How to Appeal Financial Aid Awards

Webinar Transcription

2025-04-10 – How to Appeal Financial Aid Awards

Anna: Hello everyone. Good evening or afternoon or morning, whatever time it is, wherever in the world you’re joining us from. We’re so happy 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 at CollegeAdvisor.

Been here almost four years, uh, and I work with students one-on-one in advising sessions in addition to leading our essay review team. To orient everyone with the webinar timing. We’re gonna start off with the 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 at any time.

We’ll get to um, as many as we can and Chris is very good at that. Um, please know that the super, super hyper specific questions might be harder to get to here, um, particularly if they involve or would require a follow up question on our end. Um, but we will do our best. Without further ado, I’m gonna turn it over to our presenter tonight.

You are super lucky to have with us, Chris, to introduce himself.

Chris: Thank you very much for setting this up and thanks everybody for being here this afternoon. So I’m Chris and I co-founded a company called Juno about seven years ago that is heavily involved in everything and the financial aid space. So.

Uh, if you have any questions relating to FAFSA, to understanding Student Aid Index, to appealing your financial aid award, uh, that is what we help people with all year round. And so I’ll tell you a little bit more about what we do a little later on in the presentation. But tonight, uh, we will spend the bulk of the conversation on understanding what to do today, which is a lot of you have gotten your financial aid awards and you have an opportunity between now and when you submit your deposit for a school to potentially negotiate more aid from the school.

And we’ll go through the different strategies that you can use and the types of templates you might wanna borrow from to maximize your odds of success.

Anna: Thanks Chris for, for introducing yourself and highlighting that. Before we dive into your presentation, I wanna do a quick poll to get a sense of who’s joining us.

Please let us know what grade you’re in. If you’re here as a parent or support person, select other. And while you do that, Chris, I’ve asked you this question before, but we have Sure. A whole new group of attendees tonight. What inspired you to found Juno?

Chris: Great question. So I started Juno as an experiment.

It wasn’t a company. Uh, about seven years ago I was going to Harvard Business School and a month before I started, one of my classmates and I, uh, were looking for student loans for ourselves. We started comparing the different rates that we were getting from a couple of different banks and credit unions.

And started an idea to see if we could get these banks and credit unions to negotiate lower rates if we could bring a large volume of students along with us. And it ended up working quite well. We got that first time about 500 people who expressed interest in what we were doing, and we got a few lenders to provide effectively group discounts to all of us.

And for the last seven years, we’ve expanded that same concept from what was originally just 10 business schools to now all schools in the US.

Anna: Amazing. Thank you for sharing that, Chris. So, you know, in the room with us, we have, um, over half are in 12th grade, which makes sense given tonight’s topic and where we are in the, the application cycle.

And then, uh, over third are other, so probably parents, guardians, um, and then a, a, a smattering of, uh, underclassmen are joining us as well. Great. But mostly seniors and parents. And I’ll turn it over to you now.

Chris: Wonderful. So here’s our agenda for tonight. Uh, a little bit of housekeeping before we get it.

I’ll, uh, try to either tomorrow or Saturday send you an email that has a copy of this presentation, a recording that, uh, of what you’ll see tonight, as well as links to a few things that I’ll discuss. You’ll get that in your inbox. And if there are specific questions that I’m not able to answer tonight, for the sake of time.

Please just reply to the message that you’ll get and either I or someone on my team will be more than happy to help you as we go through tonight. Please feel free to use the q and a box to just write down any questions that you might have. Uh, and I might ask for your help as we go through. If I’m missing something that maybe I should be answering, uh, if you could maybe voice that over.

But for the most part we’ll keep close tabs on that and, uh, we’ll, we’ll answer everything that we can. Uh, and we’ll, we’re gonna start off with something that if you joined any of our previous webinars you might have seen. But it’s a quick five minute overview of the timeline for financial aid. Uh, we’re gonna spend about 10 minutes talking about merit-based aid appeals, uh, and I’ll tell you exactly what that means and what you need to know.

Uh, we’ll spend a bulk of tonight’s conversation on need-based aid appeals, which is all. Applies to a lot more people than think it might. Uh, and for both merit-based and need-based, I’ll leave you with a general set of tips for who to reach out to, who should be writing letters, what types of reasons you should cite in order to increase the odds of, uh, successful appeal and what you should expect to hear back from the financial aid office or the admissions office along the way.

And I’ll spend about three to five minutes just as a quick intro to how Juno fits into this process, uh, and leave q and a until we wrap up with that. We’ll, lemme make sure I can switch slides here. Let’s go over a quick overview of the timeline for financial aid. And so what you see here is, uh, we always start on the left hand side of this slide, which is filling out FAFSA.

If you haven’t yet done this, you still have time to do it. But by this point in time, most people likely have filled it out within about one to three days of submitting a completed FAFSA application, uh, which gets you access to federal student aid, you’re going to get a number. That number’s gonna be in your student aid.gov dashboard, and it’s called Student Aid Index By itself, this number doesn’t mean anything.

I’ll explain a little bit more of what it means in about 20 to 30 minutes, and I think it’ll make more sense in context, uh, right around now. Uh, it many people have already received or soon about to receive a financial aid award letter from the school. That letter will look a little bit different from one school to the next, but it’s going to include some line items in there that might describe scholarships, the schools providing to you, grants that you might be getting from the Federal Depart, federal government, or from states.

As well as work study or federal loans that are included within a package provided to you. And that’s what we’re gonna be talking about tonight. It’s what does your financial aid package look like and what can we actually do to help you increase the amount of money that you can get out of it that does not have to be paid back.

