Posted July 23rd, 2008
by admin
Almost all graduate students feel they are financially “needy,” because they don’t earn very much money and are facing big tuition bills. So every grad student should at least fill out the single most important financial aid application, the FAFSA. But students should also be realistic about their chances. Very little financial aid is awarded to graduate students based solely on financial need. Pell grants, which help pay tuition for millions of low-income undergraduates, simply aren’t awarded to graduate students, no matter how broke they are. Many grad schools—especially professional programs—tell students to borrow on the theory that their new degrees will help them get better-paying jobs, so they’ll be able to repay those loans.
Still, some charities, and some schools—mostly big public universities or private schools with big endowments—do award scholarships to the neediest students. Generally, the students with the best chances for need-based aid come from disadvantaged backgrounds. Often, however, scholarship funds are so limited that they go to only the most talented or qualified needy students.
Here’s how to maximize your chances at getting need-based aid:
1) Analyze your own finances. Does your fiancé/fiancée have a good job, some savings, and/or a house? If so, delay the wedding! Many schools consider a spouse’s income when deciding who gets need-based aid.
2) Do your parents have good jobs or a nice home? If so, you’ll want to focus on schools that don’t consider income of the student’s parents. That means focusing on schools that ask only for the Free Application for Federal Student Aid. Schools that ask for additional forms typically expect parents to help pay your graduate school bills.
3) No matter what your financial situation is, you should fill out a FAFSA as soon as possible. Don’t wait to fill out your tax forms first. You can estimate your income now and correct the numbers later. The federal government’s free financial aid application generally asks for financial information only from graduate students and their spouses. It does not require information about the grad student’s parents. Even if the FAFSA doesn’t get you a scholarship, it will qualify you for cheap federal student loans like Staffords, which are capped at 6.8 percent (plus fees).
4) See if any of your target schools or the charities that offer scholarships in your field ask financial aid applicants to fill out the College Board’s CSS Financial Aid Profile. This application asks for financial information about an applicant’s parents and spouse. The College Board charges $25 to send a financial aid application to one school and $16 for every school after that.
5) See if any of your target schools ask financial aid applicants to fill out the Need Access form. This form is free. It also asks for financial information about your parents and spouse.
6) Seek out schools more likely to give need-based aid. That includes schools that require the Profile or the Need Access forms, many public universities with state-funded programs, and private schools with the biggest endowments. U.S. News’s lists of the most generous schools can be found here. A chart of the wealthiest schools can be found here.
7) Call your department head or graduate school financial aid office and ask for help in tracking down other financial aid opportunities.
Try for grants and scholarships awarded for reasons other than pure financial need such as by field of study or by competition.Also, try creating a bidding war over yourself. See if your employer will help pay for your education. Search for other financial aid opportunities.
Source : US News.
Posted in Uncategorized
Posted July 21st, 2008
by admin
The best kind of financial aid is money you don’t have to pay back, typically called scholarships, grants, or fellowships. (Be careful to check the fine print. No matter what name they give it, money that you have to pay back is a loan.)
At least 40 percent of grad students get some free money. They get it by:
1) Creating a bidding war for themselves by applying to several graduate schools, including at least a couple for which their grades, test scores, or other qualifications are above average. Schools are more likely to add a financial lure for applicants who bring up the school’s statistics, rankings, and prestige.
2) Filling out the Free Application for Federal Student Aid and, if their prospective schools ask for it, the CSS/Profile or the Need Access forms to see if they qualify as low-income enough to receive need-based aid.
3) Asking their university department or grad school adviser for help in finding aid.
4) Tracking down and applying to charities and government agencies that fund graduate study in their fields. This is a great option for those in the sciences, education, and languages.
5) Getting their employers to contribute to their education. This is a great option: At least half of all workers receive education benefits from their employers.
6) Even if they don’t get free money, many students lower their out-of-pocket costs by taking advantage of tax benefits, loan repayment programs, jobs, or grad school bargains.
