Appealing Financial Aid Awards

Webinar Transcription

2025-03-13 – Appealing Financial Aid Awards

Anna: Hello everyone. Good evening, good afternoon, good morning. Whatever time it is from wherever in the world you’re joining us from. We are so excited you’re here for our webinar with Juno on, “Appealing Financial Aid Awards.” My name is Anna Vande Velde. I’ll be your moderator today. I’m a senior advisor with CollegeAdvisor.

Been with the company for almost four years, and I’ve worked with students one-on-one in advising sessions and am a captain on our essay review team. That’s really more than you need to know about me. But just so you have some sense of who I am, uh, to orient you all with the webinar timing, we’re gonna start off with a presentation, then answer your questions in a live q and a on the sidebar.

You can download our slides and you can start submitting questions in the q and a tab at any time. I am now thrilled to turn it over to our presenter, Chris, uh, to introduce himself.

Chris: Thank you very much for the intro. Uh, so hi everybody. Thanks for joining us this afternoon or evening, depending on where you are.

I’m Chris Abkarians and I co-founded a company called Juno about seven years ago. Uh, we do a lot of webinars on different topics from filling out FAFSA to understanding Student Aid Index to appealing your financial aid awards. And, uh, our core reason to exist is. To help families access the cheapest student loans in the market during the summer.

And so I’ll get into a little bit more of how we do that. Uh, but you can kind of think of us as a Costco membership type thing for finance. We do a lot of work throughout the year to educate people about why you should shop around for loans, uh, why you should negotiate your financial aid award so that ideally you don’t even need loans.

Uh, and hopefully this presentation will go a very long way in helping you understand what levers you have to pull to reduce the amount that you have to pay out of pocket for the upcoming fall semester.

Anna: Thank you Chris. It’s really important content. Before we get into it, I thought real quick we’d get a sense of who’s joining us. So please let us know what grade you are in, or if you’re here as a parent, a Guardian support person, please select other while we wait for your results to come in. Chris, I was wondering if I could put you on the spot and ask what inspired you to found Juno?

Chris: Uh, it’s a great question. So I started Juno with one of my classmates at Harvard Business School. We were both in need of student loans to pay for our degrees, and we tried an experiment to see if we could bundle together 500 of our classmates and ask lenders if they’d be willing to negotiate on the rates and terms they’d provide to our group, uh, and give us something better than if we each went individually to those lenders.

Surprisingly, a bunch of them said yes. And Juno was born. So truly it was an experiment to help reduce how much I would need to pay for the loans that I took out for my MBA.

Anna: Wow. What a cool origin story. Thank you for sharing that. And just so you know, you know Chris, in the room, we have almost 50% are in 12th grade, which makes sense given today’s topic.

43% are others, so likely parents, guardians, and then about 8% are in 11th grade or younger.

Chris: All right. Well, for those of you who are, uh, seniors or parents of seniors, this will be very applicable. And for those of you who are younger than that. There’s a lot of really actionable things that you might be able to learn tonight to keep in mind for next year and the year beyond.

Anna: Absolutely. I’m passing the baton to you now, Chris. Take it away.

Chris: Thank you very much. So we’re gonna spend the first five minutes going through a general timeline for financial aid awards. We’ll spend about 10, 12 minutes on merit-based appeals, and I’ll talk exactly what that said. I’ll explain exactly what that is.

We’ll spend the bulk of the conversation on need-based financial aid appeals, uh, and this is gonna apply to a lot more people than you might expect. I’ll give you a quick five minute intro to Juno and q and a for as long as folks need. At the end, if you have questions as we’re going through, please feel free to just type them into the q and a box.

Uh, it should be somewhere on your toolbar. I’ll make sure to stop along the way on each slide and answer as many as I can that are relevant to that slide. And really before we dive in, quick housekeeping, you’ll get a copy of the presentation and the recording of the webinar along with a few links that I’m going to speak about tonight sent to your inbox, uh, likely tomorrow, if not Monday.

And if there’s any remaining questions that you have that we’ve not been able to answer tonight, please feel free to reply to that email and someone from my team will be able to help you out pretty much immediately. And so with that, let’s, uh, walk through a little bit of the timeline for financial aid.

So starting this past December, you would’ve been eligible to fill out the FAFSA form for the fall 2025 academic year. So if you’re going to college this fall, uh, you have been able to fill out FAFSA for a few months. Now you can continue doing so. About one to three days after you complete that FAFSA form, you’re gonna receive a notification that you have a number calculated that’s called a Student aid index.

And we’re gonna talk about that a little bit tonight. Uh, likely many people have already applied to college if you’re a senior. Uh, some places, uh, still will allow you to do rolling admissions and don’t have admissions deadlines yet. Uh, but regardless, many schools have already started setting out financial aid packages.

Uh, if you haven’t gotten one yet, uh, they are likely to come at some point over the next few weeks. And quickly after you receive those financial aid packages is when you want to look into appealing them, either for merit or need based, which we’ll get into. Uh, really around early May is when most schools will have their decision day.

Uh, and then tuition is typically gonna be due in August or September for most schools. And so if there’s any gap between what you’ve gotten in your financial aid award and how much you have available to pay for college, you’d likely be looking at different forms of loans, uh, in that June to July period.

And tonight, we’re really focused on the middle of this process. So we’re gonna talk about appealing your financial aid award. If you have any questions related to filling out FAFSA or understanding what that student aid index number means that you got, after you fill out FAFSA, there are some materials that I can send you tomorrow that go through that in depth.

Uh, but for now, we’re gonna focus a little bit more clearly on how your FAFSA and your overall financial application and college application impact the amount of aid that you’ve received and what you can do about it. And so the first principle that I want you to keep in mind is that when you receive your financial aid award letter from the school, you should view it as a first draft and not a final draft.

There is a quite a bit of leeway, uh, that you have to ask for more help, and as long as you’re doing it politely, there’s no downside. Once a school has admitted you, if you’re appealing for more financial aid, they’re not going to rescind your admission. And if you’re not the one, if the school has some extra budget left, that it can allocate to students.

Whoever asks for it has a chance to get it. And so it really is in your best interest to ask even if it isn’t too likely that you’re gonna get more, because there’s a lot of upside. The upside is that you don’t have to actually pay as much.

