Financial Aid and Scholarships
There are a few things to keep in mind for affording college, which I'll cover in this post. You’ll receive the majority of your scholarships from the college itself. Beyond that, there are loans/grants that can also be awarded through the FAFSA.
Scholarships
Academic Merit Scholarships–these come from the college themselves and are often awarded at the time you receive your admissions decision. Sometimes, they come out later, so worth reading the fine print for each college to see. Some colleges require an additional scholarship application; others do not.
Hope/Zell Miller Scholarships– these are for students planning to attend college in the state of Georgia. At public colleges (Georgia College, GA Tech, UGA, etc.), this covers full tuition (still have living expenses, though). At a private university in Georgia (Emory, SCAD, Mercer, etc), you will receive about $5,000 with Hope and about $6,000 per year with Zell. You have two ways of applying for this: through the FAFSA (more on this later) or through the Ga Futures website. If you will not be applying for financial aid from other colleges, the GA Futures application is simpler, and once it’s done, it’s good for 10 years, whereas the FAFSA has to be re-filed each year. You have until the end of senior year to submit the GA Futures application.
External Scholarships–these are the scholarships that are coming from an organization outside of the college itself. There are a few trusted resources for finding these:
Fastweb and Going Merry websites have you create a profile and then match scholarships accordingly. Filling out this profile with as much information as possible will give you the best matches. Fair warning: you’ll receive a lot of emails from these organizations.
Financial Aid/Loans
The FAFSA is the federal financial aid application. This is required for students interested in being considered for loans, grants, and, at certain colleges, scholarships. This year, it’ll open December 1. You can go ahead and create your account now, and I encourage you to do so. The reason for this is that it takes a couple of days for your SSN to be verified, and you cannot complete the FAFSA application until it has been. You can have this step completed before the FAFSA opens.
The FAFSA connects with the IRS to make the form simpler to fill out. You’ll provide information about your income, savings, debt, etc. so that it can calculate what it thinks your family can feasibly afford. Colleges use this information to then determine if they’re able to offer grants to cover that difference.
Federal subsidized and unsubsidized loans are administered through the FAFSA and equate to $5,500/year. There are private loans to cover more and are based on credit scores.
The CSS Profile is required by some colleges in addition to the FAFSA. These are mostly private institutions, with some exceptions, such as Georgia Tech. The CSS profile is run through the Collegeboard, so you will need your student’s Collegeboard login for this application.
College costs have been steadily rising. There are ways to offset these costs; read on for some tips.