Source : US News.
Posted in Uncategorized
Posted July 15th, 2008
by admin
Top dollar. Many professionals don’t need these repayment programs, however, because their degrees pay off so handsomely. Although physicians these days leave medical school with about $100,000 in debt, most can easily make the monthly payments of $800 to $1,300 (the higher payments eliminate the debt within 10 years) once they start work. Likewise, Forbes magazine calculates that M.B.A. holders from the top 100 business schools typically get such big raises that they earn their grad school outlays back in just four years or so.
Of course, there are plenty of students—those in, say, social work or the humanities—for whom an investment in grad school returns little financial profit. But, says Kevin Murphy, an economics professor at the University of Chicago who has studied returns on education, money shouldn’t always be the deciding factor. “I hate to see people get discouraged,” says Murphy, who won a MacArthur “genius” prize in 2005. “Education gets you a lot more than earnings…. You should go for a master’s in poetry if you enjoy it.”
source : US NEWS.
Tags: Get Financial Aid Posted in General
Posted July 2nd, 2008
by admin
A growing number of students work part time while they are in grad school. Campus research jobs are ideal because students can get paid for working on their dissertations. But those plum assignments are hard to get, and many more grad students end up with teaching assistantships. Teaching can be fun, and it prepares the student for a future as a professor, but grading undergrads’ finals just when grad exams loom can be stressful.
Alas, there is such a shortage of grants and high-paying campus jobs that most grad students have to borrow, often massively. Almost 60 percent of all grad students have some education debt, and the average such debt is more than $40,000. Those attending professional schools should expect to rack up far more than that. More than 90 percent of all medical and dental students borrow, and their typical debt load exceeds $90,000. Debt loads of $200,000 are not unusual.
Point shaving. With those kinds of numbers, students who shop around for loans that waive fees or knock a couple of points off the interest rate can save thousands of dollars. Grad students say one way to save big bucks is to stick with federal loans even when private loans seem to offer lower terms, since the federal loans can be deferred or even forgiven. That was a happy discovery for Cathi Blair, who started spending down her family’s savings to fund her pursuit of a master’s in education at Eastern Kentucky University. Blair, who has worked more than 20 years as a scientist for the state, is preparing to launch a second career as a science teacher. One of her fellow students pointed her to a program that will repay up to $17,500 worth of federal education loans for science teachers. So she borrowed to pay tuition instead, preserving the family nest egg. After five years of teaching, most of her debts will be canceled. “It would have been extremely hard on my family” to pay all the costs out of pocket, she says.
About 80 percent of schools allow students to shop around for Stafford and Grad plus loans. Many of these will steer students to loans offered by “preferred lenders.” While those are no longer simply the lenders that pay the biggest kickbacks to the school, they are not necessarily the lenders that offer the best deal. Students can save thousands of dollars if they spend a few hours checking out deals on websites such as SimpleTuition or Graduate Leverage or from nonprofit lenders such as the Missouri Higher Education Loan Authority. MOHELA lends to students around the country and cuts 2 percentage points off many loans. A list of nonprofit lenders can be found at efc.org. Some private lenders may offer similarly low-sounding terms. But most private loans have variable rates, which means payments may rise in the future.
Students who move on to low-paid or public-service professions can get many of their federal—but not private—student loans forgiven. Among the advantages of federal loans:
- Income-based repayment. Starting in 2009, graduate students who consolidate their federal loans with the federal government can apply for an income-based repayment plan that caps monthly payments at 15 percent of family income. Some borrowers can have their remaining debts canceled in as little as five years.
- Public-service forgiveness. A host of programs will repay educational loans for teachers, healthcare workers, and other public servants. Some of the programs, however, are designed with so many loopholes that most students won’t get much benefit. Last year, for example, Congress congratulated itself on agreeing to repay Grad plus loans for those who work at public-service jobs of almost any type for 10 years and who make 10 years’ worth of on-time payments on their plus loans. Since standard plus loans last only 10 years, students won’t get any advantage from this program unless, as soon as they finish school, they apply for the federal government’s 25-year income-based repayment plan.
source : US NEWS.
