What You Need To Know About Understanding The Financial Aid Award Letter
In the college selection and admissions process, the award letter is a key ingredient for you to make good choices. The award letter will help you determine if and how you are going to be able to pay for an education at your chosen school. To this end, understanding the award letter is critical to your college career.
An award letter details your financial aid packet. Basically, the letter lets you know exactly how much financial aid, and it what forms, you can expect to receive from each college. Award opportunities will vary, and usually diminish as time for enrollment nears. Thus, it is important to apply early and follow up in a timely manner to every correspondence you receive.
Understanding the award letter, however, may not be as straight forward as it seems. Awards offered may be of greater or lesser significance, depending on the total cost of attending each school in question.
There are a number of factors to consider when adding up the year-by-year cost of attending a particular college or university:
In their awards letters, some colleges will provide a sum of the entire financial scope of attendance. Other colleges will only list tuition and books. Make sure you are taking all expenses into consideration when making your decisions. In addition, your awards letter may include a tuition payment plan. You also need to keep in mind the amount of financial contribution your family will be able to provide during your college career.
In short, the financial aid award letter may greatly impact your ability to consider certain schools for your college education. The college costs for attendance alone may cause you to rule out private schools or particularly expensive public institutions. However, in combining this information with the amount of money a school is willing to award, it is possible that a more expensive institution will become very affordable.
An award letter is not only going to list scholarship and grant opportunities. The total award may offset the entire cost of attendance. But, to completely understand the award letter and its impact on your education, you need to determine if the money is being offered in the form of gifts, loans, or work-study programs.
Remember that even the amount of federal funds available to you will vary from school to school, depending on their participation in federal-funding programs. In addition, federal funds are dependent on how much of the funds from each institution are still available for distribution at the time that you apply.