<p>Your daughter is eligible to apply as a US citizen for financial aid. She will fill out the FAFSA, and you will fill out your part as a parent using your income figures. Your spouse’s income and assets will also have to be included. If he has no SSN, all nines or zeroes can be used. </p>
<p>When it comes to the verification process, the schools will contact you and request items to substantiate those numbers. They will treat you as they would parents of international students in terms of verifying your income and assets. The difference is that your DD will be eligible for Federal monies if the numbers so bear. As others have said, there really is not a whole lot out there that is guaranteed. FAFSA calculates an Expected Family Contribution that is usually about a third of your family income and 5.6% of your family assets over a protection allowance determined by your age. You can run the numbers through some quick estimated calculators to see what your famiy EFC would be. At about the $5K mark, your student is no longer eligible for PELL grants, and it is pretty much loan eligibility that is there, up to $5500 freshman year, year with another $4K if you apply and get rejected (which you will as a non citizen) for the Parent Direct loan (PLUS). </p>
<p>The rest is up to the college itself. If you DD applies to schools that tend to meet financial need, she will benefit being a citizen at a lot of them, since many colleges do not give aid to international students on the same basis. She will be in the citizen pool for financial aid, a huge benefit for her. Admissions for her to some of the more selective colleges would also be on a US Citizen basis and she would not be under the foreign countries’ quotas. These colleges who give out their own money tend to ask for PROFILE or their own app in addition to FAFSA, and will likely have a decent knowledge on how financials work in your country. </p>
<p>How much of a benefit or disadvanatage it will be for her, all depends on the individual school’s policy on students from a given college. THough your daughter will not be in the international pool, all schools do look at getting a nice mix for diversity’s sake, and how many applicants they get with backgrounds from a given area, can come into play, especially when it comes to getting money. Still, she has a distinct advantage over international applicants.</p>
<p>Fill out some of the Net cost calculators for colleges she is considering, as well the FAFSA, to get some idea where you stand in terms of financial aid. We can’t tell if you are a very low income family, or a high income one, or somewhere in the middle from what you have written. Nor do we have any idea what sort of schools she is considering. Most colleges require the parent to be living in the state for the student to be considered a state resident for tuition purposes. I have a son going to an out of state public school and will be paying the extra charge for the full time he is there, despite the fact that he was 18 even starting there. It’s the actual college that makes these rules for instate consideration, by the way, not the state itself and the requirements often differ greatly. My son can get his drivers license, car registration, get his own place there with his own lease without me on it, and can register to vote there. He can get state residency there but not for his college in state tuition requirements which require a parent to have lived in the state for a year, or for him to have graduated from a high school in that state and be able to show he was there for 3years prior to that. </p>
<p>So it all depends on so many things. Your daughters grades, test scores and the school she attended will factor heavily on what she may get, as well.</p>