Of Dreams & Dollars

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Hello everybody.

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My name is Nancy Goodman and I'm the executive director and founder of College Money Matters.

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College Money Matters is a nonprofit organization designed to help students and their families get smarter about paying for college and get an education without getting into too much debt.

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We have a excellent website calledcollegemoneymatters.org, not.com.org and you can use it for free.

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There are no ads and no sign in is required.

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And most of the things we're going to talk about today you can find on the site if you need your memory refreshed, as well as other useful information.

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So today we're going to talk about dreams and dollars and the age-old question of what you really want versus what you could really afford.

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We're going to talk about practical ways that you can reduce the cost of college, how you can compare the cost and value of different colleges.

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We're going to show you some tools at places you can find tools for estimating your personal cost of college because it's different for every individual and every college, and calculating what your loans and are really going to cost you, and also where you can find information about getting financial aid.

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And then we're finally going to talk about acceptance letters and offers and how you can compare them even when they sort of look like apples and oranges.

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So I'm assuming you're either in your senior year or you're a parent of somebody in their senior year and you're doing what most people do, which is you're thinking about and applying to colleges you think you want to go to and you are planning to wait until you get acceptances to figure out where you can really afford.

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I would suggest that that is, well, what most people do.

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It's really backwards and what you should be doing right now if you haven't done it is be having a family conversation about how much money you've put aside and or are willing to borrow to pay for college.

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Have this agreement at the beginning because otherwise it leads to a lot of heartbreak when people kids have their heart set on a certain school and it turns out to be unaffordable.

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And then what a lot of parents do and, and students as well as they borrow too much money and they make a financial mistake that affects them for the rest of their lives.

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You should also know the four types of colleges.

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I think many of you do, so I'll just make it quick.

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There are private nonprofit institutions like Duke or Colgate.

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That means that money that is made by those schools in tuition goes back into the school to improve its, you know, it's offerings.

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There are in state colleges that are colleges funded by the state that are in the state that you live in.

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There are out of state, state colleges that are colleges funded by the state, but not your state, maybe an adjoining state or a state somewhere else in the country.

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And then there are community colleges on community colleges are usually two year institutions, often commuter schools, and they can really help reduce the cost of a good quality college education.

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So let's look at some nearby examples of what costs are in the area that we live in.

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Pace University is a private nonprofit that we talked about.

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You can see their tuition, annual tuition is about 51,000.

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And remember anything you see here you got to multiply by 4.

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Iona College University is 45,000 in tuition.

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University of Connecticut which is state school but not in our state is 43,000 to to out of state students.

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State University of New York had purchased which is in our county is 7000 City University of New York colleges.

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I wrote Hunter College, but there is Baruch there are a number of them.

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There are about $7000 also in tuition and Westchester community which is $5000 in tuition and you would go for two years.

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There's another kind of college, Monroe University is an example.

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It's a for profit college and that means that the money they make in tuition goes to the owner of the college so that he could buy Mercedes.

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Oh well maybe I'm not being fair but in any event it's a pretty ample sized tuition and the for profit colleges records of students completing their degree is pretty poor so I would suggest you avoid for profit colleges.

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Now this is just the tuition, but if you look at food and housing, the cost on the food and housing side has grown even faster than the tuition side.

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Just eyeball this list of numbers.

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You can see that you know if you're housing at Pace University, it's $19,000 again times 4 years of college and Iona.

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Also, this is pretty substantial.

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So the first thing you can do to make college more reasonable is is commute, at least commute at the beginning.

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And these are big numbers that you can save by commuting.

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As you can see in Westchester community.

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Then there's no no housing room and board at all.

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So you may be thinking, looking at this like, whoa, that is more money than I really have available to spend on this.

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What what are my options for helping my student or for me to get a college education at a lower price?

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So step #1 choose a less expensive school really important that you've applied to a financial safety school on your list.

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So 1 you can get into and you know you can afford and that's probably going to be an in state, state school or Community College.

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Second, go on the college's website, use the net price calculators and figure out you usually put in your income, sometimes test score or grades and the school will give you an estimate of how much financial aid you'll need.

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You'll be likely to get.

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Excuse me.

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And some schools are more generous than others.

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So if you use the net price calculator, you can get an idea.

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OK, what is this college likely to cost me?

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Even before you get their financial aid letters.

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So that could be something you could be doing right now.

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On the College Money Matters website, we have a downloadable spreadsheet.

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When you look at the cost of attending on a college, that's an average number, but we have a spreadsheet where you can put down your personal number.

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So for example, if you have to fly to the college you're going to, that's going to be a different price than if you're going to drive there as, or you may have personal medical needs or other kinds of needs or of systems, computers, tech needs that you can put on our spreadsheet and really assess the full cost of what the college is likely to to be in your particular circumstance.

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Another suggestion I have for you is visit tuitionfit.org.

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They collect financial aid packages from colleges around the country.

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And so they have a free calculator that you can use.

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You put in your test scores, you put in your grades, you put in I think the state where you live and you put in the FASA Sai that you've gotten the number that you get after you fill out the FASFA and they will give you a list of colleges.

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But sorry and you and you tell them how much you could afford, they'll give you a list of colleges that will meet your financial needs.

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So there may be colleges on that list you hadn't even thought of that might be interesting or good ones for you to apply to.

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Consider going to Community College for two years.

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Yes, I know it has.

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Community College has a little bit of a reputation problem, but it's really not for students who couldn't get in anywhere else.

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A lot of very smart students have realized that they can get a good education by starting at Community College for a year or two and then transferring to a State University of New York college or Community City University College.