Tonight we’re gonna talk about two different forms of appeals, and we’re gonna go through these in quite a bit of detail. We’ll talk about who you should reach out to, how you should actually structure the appeal, the reasons why you’d be allowed to appeal, and what you can do to make your chances of success as high as they can be.

The first bucket is merit based appeals, and so we’ll spend about 10 minutes on that. Merit based appeals are put simply money that you or your student get because the school has admitted them and really, really wants them to accept that offer of admission based on prior academic and other success. The second bucket is need-based appeals, which are based on the inputs that the general idea of need-based appeals is when you failed out FAFSA, it collected certain financial information about your household, and in many cases, that financial information doesn’t perfectly reflect the actual finances of that household.

And a need-based appeal is gonna provide you with some of the reasons why you can explain to the financial aid office that you actually deserve a different amount of aid based on things that they didn’t yet have the chance to consider. We’re gonna go through that in a lot of detail and it applies to, uh, a lot of people who might not even think that they’re eligible for need-based aid.

And you might actually be eligible for both of these. Both merit based and need-based might apply to you and your family. I’m gonna pause here to take a really quick look at some questions.

Uh, there are a lot of really good questions here that I know we’re going to touch on in a few of these slides, so forgive me, but I’m gonna move on at the moment and I’ll make sure to discuss these as we get to the relevant slide. So we’re gonna just start off with general tips on how to go about a merit-based deal.

So this works most effectively if you’ve been admitted to multiple programs, and if multiple programs have given you a discount or merit-based aid in order to attend. You don’t have to, uh, this does not need, it’s not a requirement for you to make an appeal, but it is generally helpful. Helpful if there’s a program that you really want to go to that is offering not enough merit-based aid.

Uh, and there’s another one that’s offered you significantly more. It’s really helpful to express your interest in the program that’s offered you less aid, and ask if there’s a way that they can just help make the numbers work a little bit better for you and your family. The core purpose of a merit based appeal is to convince the admissions office and financial aid office that if they can move the needle a little bit, that you ultimately will accept that offer of admission and go there.

And as long as you’re doing this in a polite way, there is no downside, and you can ask more than once. And we’re gonna get into that in just a moment. So, as I was saying on the last slide, you really wanna express enthusiasm. What we’re gonna do right now is just go through some really high level points that you can touch on.

We’re gonna walk through an example, uh, merit-based aid appeal template, and you’ll get a link to that template tomorrow. Uh, you can adjust that, copy it, use it however you like. You can ignore it and do something completely different, but it’ll at least give you a starting point and then a slide after that.

We’re gonna talk about, uh, a few other considerations, uh, in terms of timing, who to reach out to, and who should actually write the merit based appeal letter in order to maximize your odds of success. So first, right now on this slide, let’s go through some of the really high level strategies. As I was saying before, make sure that in the letter that you write, this is gonna be a letter.

You’re expressing a strong degree of enthusiasm about attending that program. You really want them to believe in, in most cases, it should be true that if they can help you financially, you’ll accept that offer of admission. If you can explain, if you can offer specific examples of things that you want to take advantage of, or programs that you want to be a part of, or clubs you wanna participate in, faculty that you want to study under that goes a long way in convincing the person who’s reading that letter that you’ve not only done your homework, but you have some explicit reasons why this is the place for you.

So do the work to put in those details and make the school understand that if there’s been any additional information that you want the school to consider, since your application now is a really good time to let. If you’ve had some new academic achievement or other type of achievement in athletics or clubs or something else in high school that you didn’t yet have the chance to talk about when you submitted your application, this is your opportunity to do so.

And based on that, to ask for a consideration for a little bit more help to make the numbers work. And in this entire process, just make sure that you don’t threaten to withdraw your admission. That’s not really a thing. Uh, and you don’t want to exaggerate competing offers if you have one that you’re using in a negotiation against this school.

First of all, schools don’t like the term negotiation. Uh, so I just shy away from using that. Uh, but if you have a competing offer, you should be what you want to share about that competing offer is up to you. Uh, but if you’re. Trying to tell a school that some other place is offering you, uh, an implausible amount of money to go there.

But you’re asking school a for an extra $10,000 to make the numbers work. That’s not going to seem as believable to the person reading this letter. So really just give it a read over once you’re done and think is what I’m putting here, uh, plausible? Is this something that makes the person on the other side of the letter, uh, incentivized and excited to make it more likely for me or my child to attend that program?

I’m gonna take a quick look here at some of the questions ’cause I see we have quite a few and then we’ll, we’ll.

So the good question to hear from Holly on many schools say they won’t consider financial aid appeals, especially public universities. Have I heard of successful appeals in these cases? So on merit based appeals, schools are allowed to say that they won’t consider an appeal for more merit based aid on need-based aid that are actually required to allow you to appeal, uh, by federal statute.

And so we’re gonna go through that in a little bit when we go through the need based, uh, aid section. Uh, but just kind of remember that, uh, there’s no guarantee that either form of appeal will be accepted by a school. Uh, but schools are required to allow you and they have to have a process set up for you to submit a need-based appeal.

Uh, great question here on, let’s say that, uh, you’re in your second year of school and you were offered merit-based aid for year one. Could you appeal and ask for more aid while you’re already in college? Uh, so this is, uh, it’s a really interesting question because it’s, it’s less likely that a school would do this, that they would actually give you a further discount.

But it’s always, in my opinion, as a general rule of thumb worth it to ask, especially if the student has exemplified themselves on campus at stellar academic record, been active, uh, all around campus. Different schools have different amounts of money that they are able to provide to students, and that can change from year to year, and you never know.

One year, a school might say, I’m sorry, there’s nothing we can do. We don’t negotiate on this. And another year they might actually have a significant amount of leftover budget for whatever reason, and they might be willing to work with you and provide you something more. The only way you’re ever gonna know is if you ask,

uh, and the question here on can this strategy be used to ask for merit aid from the school that didn’t offer any? Yes. Whether you got offered zero or any amount, uh, you can still theoretically appeal and ask for either some or more aid. Uh, again, there’s really no good data around how likely it’s that the school will say yes.

Uh, but it’s worth it to spend an hour or two or three at least writing a strong letter so that you can ask. I see a lot of good questions here on who should reach out, who you should reach out to, and a few other key points. We’re gonna touch on those in the next slide. The template that you see in front of you on this slide is just something that you pull together for anybody who wants a starting point to work off of.

