Your college savings fund has gone down, down, down, but the cost of tuition just keeps going up. Does this mean you’ll be forced to dig deeper to send off your undergraduate this fall? Not necessarily.
Colleges are trying to offer just as much financial aid as they did last year, even to affluent families. In some cases, they may be doling out even more this year than they did a year ago. But you will need to work a little harder to find the loans, grants, and scholarships, because more families will be competing for them.
Your family will boost its chances for receiving financial aid if you understand exactly how the system works. You need to know how each college calculates a family’s financial need (no, they don’t all work the same way). You need to know what makes a particular admissions office more likely than another to flash cash to attract your child.
You can learn the secrets of financial aid officers by doing a little research, on the Web and on the phone. Your kids will thank you — no, that’s too much to ask. But they ought to thank you.