Uh, and let’s kind of work backwards. Tuition is typically due for most schools in August or September, and if you still have financial need remaining after all of the other types of aid that the school might have provided you, then you would likely be looking into different types of student loans in the June or July timeframe.

Uh, and we’re not gonna cover that tonight, but in future sessions, uh, we’re gonna go through that in quite a bit more detail

tonight. As I was saying, we’re gonna really just zoom in on appealing your financial aid award and. What I want you to think of is, uh, one thing in general, once you receive a financial aid award, it’s more of a first draft than a final draft. Uh, there’s a lot of potential leeway in the amount of aid that you can ultimately receive.

Uh, and just a couple of quick reasons before we jump into the different types of appeals that you may be eligible to file. One, a lot of schools have some amount of extra aid that is left over that they can allocate to people. Not all, but some schools do. And many schools are expecting some percentage of the people that they’ve offered admission to to try to appeal for a little bit more financial help to make the numbers work.

So I, I want to just emphasize, you should feel comfortable, uh, asking for a little bit more aid. Uh, schools are used to this. It’s not something strange that you’d be doing. The worst that you can hear is a no. And the best that you can get is a significant discount to the overall cost of tenants. And if you’re politely asking for a little bit more help, the school is not going to rescind your offer of admission or reduce the amount of aid that they had already provided to you.

There’s not a downside to this, uh, either in terms of your admission or financials as long as you are approaching this in a, a polite way and, uh, aren’t too pushy about it. And what we’re gonna talk about is how I’ve seen people approach this successfully in the very recent past. So for the next 40 minutes, we’re gonna go through two types of appeals that you’ll be able to submit.

The first is called merit based appeals. And so, uh, a merit based appeal is, uh, a merit based aid is based on. Your or your students’ stellar academic record or athletic record or some other thing that they achieved in high school that makes the university very much want them to enroll. And the way that they try to get you to enroll is by effectively providing a discount.

And that discount is what we’re talking about when we talk about merit-based aid.

Uh, can you still hear me? Hear me? All right. Sorry, I just disconnected.

Yep, you’re good. Okay. Great. Need-based aid is every other type of aid that you might see on a financial aid award letter. So you’re, let’s say you’ve already filled out FAFSA and when you filled out FAFSA, there’s a lot of inputs that go into, uh, that student aid index number that we’re gonna talk about in a moment.

Uh, need-based aid basically is saying. There’s a view that the financial aid office has about your family’s finances and based on some rules that they’re supposed to follow, uh, based on your family’s income and assets and the size of your family, there’s a number that says how much you’re expected to help pay towards school.

And what we’re gonna talk about when we get to need-based aid is the various reasons why you can explain to the financial aid office that the number they’re saying you should pay isn’t really reasonable or possible for you to do. Both of these types of appeals might apply to each person who’s listening right now.

For some of you, only one of these might, uh, actually apply. Uh, but what I will caution you with is there are some specific things when it comes to need based. That apply to more people than you might expect. And so even if you think that your income might be too high or, uh, you otherwise might not be eligible for any type of need-based aid, I’d still encourage you to listen to at least a portion of that discussion because there’s specific things that, that, that apply that may may very well apply to you.

Uh, I see we have a, a question here on what is FAFSA, um, the acronym and so apologies if I’m using this, uh, terminology. FAFSA is the federal application for student aid. So, uh, it is something you have to fill out once each year that you go to school. And it’s the only way that you get access to federal student.

Uh, and one more question here. So is the process the same for international students? Unfortunately, it is not. So what I’m talking about right now is primarily, uh, ways that you can appeal for more aid. Well, lemme take that back for a moment. Only, uh, US citizens and permanent residents can fill out the FAFSA form and get access to need-based aid.

International students may still be offered merit-based aid, and that’ll depend on which school you’re going to. And so for some cases, international students may be eligible to appeal for more merit-based aid, uh, but it would be less likely that you’d be able to appeal for need-based aid. Not impossible, but I’ll talk about that more in about 20 minutes.

Uh, and I guess one more question here on what year should you try to apply for FAFSA? And, uh, short answer there is each year that a student is going to school, you’ll need to fill out a new FAFSA application. And we’ll we’re gonna talk more about that in just a moment. Uh, so some general tips about merit-based appeals, and then we will, uh, go through a few more details related to this.

And I’ll leave you with a template that you’ll be able to borrow from if you’d like to submit a merit based appeal. So first, uh, I want you to picture that you are the person who’s on the other side of the table. Imagine that you’re at the school right now. You’ve offered admission to a lot of different people and you care a lot about making sure that a good percentage of these people that you’ve offered admission to actually accept those offers as admission.

And so just keep that principle in mind when we’re talking about am merit-based appeal. It’s gonna be really strong if you can explain to the single school why you really want to go there. Uh, if you’ve been admitted to more than one program, it’s going to give you some degree of leverage depending on what the other programs are in getting one or two schools to maybe compete with each other a little bit in order to get you to enroll.

And if we do our job right, we can get them to compete by potentially offering a larger discount meeting, more merit-based aid. Uh, and just last thing to remember here before we move on, you’ve already been accepted. They already want you to be a part of the class and they’re not going to change their mind just because you’re asking for a little bit more financial help.

So we’re gonna go through, uh, a few really quick things on this slide. Uh, and then I’m gonna flip to a template that’ll also give you access to tomorrow. Uh, when we’re talking about merit-based appeals. The way that we do this, uh, is typically through a letter and you want that letter to come from the student, and it’s, you wanna express a significant degree of enthusiasm about the program that you’re asking for more money from.

