If your family receives financial aid, do you still take vacations? Not sure how many families on FA are able to manage this, but a few seem to still travel really well. I wonder how they do it and still qualify for aid.
Vacations don’t have to be expensive. My last family backpacking trip to Yosemite costed $250 per person total. Even FA families can afford that, or a bit more?
Regardless of the cost of the vacation, a college student with a summer job might have to miss it because you generally can’t miss work when you’re only working in a place for the summer.
Determination of FA is primarily based on parents’ current income as revealed on tax statements. FA doesn’t take into account things like consumer debt. A lot of people put vacations on credit cards. Some people may live in modest homes and drive modest cars, and spend their discretionary income on travel instead. You don’t know how people are paying for things and it’s best not to worry too much about it.
We are in the ‘rice or beans’ category, and receive generous aid from my daughter’s school. Have not managed to take an actual vacation since she started prep school. This summer’s college tours were our “vacation”. We don’t really mind though… we live in an area that many other people think of as ‘vacationland’. 
You can get a lot of traveling through credit card points and miles bonuses if you are strategic about applying for cards when the bonuses are high, and putting your usual spending on them to earn the bonuses.
To date, I’ve earned about $10,000 worth of free travel without spending a cent more than I would have been spending anyway.
I have a friend whose husband has a hobby of entering contests. They take great vacations that he wins, and only have to pay the taxes. Don’t worry about anyone else’s finances, just look at your own.
You mean someone actually wins those? 
I occasionally took vacations as a FA student. There is an indoor waterpark resort only a few hours for us so that’s a pretty cheap stay ( < $500 for the weekend for a pretty all-inclusive package). We also went to Florida. I gave my parents some money so that they could go to Florida, too.
I worked full time though. Part time at a well-paying job and part-time at a near-minimum wage job. They both allowed me to go on vacation without a problem.
My income was never taken into account on FAFSA because I had an auto-0 EFC (parents are both permanently disabled).
Our last family vacation was last century, in 1999.
We didn’t take any big vacations while our kids were in college…and we didn’t receive need based aid at all. But we did take some trips that were car rides away…and a couple where we used FF miles from DH’s work.
But when our kids graduated, we went on a BIG vacation…three weeks long…and it was terrific!
[Louie CK on fairness](A Little Girls Lesson In Fairness - YouTube)
@Marian
“Regardless of the cost of the vacation, a college student with a summer job might have to miss it because you generally can’t miss work when you’re only working in a place for the summer.”
Are you suggesting that a FA student with a Summer job shouldn’t take a week off during the entire Summer?
I think they meant that they might not be able to get the time off from work.
But they can do it at either end of the vacation.
We did not take family vacations in the summers when our kids were in college…well…we took DD on a college visit trip for two weeks…does that count as a vacation?
Our kids worked in the summers. Oh…and we both had jobs as well!
If my kids had FA then we would have been able to go on more vacations. Just saying.
“But they can do it at either end of the vacation.”
Maybe, maybe not. Some summer jobs may have hard and fast start and end dates.
In my experience, the options for vacation became increasingly limited as the kids got older and had other commitments. It’s not unusual for college students to have schedules that make it hard to take a vacation with the family, and frankly that’s not always a high priority for young adults. Often families prefer to spend the kid’s off time relaxing at home, and the kid may appreciate the chance to visit local friends more than a trip with parents.
The only trips we took when one daughter or both were in college were to their graduations.
What is your definition of a vacation?