<p>We filed FAFSA and received our SAR. The EFC is the full amount of tuition. How do we pay the 35,000.00 (state school) tuition every year? I would gladly pay immediately if I had it. We have one person working and one looking for work. We have a mortgage, car loans etc the same as everyone else. I don’t believe we could get a loan
(140,000 for the first child and 140,000 for the child) who will attend in 2014. I am guessing that because we do not qualify for any money thru FAFSA we wont qualify anywhere else. A bank will not loan us that much with a mortgage and car loans etc., If I had $280,000 I could have paid my mortgage off :)…Any Advice?</p>
<p>First of all what is your exact EFC ? 32k ? If you think your efc is too high for your income,. then you must have reported a high bank balance…and did the student work ? that also increases the efc</p>
<p>No. The FASFA determines your EFC by income (regardless of liabilities). Basically, they do not consider your debts. Everyone has debts whether mortgage, car, insurance, loans etc. The information you would think FAFSA would ask they do not. Their method escapes me.</p>
<p>actually fafsa determines your efc by income, assets and how many people are in college in your family…if you didn’t know efc just shows how much you can pay to college every year, so if your efc turned out to be 35k then there must be a reason for it…</p>
<p>[News</a> and Updates — The Office of Student Aid](<a href=“http://studentaid.psu.edu/]News”>http://studentaid.psu.edu/)</p>
<p>I think our EFC was very nearly the whole tuition as well. Gives you a headached, doesn’t it, as if you have money stashed under the bed…</p>
<p>Try reading through the financial aid office site for common questions and solutions. You would probably qualify for a parent PLUS loan, and there are government loans as well. It’s not necessarily the same as qualifying for a home equity loan or line of credit. That being said, yes, PSU costs are waaaay up there for a “public” flagship, and they will only rise higher. Many accepted families will end up deciding that they can’t afford the debt burden. We are lucky in that being local, our students can live at home and/or some will get a tuition credit as employees’ dependants (which is meant to recompense faculty and staff for being grossly underpaid) Don’t panic! Yet!</p>
<p>They also base the EFC on what they think you should have saved over the past 18 years. We did try to save but got no where near what we needed. PA state schools, other than what you are reporting about Penn State are a lot less than Ohio state schools. My DD attends Slippery Rock University and with the upgraded dorm we only paid $21000 per year and we are out of state. It is less than that for in-state students and she absolutely loves her school.</p>
<p>Yes paying for college does suck, especially if you are a saver like my DH and I. It seems you are pentalized for doing the right thing by saving for your retirement by investing in many different things. I’m glad we did set up the 529 for our kids, though I remember saying to DH shouldn’t we be putting $ in them more often. He said no and now the chickens have come home to roost. I started researching how much college was going to cost about two years ago for DD1 who is going to UP in the fall. Little by little I started enlighting DH about the college cost reality. It took two years but he now gets it. I don’t expect any aid from Penn State but I’m still gonna file the FAFSA incase out business goes belly up and DD2 decides to go to college.</p>
<p>if anyone wants to know why it is relatively so expensive compared to other large schools in other states, just do a google search for PA state appropriations for higher education. Ironically, Pitt and Temple get a larger percentage of their budget from the state than does PSU. The governor just released his budget. It will be flat this year, after two years of large reductions.
To compare PSU to smaller “true” state schools is not appropriate. Can you get a good education at these smaller schools, certainly. Do you have access to the same things as you do at a larger school, certainly not.</p>
<p>There are also private student loans and private student loans for parents…I think with some companies you can borrow up to the entire tution cost a year. I am not sure the interest rate they charge. If you contact the student aid dept. they should be able to give you info on private loans. It is painful to think about coming out of college with over $120,000 of debt. We are very lucky to have been able to save enough for PSU but we have friends who are facing telling their children they have to attend another school. Good Luck.</p>
<p>greenbutton Panic mode this morning! I will do the research as suggested and hopefully we can qualify for the Parent Loan. As for the money under the bed… taxes and healthcare! If we cannot afford the loans? How do you tell your child that has worked hard in school etc…that they can’t go? It breaks my heart. And thank you to the employee. …I appreciate what you do everyday. I know I could not do that job. Thank You!</p>
<p>Thank you everyone for taking the time to help me out. Will follow up on the suggestions.</p>
<p>You tell your child that having debt greater than their first 5 years of working life, or more, is not worth going to That Particular School and instead, they are going to have a wonderful education at A School We Can Afford. You tell them they have done a great job so far and you know they will continue to do so, because college education is as much about what you bring as it is what is there. No new graduate needs the added burden of big debt, it’s never worth it if you have a choice. Schools like Slippery Rock, Shippensburg, West Chester, etc. are doing great work at a fraction of the price. </p>
<p>We saved in 529s since they were little (and not much). They lived at home at first, they work all summer and it has still been really hard.</p>
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<p>Well, if it’s any comfort, some parents had to tell their 2400/4.0 kids not to even THINK about elite schools because they knew they didn’t qualify for need-based aids. It’s an old story. The kids had certainly done everything right. The parents had also done everything right (by getting good education and good jobs themselves). What can you do? It’s just the nature of the beast.</p>
<p>Go to a less expensive school or a school with good merit-based aids. You can still be surrounded by smart kids who go there for the same reason. The professors are hit-or-miss anyway, wherever you go.</p>
<p>nobreaks, Those parents did their kids a favor. What is even more heartbreaking is the kids whose parents didn’t educate themselves about college costs and financial aid and let their children apply anywhere only to have them accepted and then realize they can’t afford to pay.</p>