And the way you express enthusiasm effectively here is by citing specific things about that program, whether it is, uh, majors or professors that you want to study under, or clubs that you want to be a part of, or on campus events that really capture your eye, that make the school truly believe that you’ve done your homework.

That if they move and offer you a little bit more financial aid, you actually are gonna accept it and enroll. So the homework when it comes to asking for more merit-based aid is really to make sure you are expressing your enthusiasm in a concrete way so that the person reading that appeal letter. Uh, understands that you’re going to accept their appeal offer.

If you have been admitted to multiple programs, then I would recommend trying to find a way to work that into your appeal letter. Uh, there are some examples that you’ll see on the next slide and the template that I’ll send you. But some rules to rules of thumb to keep in mind here are if you’ve been admitted to, let’s say, program A and they gave you $10,000 of merit aid, uh, and let’s say program B is more selective, harder to get into and they offer you a similar amount or more aid, please mention that this is the case.

’cause it basically is a signal to program a that they clearly need to do something to get you to enroll. If you’ve been in, if you want to go to program A at another school that is perhaps less competitive, is offered you more aid. Uh, I would personally, I. Just not mention the name of the other program that is offering you more aid, but still mention that there is another program that, uh, whose offer leads you to having to spend a lot less money to go to school and to just see what happens and just things not to do.

Uh, you really do want this to be, uh, humble and kind. Letter to the admissions office. Uh, and while I haven’t seen people do this, uh, just don’t do anything like threatening to withdraw your offer of admission if you don’t get what you want. Or, and don’t exaggerate competing offers from other schools, at least to a degree where it would no longer be plausible or believable to the admissions officer reading your letter that this could have actually happened.

Uh, getting some really good questions here.

Uh, is it primarily the parent or the student appealing for more aid? There’s not a set rule around who has to do this, but what I would say is it’s more effective for the student to write the letter about merit-based appeals. And it is okay for either the parent or the student to write the letter about need based appeals, which we’ll get into in about two minutes.

Uh, is this month too late to start sending a merit-based appeal letter? Uh, no. I’m gonna get into that in just a moment. Uh, so I see another question here that I’ll also get to in just a moment. What you see on this slide is a really quick template on merit based appeals. When I send you the presentation tomorrow, you can open up this slide deck, go to this slide, click access a template here, and you’ll be able to just copy that template and use it however you like.

Uh, I’ve helped a couple of dozen people just quickly review their appeal letter or provide just a really quick comment on maybe ways that I think that they could potentially be done better. Uh, if that is something that would be useful for you, you can just reply to the message that we’ll send tomorrow and more than happy to just give it a really quick glance.

Uh, but just know that you’ll get access to this template tomorrow and, uh, you can just copy this effectively and change the pieces of it that matter for you. And last slide here, which I think will answer a few questions that, uh, I think I see popping up. Let’s just go through a little bit more of the process.

So I see a lot of questions about timeline. Uh, and I’m gonna be completely transparent here. If you’ve already accepted an offer of admission, it is a lot more difficult to get a school to change the amount of merit base aid that they would provide you. Many schools offers of admission, uh, don’t have to be accepted until the first week of May.

And so it’s not too late to start doing this now, if you haven’t yet accepted your offer of admission, uh, even let’s say over the next three weeks, if you can in the next couple of days, get some kind of merit based appeal letter written and sent over to the relevant contacts of your program, you’re still squarely in the peak time during which you should be doing this.

Uh, it’s unclear at each school who the right point of contact is, uh, to whom you’d send a merit based appeal letter. And so my recommendation is typically to send it to both the admissions office and financial aid office at some schools, uh, one or the other of these departments. And sometimes both are responsible for the allocation of merit based aid.

And because it’s impossible for you to know that for every school, it’s generally safe to send it to both. If you have a strong indication from the school or if there’s a contact who sent you your merit based appeal, please just reach out to them directly about this. If you’ve heard nothing back within a week or two, it’s perfectly fine to call the admissions office or the financial aid office to ask if you can follow up about any potential next steps related to your appeal.

And there’s really just three outcomes that are gonna happen here. Uh, in some cases you’ll make a specific ask for how much money you’d like to see the merit-based, uh, appeal increase by, and sometimes you’ll actually get it. More commonly, you’ll get a counter offer that’s a partial but not full increase in the discount that they’ll provide.

And the worst case scenario is that you’ll have a denial. And even if you have a denial, uh, there’s one last thing I would just recommend you consider doing and that’s, uh, consider this. The school has offered admission to a lot more people than ultimately will accept those offers and, and attend. Uh, and so a lot of the people they’ve offered that admission to might have also had merit-based awards allocated to them.

And the school doesn’t really know today how much of their merit aid budget is going to be effectively used by the time everybody has offered their, uh, and has accepted their admissions offers. And what that means for you is, let’s say you got a no today. Or just don’t get as much as you want it to get.

It’s perfectly fine to ask them again in a few weeks time. It’s not likely that they’re going to change anything, but there’s, at the very least some chance that they’d be willing to change something if there’s a material amount of eight that is left over from the budget they would’ve otherwise allocated.

I’m gonna flip over to some q and A before we move on to need-based appeals.

Uh, um, to Eden’s question, when I said program A and program B and example, I was talking about college A or college B, just as some generic examples of different universities to whom you may have been admitted, uh, will the schools ask to see the competing award letter? In some cases, yes. In many cases, no.

