The Illusion Of College Financial Aid

Guest Blogger: Paul Wrubel, College Adviser, San Mateo , Ca.

Again this year, millions of hopeful Americans will complete the FAFSA and CSS Profile forms in order to qualify for need-based financial aid.  They will pay attention to deadlines and try to follow the rules out of an innate sense of honesty and a desire to play it straight.  They will do their job.

For their troubles, the promised outcomes will rarely if ever occur.  Financial aid awards across the nation will reflect a different reality with elusive, shifting rules and an opaque strategy of determining who gets what.  Families at any income and a few dollars left in the bank will be routinely “short-sheeted” by college-produced aid awards.  If a family reporting an income of $65,000 were judged by their financial aid award, you might guess that the family had an income of $90,000 or even more.  For millions of American families the college financial aid system will be a cruel and costly hoax.

For years, there has been a clamor to simplify the FAFSA so that families can more readily apply for need-based aid but with every passing year, it is clear that simplification would merely add to the growing chorus of disillusioned Americans.  What real benefit is there to gain easy access to a theater if the play is bad?  Simplification of the financial aid paperwork would merely add to the audience of disappointed and increasingly angry college-bound students and their families.  But the illusion runs much deeper than mere paperwork.

An actual experience with financial aid looks like this.  A family had submitted precisely the same financial and demographic information to three private colleges, two in Massachusetts and one in Oregon.  Each college received exactly the same numbers.  Two colleges responded with offers that suggested a family contribution of about $19,000 and $32,000 while a third proclaimed that the family did not qualify for one cent of aid making their family contribution a whopping $45,000+ or an assumption of an income of around $150-200,000.  Same numbers, same formula, different outcomes.  Why?

For a complete version of this piece go to:   http://www.paulwrubel.com/college-financial-aid-the-grand-illusion/

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