because UCLA knows exactly what their dorms cost, and so they give you exactly that amount of aid. But since they can only make an estimate about what your apartment will cost, they give you that estimated amount, and if your apartment is cheaper than they expect, you get to use the extra money however you like. (The risk is that if you’re not good with your money, or you get an apartment that’s too expensive and spend more than the estimate, they won’t give you any more aid to cover it; you’ll have to take a loan.)</p>