Uh, and so. If you have very strong evidence that there is another program that’s more competitive to get into and is offering more aid, uh, it can certainly help to provide that evidence when you’re asking for more money from another school. Uh, and so it’s up to you to just think through, is attaching something right now going to help my case further?

Uh, it’s important to keep a letter to a certain length. Uh, it’s a good question that there’s just not, uh, set answer for. Uh, the vast majority of these that I’ve seen are typically right around one page. Uh, the more succinct you can be, uh. At least at the beginning of the letter, the better. Just think about the fact that the admissions officers have a kind of seasonal workload to some extent right now is when they’re getting the most number of questions for the next couple of months.

And so if you can help reduce the amount of work that, uh, they need to do by reading something very long, that might help a little bit. Uh, what is the timeframe in which you’d hear back from the school since it’ll be really close to decision day? Uh, it’s a great question that I have no answer for. Uh, uh, it’s going to vary from school to school.

Some schools, uh, are actively review merit based appeals. Some schools do not review at all any merit based appeals. And so I can’t speak to all campuses. Uh, I, I’ve seen in the last week, uh, at least a handful of people get responses back within one week. The closer we get to decision day, that’s different for each school, the harder it might be for the financial aid office to have time to respond quickly, which just means do this on the earlier side if you can.

Can you appeal to multiple schools simultaneously? Yes, you absolutely can. Uh, look, there isn’t a bit of an art to this, uh, and uh, I’m not advocating that you should lie about where you are passionate about going to school. But I will say that, uh, it is important to reduce whatever you have to pay out of pocket to go to school.

And if you can appeal to multiple programs and in that process get, uh, more chance of getting, uh, a great cost at a great school. If I were you, I would do it.

Uh, what is the success rate for merit-based appeals? Based on my experience, even if it’s just a counter offer. Uh, this is a really good question. So I don’t have a really large data set on, uh, success or not. Uh, I can tell you that last, I look at this about, uh, two weeks ago, uh, almost everybody was getting a response from the school, uh, that wasn’t yet a no.

Uh, and that at least one in five people had been getting some increase in the amount of aid that they’d been offered for merit-based appeals. Uh, the, the remaining 80% that hadn’t, uh, gotten a positive response. Many of them were actually still just waiting on hearing back from people. Uh, but I would say based on prior years, I, I wouldn’t be surprised if roughly up to one third of people are getting some sort of a positive response.

So again, this is a situation where your odds of success aren’t incredibly high and it’s just situationally dependent based on where else you’ve gotten into and how much money that school has for the upcoming year. But I would still take a one third chance at getting a significant discount on what needs to be paid out each year.

I see quite a few more questions and so, uh, I am going to move on just for the sake of time. Because the need based appeal section is a, a little bit complicated, but I’ll make sure to come back to these questions when we get to the end.

Key takeaway for the merit based appeal section is like, it’s hard to know exactly what the odds are of success, that the odds are high enough that if I were you, I would at the very least, attempt to appeal. And if a school does have any money left over that it’s willing to allocate for the year. Uh, odds are that somebody else is going to ask for it too.

So if you’re not asking, somebody else will ask and they’ll get whatever money is left instead. Uh, and so it’s just two year benefit to put in the hour or two that it’ll take to see if there is anything positive that come. This moving on to need based aid and promise, I.

This is gonna be a slightly more complicated situation, but there’s a little bit more clarity around what to do and, and when to do it. So, uh, lemme start off with, merit-based aid is most effective. What we just talked about before, the decision date for a school need-based aid and appealing. It applies every single year that a student is in school.

So even if there are things that we’re gonna talk about over the next 30 minutes that might apply to you today, some things might not apply to you today, but they might apply to you next year and they’re just valuable to learn so that you’re always prepared, uh, to potentially increase the amount of aid that you’ll be provided in future years of school as well.

There’s a big problem, though, with the way that need-based aid gets calculated, and I’m gonna go through that in a little bit of detail. At a very high level, the problem is. Need based data comes from data that you give to the FAFSA form, and the data that you give to FAFSA does not provide a complete picture of your family’s finances.

It does a good enough job at capturing a generic view, uh, but it doesn’t go into enough detail to work for a very large share of families. And so when we’re talking about need-based aid appeals, what we’re really talking about is the things that you should do and the ways that you should provide new information to the financial aid office so that they could reconsider the way that they calculate the amount of need based state that you might be eligible for.

For the next couple of uh, minutes, we’re gonna go through, uh, what you see on the left hand side. So we’re gonna start off with. Uh, a few slides to help you better understand how financial need is calculated. Uh, I’m gonna explain a little bit more of how the information that you provide FAFSA flows into determining the amount of aid that you might get.

And then we’re gonna spend the bulk of this section talking about the different reasons why you would be allowed to appeal for more need based aid. Uh, and then we’ll spend three or four minutes in general on the process for applying for need based aid.

And again, please do keep, uh, asking questions. Uh, I will certainly review them on, on some of these slides, and some of them will just have to wait till the end. So the first and most important thing to understand is what is financial need. When you got your appeal letter, uh, your, sorry, when you got your financial aid award letter, uh, there’s probably a line on there somewhere that says that this is your family’s level of financial need.

Uh, and then based on that number, the financial aid officer who’s at the school is supposed to create an aid package for you. That aid package is gonna come up, is going to include some combination of grants, work, study, and loans that can be provided to you from the federal government. Uh, lemme just walk through a little bit of how this math works and then we’ll talk about how it actually impacts the amount, uh, the different types of aid that you might get.