I wouldn’t necessarily just copy this and only change the yellow highlighted parts, but it can be helpful to at least have a starting point here. And so tomorrow when you get a link to these slides, we can also just go to this slide and click access the template here. Uh, and you’ll be able to go to the public copy of this if you have any questions about whether your letter, uh, is good enough or if you just want somebody to review it, you can always email our team and ask us to take a quick look at it.

Uh, we, we do that for a couple of people every week, uh, just for a few minutes here and there. We won’t charge you for it, if that’s helpful. Please remember, all you gotta do is reply to the email that we’ll send tomorrow and we’ll help out.

Uh, so let’s go through a few key things on process and then I will turn back over to all the questions we have remaining on merit appeals before we move on. So, timeline, let’s start with that. It is generally helpful to do this after you’ve received multiple offers so that you can frame the conversation, uh, but you need to do it before the enrollment deadline in most cases.

And so if you’ve already accepted the offer of admission and put down a deposit at the school. Look, you still can theoretically appeal, but your odds of success go down quite dramatically. And so now is the time that you wanna look into this. If you’re, uh, a junior in high school and, uh, younger than that, remember that your merit based appeals should be done well before you accept the offer of admission from any one place.

Uh, you really want to do this as a letter, and it’s most helpful if that letter is sent from the student, not the parent. Uh, it’s gonna be different for need-based appeals. We’ll get into that in a few minutes. But for merit-based appeals, the student should be the one expressing their enthusiasm about attending that school and asking if there’s more that the school can do to help lower the cost of attendance based on their academic and other achievements.

And you wanna send that letter to both the admissions office and the financial aid office. I say that because in some schools the right point of contact is admissions in some it’s financial aid and in some it’s a shared responsibility, uh, because it’s very difficult to actually know who the right contact is to reach out to at a particular program.

It’s quite helpful to send this to both.

And I’m gonna turn over to the questions that we have here ’cause I see a lot of really good ones. And then we’re gonna move on to need-based appeals. And if there’s anything that I’m not able to answer right now on merit, we’ll come back to it during q and a.

Uh, good question here from Kevin. Can you leverage a financial aid package from a private school to get more aid from a public school or vice versa? Yes, you can. Uh, when you are asking a school for more merit based aid, uh, the amount of information you volunteer is up to you. So if you wanted to say

there’s another program without naming the program or without naming how competitive it is, or whether it’s public or private, that’s offering you significantly more financial aid. Uh, is there something that school a can do to just get closer to that number? That’s fine. That could be all that you have to say.

You might get asked more follow up questions. Uh, and it’s possible that you might get asked for proof, but it’s not likely. Uh, and so, uh, in general, yes, the type of school is not a limitation on whether you can actually appeal. I see another question here on whether you need to attach proof of the competing offer from another program.

You do not have to do that. Uh, can you, if you want to. Absolutely. And I honestly don’t have a strong answer or view on whether that’s a. Going to be incrementally helpful or not? Uh, you can, you don’t have to. When we get to need based appeals, there’s a little bit more structure around the types of documentation that you might be asked to provide for certain reasons.

For appeals, for merit base, it’s, uh, relatively unstructured.

Uh, good question here. And if a school did ask you to send competing offers, is it okay to send competing offers that have given you more, uh, better need-based aid than not enough merit? Uh, I, I would actually say yes, so, uh hmm. At the end of the day, how a school’s finances are set up, uh, can be different from one place to the next.

One school might have a big budget allocated to merit-based aid, and another school might have a large budget that they allocate as their own money to need-based aid. Uh, and it’s totally fine if you wanna say, uh, frame the conversation as, look the both of these schools cost $40,000 per year, but this other school is telling me it’s only gonna cost $10,000 a year out of pocket to attend.

Is there something that you can do here to help close the gap? And so, uh, there’s really no rule around this, but in general, I, I think you should feel comfortable, uh, moving forward with that approach.

Uh, and just make sure, in case somebody didn’t hear this. The merit-based appeal is best to come from the student and to govern the student to the financial aid office and the admissions office. Uh, we’ll get to the need-based appeal later, and that’s better to send to the financial aid office and in many cases from the parent.

And we’ll get into why in a few minutes. Um,

so there’s a couple of questions I see here about how do you know how much to ask for? And it’s a really good question. So there’s uh, a company called Road to College that has a tool that says compare offers on their website that actually collects some information on the amount of need based, uh, the amount of merit aid.

Thousands of families have been offered based on some information input about the student. And so if you wanted to, you could go and see roughly how much aid other families whose students have a similar SAT or GMAT score and a similar GPA have received for that school in the last year. And get some sense for whether the amount of merit based aid that you’ve been offered is so to speak, fair in that context.

Uh, that might give you some sense for how much room you might have to push, but uh, you don’t necessarily need to have a number in mind when you’re asking for a little bit more help.

And, but it is absolutely fine if there’s a number that you do wanna ask for, by the way.

Uh, and when you provide the other offer, uh, you don’t need to include the net price, uh, the other program. Let them ask for it to be totally honest. Uh, so for everyone’s context, the, I think the idea here is, okay, if I’m comparing school a as $50,000 as its cost of attendance, it’s called at the sticker price and they give me $20,000 of aid, uh, my net cost is $30,000 for the first, but let’s say school B is, uh, significantly cheaper and it gives me less aid.

Uh, I don’t have to communicate to either school what the sticker price is or the starting price of the other school that I’m comparing against. It’s up to you. Whatever information you communicate to make the most compelling argument, uh, that you or your student are highly desired by another program that’s offering a significant discount that makes attending that school just easier on the family.

Uh. Specifics that you wanna get into, and if you need somebody to review it, our team is, is happy to and to help you think through that. And I’ll save some time at the end during QA to go through a few more of these specific examples. Uh, but I’m gonna move on to need based aid just so that I, I make sure that we have enough time.

I wanna leave you just with one closing thought on merit-based aid. If you got a no, that’s the worst thing that can happen. There’s nothing worse and there’s no other ramification or any downside to just being told politely. I’m sorry. There’s nothing more that we can do. That being said, as you get closer to the, uh, let’s say start of the semester, this is, it’s lower likelihood, but I’ve seen it happen successfully a few times where when a school offers aid to students that it’s admitted.

