Fafsa and Grad school

somemom
Wed, 20 May 2009 12:17:05 +0000

Whether undergrad schools count your grad student depends on each UG school policy, you need to ask, but many schools (the UCs for example) do count

Most grad school financial aid is in the form of loans, TAships which earns a stipend and tuition remission etc.

Tell any grad school applicant that you know to file FAFSA in January as they had in UG. My DD did this for a masters and got a substantial work study which was used as a research assistantship. The profs & dept all said they had never seen a grad student get work study before, we figured out this was because most of her cohort did not do FAFSA until they knew where they were going and WS$ are limited so by then they were all gone. This small award made a huge difference in reducing her potential loans as she would have had to work in that research lab any way so would not have had that much time to work another job.

For professional schools- MD/JD/MBA many schools will count parents info for school based aid, PhD and masters usually consider the student independent