<p>Only the very wealthy can pay college expenses out of pocket. The expectation is that you will pay from past earnings (savings), current earnings and future earnings (loans), in some combination. Most students can make $5K working during the summer and a couple thousand more during the school year. They can take out Stafford loans totaling something like $4000 a year. That will give them more than $10,000 a year to start. We started saving for college when our children were pre-schoolers, direct depositing from our paychecks and increasing as much as we could each year. We were always very frugal-- driving our cars into the ground (so many years there were no car payments), no smart phones, basic cable, mostly camping for vacations. Of course, all that was still not enough to pay for two kids in college, two years apart. When interest rates dropped and we refinanced our house we increased the loan amount so that we had what we needed for tuitions. It was a combination of all these things that allowed us to cover our kids’ schooling.</p>
<p>The idea that savers are penalized is generally not true, in part because income is weighed more heavily than assets in financial aid formulas (unless the value of assets is uncommonly high). Had we not saved it is unlikely we would have gotten more aid from PSU and we would have had a harder time making the numbers work. Generally, financial aid goes to families with low incomes and few assets to borrow against. Some may feel that low income families get all the breaks but personally, I’d rather have my house and my middle class income.</p>
<p>I understand what you are saying. Unfortunately, we have two children that thru medical bills have drained us plus cancer treatment for a parent. The school may look at our income and say you can afford this but in reality we live paycheck to paycheck. I just read somewhere that the #1 cause of bankruptcy is medical bills. And we all know the healthcare system is breaking down. Our insurance (HDP) was cut by the employer so much that we have to pay thousands of dollars of bills before they pay a dime! Plus pay premiums. I cannot work at this time because the second child is still receiving medical care (One Dr. is $250.00 an hour and we are solely responsible for this). So unfortunately students that need help are not getting it because just looking at your income figure does not tell your whole financial picture. We will just have look into all the suggestions given and take each day at a time.</p>
<p>It is often a shocker when this happens. You can submit medical bills PAID and not reimbursed in 2012 to fin aid and see if they will reduce your EFC somewhat. But, yes, if your EFC equals or exceeds COA of the school, you are not going to get any financial aid. But, honestly, Penn State is not that generous in financial aid. Two cousins of ours applied there, and one goes there. Both qualified for aid, and one got about half his need met, some of it with subsidied Stafford and workstudy (which he could not use) and the other just got the Stafford Subsidie and work study. So even if your EFC had come lower, it is not likely that they would have given you the money anyways.</p>
<p>Your student will able to take out $5500 in loans on his own without a credit check through the Direct Loans/Staffords as a freshman. If you aren’t coming up as behind on bills on your credit report, you will qualify for PLUS (parent loans). You can apply for them in the privacy of your home on line and the decision will be in seconds. If you are turned down, your student can get an additiona $4K in loans. The student loans are slightly favorable in terms of interest rates, but these loans are no bargains in this area, given the prime rate these days. </p>
<p>If your student is going to the summer session before, make sure you understand how any loans and aid work for that. I don’t know whether summer is tacked onto the previous year, in which you may have to file another FAFSA, or if it comes off of the first year and subject to those limits. One of the cousins was in that situation, and I don’t remember the solution, but it had to be addressed earlier rather than later since if the summer required the prior year’s FAFSA and funding the absolute deadline for those funds is June 1 or about that time. This is regarding the student’s Stafford loans. You might want to do a separate thread about that.</p>
<p>You are fortunate in that being in PA gives you some excellent choices in state schools. I believe Temple gave both our cousins some merit money. Also check out the many Catholic schools such as Scranton, King, Gannon, Duquesne, etc. They may come up with some merit money that will bring the cost down. Of course if the Big State U atmosphere of PSU is the draw, it 's hard to beat this school.</p>
<p>Sorry to hear about your situation. (You are right that medical bills are the number one cause of bankruptcy, despite the popular notion that it is usually caused by people living beyond their means.) Are you close enough to a branch campus to commute for two years and then see if UP is feasible?</p>
<p>Shame on Penn State for doing this. You are not the only one. They are giving out merit awards to students and giving out zip, zilch, zero to students with a Zero EFC AND requiring to come for the summer session at extra cost, thereby eliminating the chance for them to make money during that time. Shame, shame, shame!!!</p>
<p>cptofthehouse- please read the OP carefully: “The EFC is the full amount of tuition”
The EFC was not calculated to be zero and then he/she was denied aid.
Medical bills: PSU uses FAFSA- not place to enter medical bills if I recall correctly. Even if it was in some “other comments” field it could be missed and PSU should not act on it until documentation of such expenses are provided. Many private school’s own applications ask for medical expenses and other circumstances.
If the OP can document the bills and discuss this with PSU and then they don’t adjust the award, fire away. This has not happened as far as I read. </p>
<p>Let’s not dump on PSU without good reason- I have a few I could add, but this situation is not one of them.</p>
<p>People should have done their homework about PSU tuition and financial aid. We checked out costs (tuition, housing, and daily living money)for every school our child applied. We also started a few years ago looking at what tuition would be now. FAFSA also has a calculator that estimates what your aid would be even you are not ready to file yet. Its no secret PSU doesn’t give money, your childs guidance counselor shoiuld’ve told them this. You can’t blame Penn State, they have options like branch campuses. PA state schools like Bloom have very resonable tuition and private colleges offer good financial packages.</p>