It knows that not everybody is going to accept their offer of admission. And if it gets to June, July, August, and for some reason the amount of merit-based aid that the school offered to all the admitted students, uh, there’s a, for some reason there’s a bunch left over. And that could just be because a lot of the people that they offered aid to decided to go somewhere else, uh, then there might be some money left over.

And the, the folks that you’re asking for an appeal right now have no way of knowing if there’ll be money left over or even if they’ll be allowed to allocate it until a few months from now. And so what that means for you is appeal. Now, see if you can get a yes, and if you don’t get a satisfactory answer, honestly just try again in a few months because at that point, the content of your appeal is already written, is already roughly the same.

You’re just asking politely if there’s any. Uh, money leftover that can help your family make these, uh, this cost work a little bit better. And if they have leftover funds, then there’s a chance that you’ll get it. And if you’re not asking, the odds are somebody else who is asking will get it.

All right, I’m gonna move on to need-based, ’cause this is gonna take about half an hour. Uh, and I will absolutely, uh, come back to any more questions that we have about, uh, about merit. So everything that isn’t merit-based aid is need-based aid. That’s simple. But we’re gonna go through it. Some of the complexities.

So there’s a big problem with how need-based data is calculated. It’s based on the data that goes into your FAFSA form for the most part. And the numbers that FAFSA collects don’t really reflect a complete picture of many families finances. And we’ll get into some of those reasons why. When we talk about appealing need based aid, we’re really talking about providing the financial aid office with new information that they did not yet have the chance to consider.

And what we’re gonna go through in the next couple of slides is a quick overview of what the financial aid office sees and why specifically some of the things that it sees might not reflect what you know about your own financial situation. And then we’re gonna go into 12 more concrete reasons why you’re allowed to appeal the documentation that you might wanna collect when you do appeal, and then the actual process to submit an appeal.

And so I am expecting that we’ll have quite a few questions as we go through this. I’ll, again, try to answer as many as I can on the relevant slides, uh, but we’ll go through some portions of this a little bit more quickly because I think once I go through certain sections, the story will be a bit more complete.

So let’s start off with just the most basic formula on how financial need is calculated and what that actually means for your financial aid offer letter. So to start off with, every school publishes a cost of attendance. That cost of attendance is made up of tuition, plus mandatory fees, plus health insurance, plus some living expenses.

And this should exist on each school’s financial aid website, and it can change every single year. So if you don’t know where this is yet, go to the schools that you’re most interested in. Look at their financial aid website and look for a number called cost of attendance. You can think of this as the sticker price and like the actual all in cost of what the school estimates.

It’ll take two, go to school for one year. You subtract out something called Student aid index, which we’ll get into on the next slide. And the difference between those two numbers is the amount of financial need that is that your family has. This is the formula that the financial aid office is told to use and required to use.

So what we need to understand now, and we’re gonna get into more of what that actual financial need number means in in just a minute. What’s important to understand is. How do we actually get to this Student Aid index number? What influences it and how does it impact the amount of financial need that your family has?

And that’s what I was mentioning two slides ago. It’s really coming from fafsa. So FAFSA collects three overall buckets of information about your family inform It puts all of that into a rather complicated formula, and that results in a single number called Student Aid Index. And that Student Aid index and elements of your FAFSA is what the financial aid office sees.

So this student aid index number is based on income information, asset information, and the overall size of the family and structure of the family that is applying for aid for that year. But it’s pretty imperfect, and that’s really what the core of need-based appeals are about. It’s understanding what are the different levers and inputs that go into each of these three sections that you can ask the financial aid office to reconsider.

The financial aid office has some leeway in recalculating your Student Aid index number. If they recalculate that number, uh, and if it comes smaller, then it means you’re generally eligible for more financial aid. And so the purpose of the need-based appeal is to see, is there actually something I might not be aware of that would allow me to submit an appeal, then ask the financial aid office to change my Student aid index number.

All right, so the first thing we’ll walk through, I’m gonna give you three quick examples here. And I’m gonna go into quite a bit more detail on uh, 12 overall reasons why you’d be likely allowed to appeal, and then we’ll go through the actual process itself. So let’s start off with income data. When you submit fafsa, it’s based on something called prior, prior year income.

So that just means you tax return from two years ago. So for those who are attending college this coming fall for the first time, your FAFSA form is actually, and your student aid index number is based on your 2023 taxes. And a lot of things could have changed from 2023 to now. If there’s been a change in income or job loss or something similar, then you need to let the financial aid office know what that change was, how large that change was.

Ask them to reconsider this input that goes into calculating your student aid index. When we talk about family assets as a general bucket of, uh, data that influences your student aid index, uh, what you need to know is that the purpose of the way the FAFSA formula works is to say, based on how much income your family makes and how much in assets you have, not including the value of your home and retirement accounts, how much money is left over to help pay for college.

And so there’s a bunch of formulas that go on in the background that we have another presentation on, and those will spit out a number that says, all right, this is actually how much money this family should be contributing out of their existing assets to help pay for school this year. What it doesn’t consider is a lot of expenses that many families have to bear and have no way of getting around.

And so we’re gonna walk through a bunch of examples of what those look like. And you’re allowed to appeal and ask the financial aid office to consider the magnitude of those expenses so that they look back at this section of the formula and they say, Hey, actually we thought that your family could contribute this much to college out of your assets.

But now that we’re considering these other unavoidable costs, you can actually only contribute this smaller amount. And that ultimately leads to you potentially being eligible for more financial aid. And then the last big bucket that we’ll go through is relates to family size and, uh, how that also, that impacts the number of people who might be going to college.

So this is, might be the most important thing to listen to. Many people do not know that when you fill out FAFSA, you are asked a question about the number of people in the household who are going to college this year. And in the old version of FAFSA, it was a slightly different form. Two years ago, this same question used to be there, and if you answered a number larger than one, you said, oh, there’s actually two kids going to college this year.

Or three, the formula that determines how much aid you’re eligible for took that into consideration. If before you’re being asked to pay $30,000 a year for one child, but, and then you’re telling FAFSA you have three kids in college for the year, then the formula would say, okay, well you actually can’t spend 30,000 times three, so let’s make some adjustments.

Now you only have to pay a smaller amount per child for the upcoming year. Unfortunately, and I can’t explain why. This question is still asked, but it is not used. So if just because it’s there, it doesn’t mean that it’s taken into consideration. However, you could absolutely appeal and ask the financial aid office to reconsider how all of this math works if there’s more than one child in school.