So really the first five minutes of this are a little bit more educational, so you understand the context of what we’re asking in the financial aid office to do, and then the 15 minutes after that are a lot more tactical to help you understand the specific reasons why. You can appeal for more need-based aid and even the types of documentation that you might want to include in that appeal to maximize your odds of success.

So what matters on this slide? Let’s just start at the top. Every school publishes this thing called cost of attendance. Cost of attendance is the sticker price of the school. It’s the tuition plus fees plus an allowance for room and board and living expenses for the upcoming academic year. And this theoretical example, we’re saying that it’s $20,000.

Uh, when you filled out FAFSA, I told you that one to three days after you filled it out, you could log back into your dashboard and see a number called Student Aid Index. That number gets subtracted from cost of attendance and whatever the difference is between those two is what the school determines as your level of financial need.

What’s interesting about this is for any given school, the smaller your student aid index number is the higher your level of financial need is. And so when we’re talking about the next slides after this, and we’re talking about data that you can provide, arguments that you can make to the financial aid office that would let them recalculate your student aid index.

And if they can recalculate it so that the number is smaller, then your level of financial need would be larger and the financial aid officer would have more opportunities to provide different types of aid to you and your family.

This is a very simplified slide. On how we actually get to Student Aid Index. Okay. Uh, there’s a whole other presentation we’ve done. There’s a recording on the CollegeAdvisor site, uh, that’s still up, that goes through in detail how Student Aid Index gets calculated. Uh,

I, I do hear some background noise, by the way as well. I, sorry. That’s probably me. Okay, no worries. Uh, so what we’re talking about is different ways that we can reduce Student Aid Index, uh, and what I’m gonna talk about, uh, in the next couple of slides is gonna tie pretty cleanly to three green boxes that you see here.

So I’m gonna just keep, I’m gonna shorten Student Aid Index and call it SAI. You’re gonna see SAI in different places on the internet. By itself, it means nothing. Uh, but when you look at the last slide, it means something in the context of your level of financial need. How did we get there? Uh, you filled out three general buckets of things in the FAFSA form.

Uh, there’s information about your household’s income, there’s information about your family’s assets, and then there’s information about the size and structure of your family based on those inputs. There’s a bunch of calculations that get run on the backend. So you submit FAFSA, it gets completed, and then a lot of math and adjustments happen to those numbers.

And after all those adjustments are made, there is a student aid index number that gets calculated. Uh, that number is imperfect. And the reason why it’s imperfect is that there are a lot of things missing from how those three buckets of information get captured. I’m gonna give you three really quick examples and then we’re gonna go into a lot more detail on the different ways that you may learn, uh, but apply to you.

So one really big bucket is income data. When you’re filling out FAFSA and getting student aid index, it’s always gonna be based on income that’s old. So the income data is actually coming from two years ago. Uh, when if you’re going to college this fall, you would be entering in fall 2025 and your academic year is 2025/2026, a FAFSA form on student aid.gov for 2025/2026.

And when you fill that form out, the way it works is it pulls in and asks you about income information from 2023. If you are a junior right now, and you’ll be going to college in fall of 2026, then in that year you will be providing income information for your household from 2024. So it’s always two years behind the year in which you are in school.

And the reason that’s important is that a lot of people’s financial situations could have changed between filing taxes two years ago and what things look like today. And we’re gonna go through some of the reasons why you might want to cite, uh, so that the financial aid office can see weight. Maybe the information we have in front of us is outdated.

The second really big bucket of things that are taken into consideration are the families and the households assets. We’re gonna talk about this in a little bit more detail, but what the FAFSA form is trying to do and what the student aid index number is trying to approximate. Is in a way how much of your family’s income and assets are available to help pay for school.

So you provided a lot of information and there’s adjustments that happen to the information. And after those adjustments, what the form is trying to say is now with what we know about this family, we actually think that they should be in a good position to pay this much per year towards school. But the form is missing Other things that are a drain against those assets that are a major source of financial strain against that same set of assets and income.

And the biggest examples are types of medical expenses, uh, especially ongoing or chronic medical expenses that the FAFSA forum has, uh, no way to capture. And so we’re gonna spend about two or three minutes going through a list of examples for things that you can cite. That are otherwise, uh, reducing the amount of assets that you have available to help pay for school.

And then the last bucket is, uh, please, I’d say listen more closely to this one than maybe any other point that I’m going to make tonight. Uh, and I, I really mean that because for about half of people, this ends up being the most important thing to learn. There is a question on the FAFSA form that asks you how many people in the student’s family are going to be in college for the upcoming year?

And that question has been on the FAFSA form for many years before, two years ago, that question did something, if you answered one or you answered 10, the answer that the FAFSA form calculated was different, which made sense because the point of that question is to say, okay. You’ve input information about your family’s assets and income, and now that you’re telling us the number of people who will be in college this year, we’re going to make some adjustment.

If for one student, we believed that the family could afford to pay $20,000 a year towards school, that’s fine, but now that they’ve told us that there are three children, we can’t automatically assume that they can pay $20,000 a year for each of those three children. It wouldn’t make sense. That’s how the form used to work.

And now for some very quirky reasons, the form no longer does this. They still ask this question, but the number that you are asked to help pay towards school doesn’t change if you have one child or if you have 10. But this is a very valid reason why you can appeal and ask the school to make an adjustment to your student aid index.

And so. We’ll talk about this in a little bit more detail in a few minutes, but if you’re listening right now and you’re a parent who has multiple children in school, you need to know that you can appeal for, uh, for each one. Uh, if you have one child in school today, and you might have another one who will be in school at the same time next year or the following year, make sure at that point to do a need-based appeal to let the financial aid office know that this is the case.

