<p>I’m surprised that my son receives basically no grants in his financial aid. Can anyone confirm?</p>
<p>Parents’ AGI: 84K
Assets: 43K
Number of dependents: 3</p>
<p>Financial Aid:
Student Direct Loan: $4500
Grants: $490
Work Study: $2000
The rest is all parents’ contribution</p>
<p>is that your official letter?</p>
<p>Yes it is.</p>
<p>It really depends on the school. Some schools give grants to people with your income level - mostly they would be schools that require profile as well as FAFSA and that have large endowments for granting their own aid.</p>
<p>For many FAFSA schools that depend largely on federal aid it sounds about right. There are four federal grants (other than the new teach grant that). The main federal one is the Pell grant which requires an EFC of below 4042. Other federal grants such as the ACG and SMART are dependent on Pell eligibility. The SEOG requires a very low EFC - most schools give it to students with a 0 EFC. With an income of $84k and a family size of 5 (assuming you meant 2 parents and 3 dependents?) with one on college your FAFSA EFC would be @ 14,000 which would make you ineligible for federal grants.</p>
<p>Depending on the school they may or may not have their own instituitional grants. Though I am guessing the grant you have is an institutional grant.</p>
<p>edit - just noticed you are posting in the UCB forum. I don’t know about their financial aid policies specifically but the above comments about federal aid still apply. I think you are above the income ceiling for the Calgrant as well. There was a posting a while back on CC that showed the income ceiling for calgrant.</p>
<p>At Berkeley the options seem to be:</p>
<p>Pell & maybe ACG/SMART
Cal Grant
Work Study
Loans
SEOG- very low income</p>
<p>Scholarships like Alumni, Byrd, other special ones you apply for not through finaid.</p>
<p>If you do not get Pell, you lose a chunk of money, the other biggie is Cal Grant. You might check the guidelines for that and see if you are close and could maybe qualify in future years?
You might tell your student to get very invovled on campus and apply for the Alumni scholarship next year, it is awarded year by year</p>