And so we’re gonna go through that in a little bit more detail, but I really want you to remember that because even if it might not be relevant for you today or this upcoming year, if you have a sibling, or if you have a child who is, uh, going to school next year and another child going to school the year after that, this will apply to you then, and you want to make sure that you submit this appeal at each, uh, child’s school.

I’m gonna pause here for questions before we go into some more of the, the 12 overall reasons why it’s most common to appeal, and then we’ll get into.

Uh, that’s a good question here. If your FAFSA is already at the lowest SAI, uh, which is the acronym for Student Aid index, then it, it’s not really potential. There’s no way to get more need-based aid. And so if, if you’re listing right now and your SAI is negative 1,500, uh, you don’t really need to keep focusing on the need-based appeal portion, but that number might change in the future.

And so if it’s negative 1500 now and it becomes the higher number next year, it’s still important to understand some of the reasons why you could appeal next year and ask them to reconsider your SAI so that. To A SAI ineligible for, again, more need based aid. Uh, I probably forgot to mention this, but when it comes to need based appeals, this is something that you should be doing every single year that you think is relevant for you.

Each year you have to fill out a new FAFSA that in order to get access to funds for that upcoming academic year, and each year you fill out FAFSA is another opportunity for you to make a need based appeal.

It’s completely fine, by the way, if you have a justification for both need-based and merit-based appeals, you can send both. Uh, and it’s not uncommon to do both.

And I see some questions just asking if I could send a few links that I’ve been, um, discussing Absolutely any of the links that I’ve discussed. And, uh, some of the things that are in these slides. You’ll get all of those, uh, to your inboxes, uh, by either tomorrow or over the weekend.

Okay. I’m gonna really move through these, uh, just three quick slides on overarching reasons why you can appeal. We’ll go through the process and then we’ll come back to q and a. So the first bucket is, and we were showing a few slides ago, changes in income or employment. Uh, really the, one of the really big influences on the amount, uh, uh, on, on your student aid index number is information about the household income.

And so. Let’s say there’s been, uh, somebody has had reduced income since you filed your 2023 taxes. You need to let the financial aid office know that they might ask for recent pay stubs, uh, to show exactly how much income has gone down. They might ask for some other information from an employer that would detail what the new income level was.

Uh, but it’s very possible that it, let’s say you’ve changed jobs and it’s a new lower income or, uh, something else has happened. You, you need to let the financial aid office know and in the back end they’ll go back to the formula and they’ll actually change the income number that’s being used to calculate your SU index.

If there’s unfortunately been some form of job loss in the household that you really do need to let the financial aid office know, they have no way of knowing unless you let them know. They’re just gonna assume in all the math that whatever they see on the 2023 tax return is representative of whatever is happening today.

And so if, uh, one or more parents have lost a job in voluntarily, please let them know. Let let the office know. Just note that you might be asked if it was a resignation and if it was a resignation, then it’s far less likely that the financial aid office would take that into consideration. Uh, the third reason is a lot more common than people sometimes expect.

So if there is some form of one-time income in your 2023 taxes that’s not ongoing, you really should let the financial aid office know. And so if there was an inheritance sale of certain types of assets, uh, anything that showed up in your 2023 taxes, that doesn’t repeat in subsequent years. You really should let them know, uh, all based on on what they see.

They kind of just assume that what happened in 2023 is still happening today. Uh, and for those of you where this is relevant, if there’s been a reduction in the amount of child support received, uh, you really do wanna let the financial aid office know as well. Uh, and again, you’ll get a copy of these slides so that you have at least some sense on that right hand column for what type of documentation you might be asked to submit.

And in a few slides we’ll talk about how and where and to who you’ll submit that. So the second overall bucket of reasons why you can appeal is, uh, really talking about those expenses that don’t get reflected in the FAFSA application. So when you get to the assets section of FAFSA, you are asked certain questions about the value of, uh, cash and savings accounts.

About the value of any stocks and bonds, the value of investment real estate, and the value of businesses and farms that the family owns. Uh, and there are a lot of expenses that many families have to bear that don’t get asked about in fafsa, but some of these are very valid reasons why you can at least ask the financial aid office to reconsider the amount of your household assets that are available to pay for school.

So the first, uh, very common one is unexpected medical expenses. And so if there’s been a significant out of pocket medical expense, uh, and typically something that’s not covered by insurance, um, or at least not entirely covered by insurance, then you should let the financial aid office know what that is, how much that financial impact has been, and be prepared to show medical bills or other statements that represent what those payment amounts are.

Uh, and so if there’s been, for example, an emergency surgery or treatment for a serious illness that has caused a financial strain, let them know if there are ongoing or chronic, uh, medical expenses. This is quite common. Uh, there could be somebody in the household, could be anybody in the household who has a chronic medical condition that, that actually requires the family to spend a significant amount of money every month.

This could be therapy, medical medication, medical equipment, uh, other forms of medical expenses. And you might be asked for some documentation about how much that ultimately actually costs. Uh, but there’s no way that they’ll know about this unless you tell them. If in the household somebody is caring for an elderly or sick family member, uh, that does by itself represent the.

A significant cost. And while there’s no set rules around exactly how the financial aid office needs to consider this, at the very least, letting them know that this happens, uh, gives them the opportunity to consider that, hey, actually in this scenario, uh, there are the significant burden on the family and on certain members of the family.

And so perhaps we should revisit, uh, the amount of aid that this family can get. And then finally, there’s a lot of expenses that are unavoidable that some families have, and it’s less likely that talking about what I’m about to go through will get you granted more need-based aid. But it’s really at the discretion of each financial aid officer.

And so I’m gonna give you some examples of what these things are. Just be prepared that it’s more likely than not that they will not accept your appeal. That it is still quite worth at least trying because you never know. And so let’s say, uh, as a parent submitting an appeal, the parent has a significant amount of student loans left over from their college.

Uh, you can let the financial aid office know that there are these monthly obligations that you have to pay. And so it’s really difficult for you to help and continue pay towards the next round of schooling. Uh, but they don’t have to take that into consideration. But they might, if there’s a lot of credit card debt for the family or personal loan debt, uh, or other forms of debt, uh, or legal obligations that you have to pay towards, uh, these are less likely to be considered.

