Financial Aid emergency question

50isthenew40
Wed, 16 Dec 2009 20:23:21 +0000

I am not an expert on financial aid, but my dd is at Yale and receiving some aid, so I hope you don’t mind if I throw some advice your way!

You might be surprised at how generous Yale and similar schools are. If you are “borderline” for financial aid, you might qualify there and no where else. They are a full need school so if they calculate your expected contribution to be less than their full cost of attendance, you will receive aid. (They included books and transportation costs to the west coast in the cost of attendance for my dd, so they will most likely include cost of flying from/to Cairo.)

Yale has a calculator on their financial aid website. You can put in a guess of your 2009 income and get an estimate, or put in different scenarios and see what you get!

They are very quick and helpful answering questions by e-mail or by phone I have found.

We weren’t able to do our taxes until late March, right before our daughter was accepted regular decision. I was very pleased with how quickly they sent us a financial aid package, in plenty of time before the May 1st decision date.