Spring 2007 Alumnae Quarterly Web Extra

Web Extras for The College-Cost Conundrum

By Avice A. Meehan ’77

Financial Aid Resources for Panicked Parents

A variety of new tools and resources are available for parents with college-bound children to evaluate savings plans and other long-term strategies or to assess the likelihood that a child may be eligible for federal financial aid. In fact, there’s no shortage of advice because financing college is big business. The federal government alone issued nearly $13.95 billion in student loans in 2006; another $14.69 billion in student loans originated with the three top private lenders, including Sallie Mae.

• The College Board—the same folks who administer the SAT and Graduate Record Exam (GRE)—provide something called the Financial Easy Planner that will enable parents and students make a rough calculation of whether they have saved enough money and how much aid the student might receive.

The planner, which requires registration, is accessible from the College Board home page (www.collegeboard.com) by the links to the “For Parents” section of the Web site. Another aid calculator can be found at www.finaid.org, a resource that bills itself as “The SmartStudent Guide to Financial Aid.”

“We tell people to go to an online calculator, take your tax information, and plug it in. That will give you a realistic projection,” says Jane B. Brown, vice president for enrollment and college relations at Mount Holyoke.

The calculator will spit out an estimate of the expected family contribution, or EFC, and Brown notes that families with an EFC of less than $4,000 are likely to be eligible for federal grants, in addition to other forms of aid. The college uses its own methodology to determine how its scholarship funds are allocated. But like the federal government, Mount Holyoke takes a variety of factors into consideration, including the number of other siblings in college.

• A new resource—the “Fafsa4caster”—has just been unveiled by the U.S. Department of Education and is available at www.federalstudentaid.ed.gov. Named after the ubiquitous and complicated Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA), the tool should help parents and students assess their financial situation ahead of time. It requires registration and detailed information, but the good news is that the data can be used to populate the actual student aid form and simplify the filing process. The forecaster will be available in Spanish by late spring.

• Another new Web resource has been created by the College Savings Plan Network and allows parents to compare the features of so-called 529 college savings plans at www.collegesavings.org. Mount Holyoke and more than seventy other Massachusetts colleges participate in a 529 plan administered through the Massachusetts Educational Financing Authority (www.mefa.org/saveForCollege) that allows families to prepay tuition.

• Tapping into a family network to salt money away for college is possible through UPromise (www.upromise.com) a savings network recently acquired by student loan giant Sallie Mae. Beth Regish Smith ’92, director of marketing production at UPromise, says it allows families to earn money for college by shopping with eligible companies around the country.

Want More? Here are Opinions Galore

From pundits enshrined at think tanks to ordinary folks with a computer and an interest in the issue, everyone has an opinion on the cost of a college education. Buried under all the “official” information, one can also find quirky and interesting commentary. Here is a sampling of resources.

• A good place to begin is the College Board, which does an excellent job in sorting through the numbers in its annual report, “Trends in College Pricing.” The 2006 edition, which is filled with helpful charts and useful comparisons, can be downloaded here.
  
• Claire Robbins ’04, a producer for Youth Radio Los Angeles, has her own take on the cost of a college education. Her commentary, entitled “Frozen in Debt,” was broadcast in January 2007 on the Marketplace program. You can hear Claire speak about making ends meet at marketplace.publicradio.org.  

• Numbers galore—and many other helpful resources—can also be found through the National Association of College and University Business Officers. Data about federal aid, as well as analyses of the economic benefits of a college education, are available at nacubo.org.
  
• The U.S. Department of Education convened a Commission on the Future of Higher Education that looked at affordability, among other issues, and made a series of recommendations for improvement. The “Action Plan” and much more can be found at ed.gov.

• National Public Radio (www.npr.org) ran a lively series of stories earlier this year called “The College Admissions Game.” You can find the stories through NPR’s audio archive.
  
• There are bloggers galore writing about higher education—including staff members at the Chronicle of Higher Education—but the three women behind “EducatedNation” (http://www.educatednation.com/) provide a slightly off kilter and always readable perspective on the issues.
  
• Washington Monthly—the iconoclastic publication that provides an alternative to the college rankings compiled by US News & World Report—evaluates schools on a variety of different measures, including how well they provide access to poorer students. It should come as no surprise that women’s colleges rank high. More information about the annual survey can be found on their Web site.

There is no way you can build a government better than the people running it. So, if you don’t like the people running it, for crying out loud, get out and run it yourself! The time has come! — U.S. congresswoman Patricia Schroeder, commencement address, 199