But again, all reasons why you could at least attempt to explain why. The amount of, and really the phrasing I would use is. The amount of money that, that, uh, student Aid Index formula assumes is available to help pay for college isn’t as large as they think. It’s, and here are the reasons why. And then this is our last slide on specific reasons before we get into what you should actually do.

So we’re gonna talk about the family circumstances that can warrant getting more aid. The first and biggest one is if there’s a sibling in college at the same time. And so, as I was saying before, this to me is the most important and the most common reason why I see people appeal. Uh, FAFSA asks the question about the number of children who are enrolled in college, but it doesn’t use it.

The financial aid office knows. They think it’s silly most of the time that the formula doesn’t take this into consideration. And they’re typically well prepared for you to make an appeal. Ask them to reconsider how much aid that, that you should pay towards child A or child B for that school. Now, just because there’s multiple children in school at the same time doesn’t mean that you’ll definitely get an appeal.

Granted, if that one student is being asked to pay $30,000 a year to go to school and the other student got a free ride, they’re gonna take into consideration that the net cost of school for the other person is zero. And so probably no adjustment would be made, and I cannot guarantee that even if there were high expenses for both children, that each financial aid office would take this into consideration.

I can just let you know that, uh, it’s a common reason many financial aid offices will consider it, and it’s definitely worth trying. Another thing to consider here is changes in family size. So, I’m not gonna go into this in too much detail, but there’s a general concept in the formula that calculates student aid index, which, uh, which says, based on the number of people in the household, a certain amount of household income is protected.

It’s viewed as required for the basic living expenses of the household. The larger the household is, the more income is protected, uh, which has an impact on that student aid index number. And so if your family has grown since your 2023 taxes were filed, you had an opportunity in the FAFSA form to answer whether the household size that showed up on your taxes was actually accurate.

And if your family has grown since then, a lot of people sometimes will skip through or answer that question quickly. With that necessarily thinking about it. Uh, make sure that number is accurate because it can make a very big swing in some cases on your ultimate Student Aid index. Just adding a one more person to the household sometimes can push you from being ineligible for a Pell Grant to getting a significant Pell Grant, which is money that doesn’t have to be paid back.

And then the last two, in the unfortunate circumstance of death of a parent or guardian, uh, you really should let the financial aid office know. They just assume that the family size and structure is the same as what’s reflected on prior taxes. And in the case of divorce or separation, especially after FAFSA was submitted.

Uh, you, because this question is asked, is asked during FAFSA if something has happened since FAFSA was submitted, you really do wanna let the financial aid office know so that they can take that into consideration as there would be greater living expenses to the family overall and other things that they’re able to consider.

So I can’t guarantee that each financial aid officer would accept each of these reasons for a greater amount of need allocated to your family, but I can say that it’s certainly worth trying and that these are some of the more common reasons why people successfully get need-based appeals. Granted, I’m gonna flip over to some of the questions really quickly and then we will move on through the last three slides.

A lot of great questions and engagement. So thank you very much for everything here.

Uh, I see some interesting questions around, uh, judgments around is an SAI, uh, a certain amount high or not, and some of these are too detailed for me to necessarily answer right now in public, but. Uh, I’ll try to see if I can get to them at the end of the webinar, and if not, uh, I’ll just offer this.

There’s, uh, a tool that you can use, uh, from MEFA. I’ll send you this link, uh, the Massachusetts Educational Finance Authority that has a really detailed Student aid index calculator, and it can kind of help you see a little bit, uh, how the inputs in your FAFSA impact your Student Aid index number. Uh, and if you have any questions as you go through that, or if you just want somebody to help you think through, is there any error in how your SAI was calculated?

And I’m honestly happy to help with that. I was literally helping somebody with that three hours ago. Uh, and so I’m not gonna answer all of those questions in a lot of detail right now, but I’ll make sure to send you a link that you can use that will better explain that. I’ll send you the presentation that we run on how Student Aid Index is calculated.

Uh, and I’ll answer any questions that you have offline. Uh, if there are ones that are remaining. Good question here on, do you need both need-based and merit-based appeals to happen in the same communication or can they happen separately? Uh, they will likely happen separately, and I’ll get into that in just a second.

Uh, good question here on if you’re self-employed and your 2024 income doesn’t reflect the income from your 2023 taxes, uh, or let’s say your current year income is on track to be materially lower than what was shown in the 2023 taxes, what would you provide for proof? Uh, looking in that case? Let the financial aid office know first of all that this is the situation and ask them what they want to see.

They might ask for a, a p and l or a glance at QuickBooks or something, uh, they might actually just say, look, we, you can just show us the, the revenue number. And you don’t need to actually have a ton of detail calculated on your finalized books. Uh, there’s no set rule around exactly what they need to ask for, but just start by having a conversation.

Let them know this is the case. Uh, what do they need to see?

Good question here. Let’s say if you’ve had a one time income event, is there a way you can properly, uh, communicate that at the time that you filed a FAFSA? And truly, no. There’s, there’s some things that get captured in the way that FAFSA inputs work, uh, like rolling over a retirement fund. Or account, but most other expenses are not gonna be, or many expenses won’t be well captured by, or sorry, income won’t be well captured by the FAFSA form.

And so in a lot of cases that one-time income is gonna look to the financial aid office is ongoing income, uh, and you to be on the safe side. That should just assume that the financial aid office doesn’t have a really good way of determining that this is not ongoing. Uh, and so you should let them know, for example, they wouldn’t know if the sale of the property necessarily means you might have that coming every three years.

Or if an inheritance allotment could be something that’s happening every other year, you really should let them know whatever this situation is, if it’s representative of something that doesn’t continue year after year.

Okay, I’m going to just go through a few questions on the process and then we’ll, we’ll come right back to q and a. And then I think we have about 18 minutes left. And so, uh, I’ll, I’ll try to get through these slides in the next five tops and then get back to q and a. So let’s just talk really quickly about how the appeal process works.

So you’re typically gonna start by contacting the financial aid office for a need based appeal. Uh, and then in this case it’s more okay if the parent is the one who wants to reach out to the financial aid office. Some schools might ask the student does it, uh, but because some of these numbers are based on rather sensitive financial information, it is understandable and sometimes expected that the parent would be the one who’s.

What the extra expenses are or what the change in household income is. And so it’s okay for the parent to be the one who is starting by contact in the financial aid office. Uh, now every, let’s talk really quickly about the review process and then we’re gonna go through a few more key things to know about on the next slide.

