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College Success
(Admitted to Univ. of Maryland) |
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Financial
Aid
Great education comes at a price. Despite the increasing cost of private education, however, most private schools provide ample opportunities for additional funding. Discover whether you should apply, and learn various options available to private school parents.
Overview
Contrary to the stereotype, many private school families need and receive considerable financial aid. Independent schools are expensive choices in after-tax dollars. Nevertheless, increasing numbers of families are seeking an independent school education for their children and are willing to make enormous personal sacrifices and to assume long-term debt. Faced with regularly rising tuition, many parents are applying for and receiving tuition assistance in the form of scholarships, grants, and loans.
Most schools award financial aid strictly on the basis of documented need, without regard to a student's academic or athletic merit. As long as your child is an acceptable student to the school, your family has financial need, and the school has enough money to give, you will be eligible to receive money.
Who Should Apply for Financial Aid?
By all means, apply for financial aid if you believe you might qualify. You have nothing to lose other than the time it will take to fill out the paperwork. Even families with large incomes may qualify because each situation is unique.
Nearly all schools have need-blind admissions policies, which means that your child's application will be judged by his qualifications, not your ability to pay. His chances of admission will not be affected by whether you apply for aid.
Parents' Financial Statement
Most private schools will ask you to complete an application supplied by the School and Student Service for Financial Aid (SSS), which is administered by the Educational Testing Service. More than 2,000 schools from across the country are members of SSS, which is by far the largest financial need determination service at the secondary school level.
Once a family has completed and returned this confidential statement of their finances, known as the Parents' Financial Statement (PFS), SSS provides each school with a preliminary estimate of how much that family could contribute toward educational expenses. You can get a copy of the PFS from any school to which you apply, and you will only need to fill it out once.
Although many factors are considered in the SSS analysis, the most important component is family income. To the surprise of many, SSS recognizes that even families with an income of more than $100,000 might need financial aid to send their child to a private school. Many of these families have more than one child in a tuition-paying school and perhaps also face one or more college tuitions.
Different Schools, Different Grants
SSS does not determine how much financial aid a school will offer your child. Each school makes that decision independently. SSS merely analyzes your family's finances and determines what it thinks you could contribute to your child's education. For a multitude of reasons, you could complete your PFS, SSS could determine what you could contribute, and you still might get five substantially different financial aid offers from five different schools.
Schools reserve the right to offer you more or less aid than the SSS analysis might suggest. If School A's financial aid resources are limited and it has an enormous number of acceptable students who also qualify for aid, the school might decide to offer smaller grants to ten students than to offer large grants to the top three students. School B could look at your same financial data and decide that it is so eager to have your daughter attend that it will offer you as much aid as the SSS determined you needed. Grants become even harder to predict in schools that award financial aid to children they really want to come there, whether their families need aid or not.
Rest assured that however a school calculates the contributions of noncustodial parents or day-care or graduate school expenses, it does it the same way for every applicant. Your responsibilities are to fill out the PFS, submit the other forms (usually IRS 1040 and W2 forms), ask questions about anything that is not clear, write a letter explaining any unusual circumstances, and do it all on time.
Financial Aid After the First Year
Most schools feel an obligation to meet the financial aid needs of its currently enrolled students before they award any money to new students. Unless your family's financial situation changes dramatically, you can assume that the school will continue to give your child a comparable grant every year, but you will still be asked to submit a new PFS and tax forms each year.
Loans
Many schools offer low-interest loan programs that are designed to help parents whose needs the school cannot meet entirely or in part by direct financial aid grants. Other schools that do not offer loan packages are happy to provide information about outside agencies that offer debt financing to families who enroll their children in private schools.
Schools are usually resistant about endorsing any particular loan program but can tell you which ones their families are currently using. A typical loan is structured for one to four years of school expenses, with a family's eligibility based on their credit rating. There is usually no prepayment penalty, and you are expected to begin repayment immediately, paying in installments and completing it in eight years.
Merit Scholarships
Some schools award their aid on the basis of documented need but also have money set aside for specific merit scholarships. These financial aid grants go to talented students-be that in athletics, music, or academics-whether their parents can afford the tuition or not. Schools that award scholarships to outstanding students may have a special test or application for those specific scholarships. Each school's admissions office will have materials that describe what type of aid they give and how to apply for these grants.
Although each school has a finite number of merit scholarships, it is certainly worth the time to investigate the possibilities.
Paying for College
Families who are worried about how they will pay for a private school are often haunted by tales of staggering college tuitions that still await them. No sooner will they finish with the private school bills than they will be faced with even larger numbers.
The good news is that there are enormous opportunities for financial aid, scholarships, loans, and work study programs. State schools are much less expensive than private colleges, and families who are willing to do the necessary research can find many excellent, affordable college opportunities for their children.
More and more families feel that the education their children receive in the elementary and secondary levels is so critical that they are willing to make significant financial sacrifices to ensure that their children go to good schools.
Few college admissions officers or professors would argue that a child's character is formed in college. Most readily acknowledge that character formation takes place long before a child steps on to a college campus. Most professors also quickly acknowledge than many critical life skills, including students' attitudes toward learning, are formed earlier than their freshman year of college. This kind of thinking has led many parents to do whatever is possible-including relocating, commuting long distances, and making considerable financial sacrifices-to send their children to the best secondary schools.
Despite your best intentions as a parent, it is difficult to predict how your child will do in school and what opportunities will come her way. It is also important to find a balance between wanting your child to work hard, do well, and be appreciative of her opportunities while at the same time not overwhelming her with pressure to perform at an unrealistic level. In a best-case scenario, you might have to sacrifice a bit in order to send your child to a private school. It's a great fit, she does well, and she is able to attend a great college at a manageable cost to you and your family.
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