Tags: Get Financial Aid Posted in General
Posted July 1st, 2008
by admin
Asking the right questions will save you money
A bachelor’s degree is becoming passé in the job market. Those who really want to set themselves apart need a graduate degree. Unfortunately, the educational ticket to the top is expensive. Annual tuition and books alone at a run-of-the mill public university are reaching $9,000 a year. Anyone who aims at a private school should prepare to cough up $25,000 to $30,000 a year. And that’s before living expenses, which usually add at least $8,000 a year to a student’s budget.
Compounding the sticker shock is the dismaying reality that students can’t count on the kinds of scholarships that helped them through their undergraduate years. Fewer than 4 percent of graduate students get a federal or state grant. Fewer than 20 percent get any kind of scholarship from their school. Fully 60 percent of grad students get no free money of any kind and have to borrow or otherwise raise the entire cost of their advanced degree themselves.
Luckily, a little financial help appears to be coming to students’ rescue. The federal government is offering new and potentially lower-cost educational loans. A growing number of communities and government agencies are offering to repay loans for workers who agree to spend several years in lower-paying public-service jobs such as teaching. And more employers are subsidizing employees’ tuition.
Most important, employers continue to reward better-educated workers with bigger paychecks, making the investment of time and money a good bet. While the average worker with a bachelor’s degree makes a comfortable $42,000 a year, master’s degree holders make about 25 percent more. And those with professional degrees earn, on average, more than twice the income of those who stopped at a B.A.
That’s a key motivator for thousands of grad students like Doug Spencer, who is working on a Ph.D. in jurisprudence and social policy at the University of California-Berkeley. Spencer owes more than $100,000 in educational debt and says it sometimes feels like “a foot on top of my head pushing me deeper and deeper into the mud.” But Spencer loves school, and as a law professor (his goal) he could start at $150,000 a year. “Maybe I’m just blindly optimistic,” he says, but he’s convinced that the education will pay off in a financially secure life for him, his wife, and their new child.
Of course, not all grad student optimism is blind. Financial aid for graduate students is much more decentralized, and thus more complicated, than aid for undergraduates, says Karen Klomparens, the dean of Michigan State University’s Graduate School. But three types of grad students can be reasonably optimistic about getting some free money to ease school bills, she says:
- Science, math, or technology specialists can shoot for funding from foundations or government agencies, such as the National Institutes of Health.
- Very low-income students can qualify for need-based aid.
- Top students who apply to several schools can hope schools will compete for them by bidding up financial aid packages.
Extra perks. Students who aren’t showered with grants can turn to one of the fastest-growing sources of free money for school: employers. Today, half of all workers are eligible for tuition benefits, up from 38 percent in 2000. And many employers focus on graduate training. Several big ones, for example, have signed on to California’s new EnCorps program, which funds up to $15,000 of the educational costs for retiring workers who want to launch second careers as teachers. Even employers without formal programs can write off as a business expense any worker’s tuition for a class that is job-related but doesn’t qualify the worker for another job, says Bob Scharin, senior tax analyst for Thomson Tax & Accounting. It takes little more than a one-page description of an education plan for a business to take advantage of Section 127 of the IRS code and pay as much as $5,250 a year in tax-free tuition benefits for workers taking just about any course, Scharin says.
Many employers say education benefits pay corporate dividends by attracting and retaining top workers. UTC, the conglomerate that owns Sikorsky helicopters and Pratt & Whitney, has found that the workers who take advantage of its generous tuition program are retained at a 4 percent higher rate than those who don’t. They also get about 4 percent more promotions than those who don’t.
source : US NEWS
Tags: How to Get Financial Aid Posted in General
