I was able to pay my tuition for the fall semester through savings accumulated from working junior/senior years of high school. I’ve talked to different financial aid officers on the phone a few times, and the responses I’ve gotten are that this is about as generous as GW gets and I should enroll in a payment plan. While they are processing the effect of my dependency appeal on my spring tuition bill, financial aid did say that it’s not likely to make a big difference. I plan on enrolling in a payment plan for the spring— I’m from NYC and will be working at my old summer job full-time during winter break to put down as big a down payment as possible, and hopefully my federal work study job should be enough to cover the rest.
Thanks for your advice on reaching out to financial aid. I definitely see the logic in that GW has a bigger incentive to help me out than potential transfer schools, but I guess conversations with fin aid + academic advisor have been disheartening. I explicitly told my academic advisor that I’d love to stay at GW but my financial circumstances make that extremely difficult, and her response was that she’d hate to see me go but students leave GW for all sorts of reasons. When I’ve had this conversation with fin aid, they’ve said that they don’t recalculate fin aid unless there’s been a drastic change in circumstances and the best advice they can give is to delay paying my tuition until Feb (when late fees are applied), and then enroll in a payment plan. It just sucks to hear from friends who are also low-income getting all kinds of financial accommodations from schools that have bigger endowments that can cover everything from textbooks to travel costs.
Forgot to add: I’ve also already maxed out my FAFSA loans this year.