So, if you successfully appeal on the basis of reduced income at school A, uh, that doesn’t carry over to school B. Uh, I know that that’s not ideal. It’s just unfortunately the way that the system is set up. And so if you do appeal on most reasons, uh, then you need to appeal again at another school if you decide to go there instead.

There are some things that do transfer over, uh, that I, I haven’t gotten into yet. Uh, uh, not go to in the context of this presentation, uh, but most appeal reasons. Just don’t carry over from one school to the next. The general principle of why appeals work is that, uh, in law, uh, and regulation, financial aid administrators, uh, have leeway to adjust some of the inputs and potentially even the cost of attendance number that’s used to determine how much financial need your family has.

The official term for that is professional judgment, so you might see that here and there. When we’re talking about financial aid, professional judgment, we’re really just talking about they have the ability to take into consideration what you tell them to change, some of the inputs that can impact how much aid you’re eligible for.

And once you submit an appeal, they will typically notify, they’ll review it, uh, and then they’ll notify what the actual result of it is. Uh, if you’ve been denied, you typically do also have the chance to re-appeal the appeal. And the key thing, well, I’m gonna go to this slide and we’ll go back since two years ago.

Schools are required to allow you to appeal, need-based aid. Anybody who tells you that you can’t appeal, need-based aid is not giving you accurate information. Uh, so the Fastest Simplification Act created the shorter version of the form that exists. Now, part of that, uh, requires every single school that receives federal funding to have, uh, a process for appeals.

They have to at least consider each one. They don’t have to accept any of them, but they have to at least consider all of them. Most schools at this point should have a link on their financial aid website or portal that tells you the instructions for submitting a need-based appeal. Those instructions will typically look like either contact this email address and use and include these attachments, or it’ll be a form that’s embedded in the financial aid page that asks you certain questions about the reasons you’re appealing, and then has a secure upload for you to add information that can support your case.

Uh, so if you want, you can either start by just emailing your financial aid office, asking them for the process, for a need-based appeal for their school, or you can go to the financial aid office’s website and see if you can quickly find that link that gives you those instructions verbatim. Uh. And so the short version of this, you will likely be drafting the formal appeal letter.

In that letter, you’re gonna be stating the specific reasons why you would want to appeal. Uh, the more you can stick to the types of reasons that we’ve discussed so far, the more likely it is that your appeal is, uh, given the full weight that it deserves. You will likely be asked to provide some form of supporting documentation for the different reasons why you’re saying that you need a, a different amount of need-based aid.

Uh, you can reference back those slides and, uh, this presentation for examples of the types of things that you might be asked to provide so that you can be prepared, uh, and really just kind of in this process, be proactive. If you know that there are reasons why you, uh, based on this presentation so far, you’re likely eligible to ask for more aid.

You don’t even need to wait until after, until you’ve gotten your financial aid offer to do it. You could contact the financial aid office today and say, uh, hello. I’m aware that there are certain elements of my family’s finances that weren’t that possible to reflect in the FAFSA. Uh, could you let me know what the process is for a need-based appeal so I can let you know what those changes actually are?

Totally fine to do that right now. Some things that aren’t gonna count are a change in your 401k values, uh, reduction in investment values since you submitted FAFSA or a parent being unwilling to contribute towards a student’s education. These things are not going to, just don’t. I will often say it’s always worth it to try for these reasons explicitly.

Financial aid offices will typically not consider an appeal. And you don’t want to dilute the effectiveness of your appeal by including some of these reasons, especially if there are valid reasons early in the presentation that are, are likely to be accepted. I’m gonna leave you with about three minutes on Juno and I’m gonna turn it back over to q and a for the last 10.

So, in general, uh, there are currently and will be a lot of headlines over the next couple of weeks about potential changes in federal student loan policy. One thing I wanna get ahead of is, uh, a few weeks ago there was a lot of discussion about, uh, pausing federal loans and grants, and those did not, and were not intended to impact federal student loans and the grant programs that you’re eligible for through this entire need-based aid calculation.

So I’d say. While there’s a lot of click baby headlines, I, I wouldn’t be concerned about your access to those for this upcoming year. Uh, the one thing that you might start hearing a little bit more about over the course of the next couple of months is that there is some discussion that the access to something called the Parent plus Loan, which you get by completing FAFSA, uh, could be reduced.

And it’s fairly unlikely that anything would happen for this summer, almost impossible. But it’s possible that for those of you who are not going to school until, uh, fall of 2026, that access to this Parent Plus loan product could be phased out over time, but you’ll know over a year before anything happens.

Uh, so I wouldn’t necessarily worry about it yet. And we’re gonna keep people updated on, on really what the forms of these changes are. Uh. Which is a little bit of a segue to Juno. Uh, as I was saying earlier, I started Juno to actually help myself and my classmates get lower student loan rates for grad school and the corp.

The way our business works is we ask people who are interested in or potentially might need loans in the fall to join our negotiation group, which is a really simple process and completely free and does not obligate anybody to do anything. It’s kind of like joining a mailing list and when a lot of people join this mailing list and say, Hey, I’m going to school so and so in, uh, this upcoming fall, and I might need a loan, then we’re able to go to a bunch of different banks and credit unions and other lenders and show them the total amount of, uh, people that are in our audience and ask if there’s something special they’d be willing to do for that group that they wouldn’t otherwise have done for an individual.

And that allows us to get a lot of leverage and competitiveness back into the market. So for the last seven years, we’ve done this for over 200,000 people. Uh, and the process is really simple. If there’s any chance at all that you might need to use a student loan before the fall, uh, let’s say for this upcoming fall, you can join our negotiation group by April 30th.

Uh, you’re not obligated to do anything. We don’t take your payment information. We have no way to, we don’t share information with anybody. Our only goal is to get the largest group of people who could potentially need a product so that in May we can get lenders to compete on the rates that they’ll offer to our members.

And in June, we make those available to everybody on our mailing list. And at that point, if people like what they see then and, and it’s actually the right product for them. They’ll often use it. If there’s a reason for them to not use it, we tell them to not use it at all. Uh, there’s really no downside. I would honestly just view this as a free option, and the earlier you can join, the more you help everybody by increasing our overall negotiating leverage.