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And this can be a very effective way to get a college degree and learn a lot at a reasonable price.

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However, there are some caveats with Community College.

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You need to take college level courses.

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You need to make sure these are the kind of college, the courses that are basic for your, your major or basic requirements and and that they will be accepted by the schools you intend to transfer into.

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And you have to also be careful you're not taking non college level courses cause at Community College they also teach remedial courses as well.

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If you want to know more about that, there's the whole section on Community College on the College Money Matters website, and there's Always Working.

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This is a great way to defray the cost of college.

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You can work when you're in college not only while you're studying, but there are a lot of breaks.

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Not only summer, but the winter break is extremely long and if you are attentive and aggressive, you can find work that will pay you good money while you're on break as well as decent money while you're working in school.

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Just be careful though, if you work too much, too many hours, you may end up failing classes or dropping classes.

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And that's very problematic because if you fail a class or drop a class, you end up paying for it twice.

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So so be careful when you work and make sure you're still able to keep up your grades.

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All right.

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Financial aid.

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Financial aid has three components, scholarships and grants, work study, which is money given by the federal government to colleges so they can hire you.

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And loans.

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We'll talk a little about loans, but loans are, you know, to be avoided or at least to be minimized because scholarships decrease your cost or defray it.

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But loans are going to increase your cost.

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You're going to borrow money for a loan, but you're going to pay back substantially more than you borrowed.

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OK, Scholarships and grants.

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Sadly, most of the deadlines for scholarships and Grants Pass on December 31st.

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So we've already missed most of the major deadlines and the rest of them are finished on March 31st.

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And I can tell from the analytics of the website that people usually get their acceptances and then they begin to look for scholarships.

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You need to do that the other direction and you should be starting to look for scholarships right now.

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And again, if you go on the website, you'll find a lot of creative ideas of where you might, might find scholarships work study will be available to you first come first serve.

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But you have to fill out the FAFSA form.

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And so the earlier you fill it out, the better likely are you are to get a job from your college.

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And those jobs are often jobs you can study while you do, like checking people into the library as an example.

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Loans.

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OK, this is my my, my big, big, big, big wish for all of you.

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Before you sign a loan note, before you agree to borrow money from the federal government or anyone else, go to one of the college cost calculators that are available, the loan calculators.

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I've listed a few on the website and figure out what the borrowing is really going to cost you.

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So at today's student loan rate, it's 5.63%, but parent loans that the parents might borrow for your schooling are at 9%.

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A loan at 9%, you're going to pay a lot of interest and your monthly payments aren't going to be very large.

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So make sure before you sign any note you actually do the math.

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And you don't have to do the math.

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There are calculators out there.

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All you have to do is punch in your numbers.

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I'm going to borrow this much at this rate, and it will tell you your monthly payments and how much the interest is going to be.

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OK.

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Acceptance letters arrive.

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It would be nice if they were all standardized and you could just compare one against the other, but they're not.

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And a lot of them kind of disguise the loans.

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They're sort of hidden in there.

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And so you don't realize sometimes that you're going to have to borrow on top of what is already borrowed.

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So no one thinks financial aid includes loans, but it does.

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And all your financial aid packages will come back to you with scholarships that they're going to give you or merit aid and they're always going to be loan loans to take out.

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So pay attention to how much loans are in total.

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And there are again, several sites where you can go and put in the information from different financial aid packages.

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And the site will help you compare.

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So one of the, the, the problems for you as a, as a student or a family is these forms come in all electronic and all different formats.

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You can go to a couple of sites which I've listed on the on the College 20 Meadows website and they will do the comparison for you so that you don't have to disassemble all of the information you have and reassemble it in a, in a different way.

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Don't forget you're going to college for four years.

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So please multiply your cost by four years and note that it takes that 60% of students take more than four years to graduate.

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Don't do that.

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It's one of the major causes of of student debt.

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You want to graduate in four years, You want to keep track of your courses.

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You want to pass your courses, you want to take only the courses you need to graduate.

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And you want to be out of your school by four years so that you don't have to pay for another year of room and board that you have to borrow for case study.

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Sarah Sarah applied to two schools.

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She was accepted at both.

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But when she got the financial aid packages, she realized she actually really couldn't afford to go to either.

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She and her mother got into a huge fight about what was affordable.

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And we're even not on speaking terms for a while.

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It's very painful.

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At the last minute she decided to go to a Community College.

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She went for a year.

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She enjoyed it very much, small classes, a lot of support.

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She transferred to an in State College and now she is working at a career she enjoys as a paralegal in training.

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So she actually decided not to go to either of the schools that accepted her and opt for Community College, which was, in my mind, kind of a gutsy decision, something very hard to do.

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It's very hard to walk away from an acceptance.

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So key takeaways, Apply for scholarships while you're applying to colleges or even before.

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Make sure you have a financial safety school in your portfolio, like a State University.

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Estimate your college costs even before you apply or before you even get your financial aid package by using the net cost models on the college websites.

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Don't over borrow.

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Pay attention to what the monthly payment is going to be and whether you think that's affordable.

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Both parents and students need to do that.

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Make sure you graduate in four years.

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And finally, check out College moneymatters.org, where we have lots of useful information, everything from scholarships to how to avoid scams to useful models that you can model your own information on.

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And we think that you'll find it very valuable.

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And we'd love to hear from you and even hope that you sign up for our monthly newsletter in which we cover current topics of interest and of importance to the applying population of students and their parents.

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Thank you very much for your time.

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I hope this was helpful and I look forward to seeing you on the website.