For the next three slides, what we’re gonna go through is, uh, just a list of 12 examples for that you could cite in a need-based appeal. And I’m not gonna go through in detail the different documentation that you’d wanna submit to increase the likelihood of success for each of these, but I’ll just cover them at a very high level so that you’re aware of the types of reasons that the financial aid office is allowed to accept as appeals.

I’m gonna caveat this by saying that not every single one of these is, uh, not every financial aid officer is required to accept every single one of these reasons to provide you with more need-based aid, but the financial aid officers have some leeway at each school for accepting these. And so this is not going to always work.

Uh, but in many cases it will work. So the first overall bucket of changes are anything related to your employment or income from 2023 versus today. As I was saying earlier, if you’ve had a reduction in income since your 2023 taxes were filed, then you really want to document that and let the financial aid office know.

Uh, I’ve unfortunately run into too many cases where this is the case over the last couple of weeks, and if you don’t let the financial aid office know. Then all they can see on their side, and all they assume is that whatever they saw on your 2023 taxes is indicative of what’s happening today. If somebody has lost a job in the household, uh, then same logic replies, you need to let the financial aid office know, let them know when that job loss occurred.

Uh, if somebody has resigned from a job, though, it is a little bit less likely that the financial aid office would take that into consideration. It’s not impossible, it’s just a little bit less likely. Uh, a third reason that’s more common than I perhaps expected at first is, uh, sometimes your 2023 taxes might have had one time income on there.

That’s just not ongoing. Whether it was a bonus that you were paid for one year. Uh, let’s say an inheritance. Some assets you sold that showed up as income on your, uh, tax documentation. If you know that this applies to you, then you need to let the financial aid office know, because their assumption would be, okay, you got a hundred thousand dollars bonus, congratulations, I’m assuming that you got that every single year, and that might not be the case.

And if it’s not the case, then they’re going to have to make an adjustment so that you can get the amount of aid you should actually get.

And the last reason here would be if there’s been a reduction or a change in the amount of child support received since the 2023 taxes were filed. In that case, you would also wanna let the financial aid office know, uh, just two more slides of these exhaustive reasons and then. We’ll jump into the slightly more part fun part of the process to appeal.

So as I was saying before, there are a lot of expenses that impact your everyday life that FAFSA doesn’t ask about, but that it should take into consideration. And so what we’re gonna talk about on this slide is ways to communicate to the financial aid office that there are other obligations that you have that are unavoidable, that strain the same resources that the school is asking you to pull from to pay for college.

And so the first and most common reason is if there’s some unexpected medical expenses that are incurred by the household. If anybody in your household has had some kind of large medical expense with a portion that’s not covered by insurance, then you may very well want to show the financial aid office.

What the cost of that actually is for the household. Uh, and if you can show that and that there’s any, especially ongoing pieces of that care that you have to pay for, then they have the opportunity to take it into consideration and effectively recalculate the amount of assets you have available. The second overall bucket here is similar logic, but for ongoing medical conditions.

And so if there’s somebody in the household who has a need for regular therapy or medication or medical equipment expenses or something else, especially something that’s related to a chronic medical condition or disease, uh, then you really wanna make sure to communicate that. Uh, I’ve seen this, uh, many people I’ve spoken to actually over the last three weeks weren’t really aware that they could do this.

Uh, and successfully we’re able to provide some documentation to a financial aid office about the cost of their ongoing care or the care of someone in their household, and had that taken into consideration when providing a, a greater amount of need-based financial aid. Uh, similar logic also holds for if you’re caring for an elderly or a sick family member, uh, especially if you’ve brought them into your household to take care of them.

Or if you’re providing, uh, financial support for, let’s say a parent or somebody else in the household. Those are reasonable things for a person to do, but they very realistically reduce the amount of income and assets that you can use to pay for school this year. And so you want to take the opportunity to explain that situation to the financial aid officer so that they can reconsider your student aid index again.

The last bucket that I’m gonna go through is a little bit less likely to be considered if I’m being completely honest, but I’ve seen people sometimes in more rare circumstances use it successfully. So the way I framed this slide is by saying that there are fixed obligations that strain your family’s resources and other forms of that could include, let’s say that the parent themselves has existing student loan debt from their own college years, or grad school, that they’re still paying off.

Let’s say there’s credit card debt for the household or personal loan debt, or other forms of legal obligations that after you paid back, those are very real strains on your finances, but it’s less likely the financial aid office would accept them as reasons why they would change the amount of financial aid that you’re offered.

It is not impossible. So please don’t take away the idea that you shouldn’t. Try if, if you need to try, but just be prepared that for this set of reasons, it’s a little bit less likely that the financial aid officer would change the amount of aid that they’d be able to provide.

Uh, alright. So I see one question that we’re going to answer right now, which is gonna relate to changes in family circumstances that can warrant more aid. So I was saying that the most important thing I’ve seen people take away is situations where you have a sibling or a parent who is also enrolled in college at the same time as the person for whom you’re submitting a need-based appeal.

The question here is, uh, can you, uh, appeal if a parent and student are simultaneously enrolled at a school? And yes. The way the question is phrased on the FAFSA form is if, uh. How many, uh, children or other children or uh, parents in the household are enrolled in college for the upcoming academic year?

