The financial aid office is out to get you!

At least that’s what the media would sometimes have us believe.  The FAFSA is frequently portrayed as an impossibly frightening form, student loan debt a ticking time bomb, and the financial aid process  (at best) arbitrary and (at worst) nefarious.  With such portrayals in the news, it’s no wonder that future college students and their parents often feel discouraged.  I fear that families reading a recent article on the website Vox, entitled “Six things colleges don’t want you to know about financial aid,” may have felt similarly dismayed.

Rather than put families off of the college admissions and financial aid processes, we at College Coach want to encourage families to take control of their application process and use the insider information we provide to their advantage.  With that in mind, let’s take a look at those “Six things colleges don’t want you to know about financial aid,” and see how you can best use this information.

Everyone knows that you can’t count on a stock tip emailed to you from a stranger with bad grammar.  But did you know that you may not be able to count on the information provided about college finance in the popular press? College Coach finance experts, all of whom are former college financial aid officers, were surprised recently when we found serious inaccuracies in the article Four Accounts Every Parent Needs For Their Kids published by the financial advising website NerdWallet on NASDAQ.com .  We hope that sharing these errors with you—and explaining why the information is wrong—will help you begin to separate the good material from the bad material so that you can confidently prepare your college payment plan.

Update: Read the latest tips for the 2017-18 Common App.

This morning, the Common Application sent out their “September 2013 School Officials Update,” which offers a few tips and reminders for completing CA4. According to their newsletter (sign up for it here), they are now “actively exploring how to clarify processes surrounding print preview, fee waivers, self-reported testing, and essay pasting.” Clearly, the bugs and glitches we saw surrounding the new Common App were not limited to the first few days of its existence! Until using the Common App becomes a truly hassle-free experience, here are a few more suggestions to help you best manage CA4.

As a College Coach Finance Educator, I often speak with anxious parents willing to explore any means possible to pay for their child’s college education. How many more scholarships can we apply for? Should we refinance our house? Perhaps sell a vital organ? It surprises me, therefore, how many parents are surprisingly resistant to one financing option: student employment. Their concerns are legitimate — working students may have added stress and less time to study — but there are a myriad of benefits, financial and otherwise, that should be considered.