So last slide before I turn it back to q and a. I know this is a, a little bit of a strange concept that we’ve been running it for seven years. Uh, we started it primarily at Harvard, Stanford, Wharton, and U Chicago. Uh, in graduate programs. We’ve expanded it to, uh, all not-for-profit schools in the us, both public and private, as well as a bunch of schools in Canada and Western Europe.

Uh, this model only works because we keep the barrier to join as low as we possibly can. We really just need your contact information, uh, and graduation year. And whether it’s a grad school or undergrad, everything else that we asked you about is completely optional to answer. We don’t take payment information, we don’t run your credit.

We literally will just kind of come back to you on June 1st with a link to where you could see the best possible deal that we’ve been able to negotiate, uh, and how you can check what rates you’d be eligible for then in less than two minutes. And from there you can decide to use it or not along, whether you do or not.

We provide free one-on-one support to everybody who comes to us all days of the week. So whether this is relevant to you or not, uh, you can always feel free to reach out to somebody on my team and we’ll help with whatever college financing questions or scholarships or grants you possibly have. I’m gonna turn back over to q and a.

Uh.

For, for the last five minutes is, do I have the five minutes for q and a right now, or?

Anna: Yeah. No, that’s perfect. Thank you, Chris. Um, I’m just here to help, so keep going as you’ve been going, picking out questions you like and I can throw some to you as well, if that’s helpful.

Chris: Sure. Uh, there’s a lot of really great questions.

Anna: There are, um, I’ll start with one, some college applications open in July. Yeah. Do you think there’s a financial aid benefit to applying to college early?

Chris: Uh, there is generally not going to be a major benefit to applying early because the FAFSA forum for the academic year won’t start until, uh, October of next year, and the schools will need that FAFSA forum to determine the need-based aid.

It maybe it has an impact on merit-based aid, but it, it likely wouldn’t.

Anna: Thank you. Um, I can keep going, but if you see questions you wanna answer, jump in. Chris,

Chris: there’s a, a really good question here, I just wanna make sure is, so someone’s asking if a, a student’s name is being added to a joint bank account with a parent, does that impact the amount of aid they might get?

And this is a gray area if you’re a parent who has an account. Um, and at the point that FAFSA is filled out, it is generally beneficial if there is as little money in the student’s account as possible. Uh, when the FAFSA form, I’ll send you a student aid index presentation tomorrow, it goes through some of the math, uh, it, it gets detailed.

What you should just remember is when you submit fafsa, it asks for assets separately for the parents and for the student. And it treats parent assets much more generously than student assets. If there’s a bunch of cash sitting in a student’s, uh, bank account, then the form, the formula assumes that a big chunk of that is available to pay for college.

If magically the day before you submitted a FAFSA, that money had been transferred to the parent and the student’s account showed zero, then you’re gonna get a lower student data index.

Anna: Thank you. That one was on my list too. Um, how long does the appeal process take?

Chris: It’s a really, really good question.

That has an unsatisfying answer of it depends. Uh, last year the appeal process was totally unpredictable because there were a lot of delays related to fafsa. And so some people were not getting their initial financial aid offer until the, like, just days before the decision date for a program and sometimes not even until after that.

And so. We have no good bar sample of, of what things looked like last year, uh, and this year there is a lot of stress on the system at different schools based on potential funding freezes and cuts that they’re facing. So look, I think the takeaway is we don’t know how long it’s gonna take, but that’s even more reason why you wanna just kick off the process on the earlier side.

So that, and just make sure to follow up if you haven’t heard something back, uh, within two weeks so that you make it more likely that you got a quick response. The last thing I’m gonna leave you with there is like, the vast majority of people don’t appeal. Uh, if you’re listening right now, you are in a really good position to just know that you can and, and how to go about doing it.

Uh, and so it. I wouldn’t be too worried about the timeline, but make sure to do it early so that you maximize your chances.

Anna: Speaking of doing it early, what if a student is on a wait list and so they get in a bit later than everyone else? Have you seen students getting in off wait list and successfully appealing their financial aid?

Chris: It depends on when they get off the wait list. Uh, so I’ve certainly seen people get off a wait list before a decision date, uh, and appeal aid, I’ve not personally seen it happen successfully for people who join after, uh, or who get off the wait list after decision dates have passed for most other schools.

Uh, and I I see a question I, I’d love to just hit on here, which is asked three times, is joining Juno is free. How do we make money aligned Incentives is the short answer. We do get paid by different banks and credit unions based on the overall amount of business that we’re able to bring to the table.

But we, and I’ll tell you right now, do not use Juno if the actual offer that we’re able to put in front of you isn’t the best thing that you can possibly get. So our belief is, as long as we are telling people to shop around and running a process that can get you the best product, and you decide that it’s a product that you’re gonna need, you’ll pick it.

If it’s not, please don’t pick it. But maybe next year we’ll be able to help you.

Anna: Thank you so much, Chris. I’m seeing we’re very close to time. I I, I can stay for another few minutes. Are there any questions you see in the chat that you wanna make sure we get to, or any last words of advice?

Chris: There’s a lot of questions I see in the chat that I’d love to get to, but I, uh, it’s one quick question for you.

Do you know if it’s possible to pull out these questions, uh, as once, uh, after the presentation? Because I would love to just take, uh, quick spin and answering some of these and send them to people once we send a copy of the slides as well. Uh, because I, I know if you’re here asking these questions, they’re important to you.

And as long as I can get a copy of them, I’ll make sure to, to get you a written response.

Anna: Yes, I’m going through right now and making sure I have a photo of all of them. So if nothing else, we’ll have that.

Chris: Great. And here, actually, I think I was just able to copy them.

Anna: Oh, perfect.

Chris: Let me make sure before we close it, but yeah.

All right. I got them all. Perfect. Um, great. Look, I just wanna say thank you to everybody, uh, who’s here, and especially those who’ve been asking really good engaging questions. Uh, again, we’ll send you hopefully everything that you need by email tomorrow or Monday. And if there’s anything that you want to ask or follow up on after that, feel free to reply to that message and either me or somebody on my team, we’ll, we’ll get back to you as soon as we can.

Uh, and so just generally thank you and I hope you have a, a great rest of the day.

Anna: Thank you so much, Chris, for being here. Thank you for the work you know is doing. And thanks for everyone who tuned in and stay tuned for Chris’s follow up email. Take good care everyone.

Chris: Thank you. Bye.