And so both the student and the parent count you can, uh, appeal if that is the case. Uh, now something very important to understand, I want into this in a little bit detail already, but the nuance is if you have two children in school, or let’s say you’re a student listening to me right now and you have a sibling who’s at a different school, uh, and let’s say you appeal to the financial aid office by explaining that there’s multiple children in school right now, you have to do it to each person’s school in order for it to be maximally effective.

Uh, if you appeal to one school and they say, great, thanks for letting us know, here’s your greater aid package. That’s not going to carry over to the other school. They don’t talk to each other when it comes to this type of thing. And so just know that when it comes to this type of appeal, you need to make sure that you’re doing it at each school for each student.

Uh,

if you have a change in family size, this is the second big bucket of, uh, reasons why your student aid index might change quite a bit. And I’m just gonna go through this for about 30 seconds. When you filled out the FAFSA form there, you were asked to consent to having the IRS send your tax information to the Department of Education and pre-fill part of the form.

Uh, everybody had to do this. Whether you had to file taxes or not, you had to hit this consent button. As a result, the IRS pulls in the household size that’s reported on taxes that were filed in 2023, and that’s the household size that’s pulled into your FAFSA form. There’s a button, uh, basically that asks you, is the household size that was reported on your taxes still accurate and reflective of the household size today?

Sometimes people skip through this quickly. Uh, just make sure that you’ve accurately answered that question because if your family size has grown larger since your 2023 taxes were filed, then it would have a very big impact on your student aid index. And there’s a specific reason why your Student aid index has a, a lot of it is impacted by the household income, and there’s a formula in determining your student aid index that says, uh, how much of your household income is required for basic living expenses?

And how much of your household income do we exclude from being available to help pay for school? Put simply the larger your family size is, the more of your household’s income is excluded from being available to help pay for school. And so if your household size is increased, make sure that you answer that question accurately on the FAFSA form so that you can exclude more of your income from what’s available to pay for school, thereby reducing your student aid index, which should theoretically increase the amount of financial aid you’re eligible for.

And then the other two scenarios here, uh, before we move on to the process for appealing, or if there has unfortunately been the death of a parent or guardian or divorce or separation of the household after FAFSA had already been submitted, then you want to have that conversation with the financial aid office to see what they say Your next step should.

Uh, this is, uh, a little bit more specific to each family and your situation, but just know that the financial aid office should be in, in a good position to help guide you through the best steps for your, uh, personal situation there.

Okay. We’re gonna move on to the last section here just for the sake of time, and then I, I, I’ll try to get back to q and a. How does the appeal process work for need-based appeals? So each school needs to let you submit an appeal, and we’re gonna talk about that in just a moment. Uh, you will either find it on the financial aid website as a portal where you can write the appeal and attach attachments to submit.

Or they’ll give you an email address to which to submit appeals. And so every school is just, they’re required to allow you to submit a need based appeal. They are not required to let you submit a merit based appeal, but they are legally required to let you appeal your need based aid. Every school is gonna look at the appeal slightly differently for the same exact reasons cited.

One school might say, yes, we accept this appeal and give you more aid, and another school might say no. Uh, so just kind of know that. But you have to submit an appeal to each school that you’re interested in. And for the same reason, one might say yes and one might say no. Uh, there’s a little bit of flexibility around how need-based appeals work.

So just some, the concept you should, uh, understand is there’s a, a legal term that’s used in the legislation that governs FAFSA. Uh, and it provides the financial aid officer who’s reviewing your case with the right of professional judgment and they shorten it to PJ and, and a lot of documentation on the Department of Education website.

All that means is the financial aid, is that the financial aid officer has a little bit of leeway in reviewing the assumptions that are used to calculate how much aid your family might be eligible for. And so each financial aid officer can take a slightly different view on whether they would accept something as being valid for an appeal or not.

Uh, and what I’m trying to provide you in the slides before this is a general overview of, for the most part, the more likely reasons why you would be able to convince a financial aid officer to change their view on how much your household be eligible for. So you’re gonna write a letter. That letter is gonna go as an email to the financial aid office, or you’re gonna submit that letter with attachments that support your, uh, the points that you’re making on a portal that the financial aid office will guide you to.

The financial aid officer assigned to your case is going to review it, and typically within a few weeks, and sometimes faster, they’ll give you a response. Uh, and if you’re unsatisfied with that response, in many cases, you can appeal that again. And on top of that, if there’s something that happens to you next year that maybe didn’t impact your financial aid for this year, you need to make sure that you take the opportunity to appeal again in the following year.

As I was saying, schools are required to let you submit a need-based appeal. And I know that there’s some outdated websites on schools that say that they don’t accept appeals. They’re getting fewer and farther between. Just know that this is something that you absolutely can do, that you should do it each year that you submit FAFSA, if there’s a reason that F cited that is relevant to you.

And the last thing to consider here is the reasons that might not count. So, uh, your student aid index is based again on the information you submitted in FAFSA. And the two things that are always excluded from the information you submit on FAFSA are the value of your primary residence and the value of retirement accounts.

Those two things are entirely invisible. To the FAFSA form and to school, so you don’t count those when trying to appeal the amount of federal student aid that you might be eligible for. Uh, there are some exceptions here when it comes to CSS schools that I’m not going to cover the second, but for the 95% of schools that aren’t, that accept FAFSA as the primary form of the federal aid that they’ll provide, these are the things that are far less likely to count when determining how much aid you’re eligible for.

So, one, if your 401k values have gone down since you submitted FAFSA, it’s not something to be considered because your 401k is not part of FAFSA. Two, if your investment values have gone down, uh, you, when you fulfilled that FAFSA, you answered questions about, uh, how much your overall assets were worth, and part of that might have been your stock portfolio, your bond portfolio, or something else.

