Financial aid - where to go next?

sivret20
Mon, 31 Mar 2014 02:21:19 +0000

I have a 3.994 GPA (had a 4.0 my entire life until last semester, my AP Environmental teacher wouldn’t round my 92.7% up to a 93), a 2210 on my SAT, multiple sports (baseball, lacrosse, football, wrestling), a job, volunteer hours. I’m a member of National Honor Society, my school’s Yearbook club, and I’ve received National Merit Scholar and Commended Student awards from CollegeBoard, as well as recognition from the National Football Foundation as a scholar athlete. I applied to UW and got in. I completed my FAFSA, and my family isn’t super wealthy, netting me an expected family contribution of around 10,000 dollars. This is somewhat affordable for us. UW emailed me with their financial aid offer, and I got a few loans for around 6,000. I’m instate, and as a result UW is netting my expected family contribution at around 20,000, about TWICE as much as what the FAFSA calculated. And the rest is in loans. This just isn’t affordable for us, as it’s about a third of our yearly income. I thought I had done everything right, got the best grades and everything, but looking at this, it just isn’t feasable for me to go to UW at that price. I was wondering what my next step is. Is there anything else I can really do, like fill out a separate financial aid app for the school? Or am I screwed?