I know that there’s been a lot of volatility in the market over the last couple of days. I know that some people’s 529 plans or other, uh, savings they were using to help pay for college might be worth less today than they were two weeks ago. Uh, it in most cases is true that the financial aid office does not consider a change in the value of your investment accounts from the point that you filled out FAFSA when you’re submitting an appeal.

So I, I would still encourage you because this is a, a unique period in time to submit an appeal for these reasons, if it’s really impactful to you. But be prepared that it’s highly unlikely financial aid office would take it into consideration.

Which leads me to the last section. We’ll go through this in about. Three or four minutes, and then I’ll flip back to q and a for the 10 minutes that we’ll have left. So there’s a lot of headlines that have been happening, uh, coming out about federal student loan policy grants and other programs. And there’s two ways that you should think about this for the near future.

One is, uh, there were headlines about a month ago about pauses in federal loans and grants. Those headlines caused a lot of stress among some people, but they were not intended to impact federal grants, work, study, or federal loans provided to students through the Department of Education. So those headlines, you can effectively ignore them.

There is another set of headlines that you will start reading about over the next couple of weeks and. The way it works is there’s a budget bill going through Congress right now as part of that budget bill, there are, uh, discussions happening about different things that will be included as cuts to certain departments.

One of those cuts that has been discussed on a menu of options is reducing or removing access to something called a parent plus loan, which is a type of federal student loan that’s available to parents that you might see on your financial aid award letter. About 600,000 people used this last year to help pay for school.

Uh, it’s unlikely that any legislative changes would impact your access to this for the upcoming academic year, but there is some chance that it could impact your access to it in 2026 and beyond. And so we will, uh, keep everybody updated on what these changes are. Uh, we’re expecting to see some draft legislation with respect to this in the next eight weeks.

Uh, no hard deadline for when this needs to happen or when we’ll learn more, but that’s our internal expectation. And as that happens, uh, we’re preparing to just keep people updated on, on when things, what could be impacted, when things impacts would actually, uh, happen, and how much that would, uh, actually change your financial aid awards in the future.

The last thing, I’ll leave you with just two minutes, if you’ll bear with me. I was mentioning that we started Juno as a way to get cheaper student loans for myself and my classmates. My hope sincerely is that by negotiating our financial aid award letter, you’re able to get enough grants and scholarships from the school to not need to use loans at all.

A large percentage of people still will need some form of a loan. And in those cases, what we created genome for is helping people get access to the lowest possible rate, with the lowest burden to figure out what rate you might get charged. And this is our process right now. Uh, we have about 16,000 undergraduate students and parents who are signed up to something that we call a negotiation group.

Uh, between now and the end of the month, we ask people to just fill it. Basically join a wait list. That wait list is free, and there’s no obligation to use a loan. And you only have to answer a few basic questions about where you’re going to school, what your graduation year is, and anything else that you want to answer is optional.

The more people who join this wait list, the easier it is for me and my team to approach different lenders and say, Hey, now we have this very large group of people who might be interested in your product and we’ll introduce them to your product, but only if you provide a really good version of it for our group.

And so we get these different lenders to compete against each other on the rates and the terms and other things that they can provide as exclusive benefits to our group, kind of like AAA and kind of like Costco. Uh, and then on June 1st, or in the first week of June, we make whatever the best deals that we’ve been able to negotiate available to our member base.

Uh, and that just is in the form of an email that will get sent out to you where in less than two minutes you can check your rates without, uh, doing a hard check on your credit. And you can decide if this makes sense for you and if it doesn’t make sense for you. You can completely ignore it and tell me that, uh, that it didn’t make sense for you.

And that’s it. So our only promises to you are that’s joining. Juno is free. It only works because a lot of people tell a lot of other people that this process is possible and that it exists. We don’t check your credit when you sign up. Uh, we don’t require you to tell us your credit score. We don’t share your information with anybody.

All we do is use the amount of people who are signed up on our wait list as a way to entice lenders to give group discounts. And whether you use your note or not, you can get free one-on-one support, whether over email, phone, or Zoom with experts on our team throughout the year. Uh, and so don’t be shy, don’t feel obligated to use it for anything.

Uh, but if you have any questions about anything related to FAFSA, to trying to understand what some of this terminology or math means or appealing your aid letter or understanding different federal or private loan options, we’re here for you 24/7, 365 days of the year. And if you’re interested in the way I just said, you can sign up at the link that’s at the bottom of this page.

That’ll also send you tomorrow. With that, I’m gonna turn it over to q and a for the last eight or nine minutes that we have.

Anna: Thank you so much, Chris. Um, thanks everyone for, for hanging with us. This is the end of the presentation part, as Chris said, we’re gonna dive into your questions, just some logistics.

A reminder that you can download the slides from the handouts tab and have those with you. Um, please also know this is being recorded and it will be published, and I believe Chris will also send it out, um, to you via email. Uh. We are gonna read through your questions, paste them in the public chat so you can see them, um, and read ’em out loud before responding.

If your q and a tab is not letting you submit questions, just double check that you join the webinar through the custom link in your email and not from the webinar landing page. So you might need to click out and rejoin. Um, but remember it’s being recorded so you don’t need to worry about missing anything.

Um, Chris, we have so many good questions here. Um, one is asking and please also feel free to, to grab some questions as you see fit. Yep. Can you appeal, merit and need based in the same request?

Chris: Uh, you typically can, uh, short answer, yes, longer answer. Some schools will require you to do it separately, but it’s impossible to know unless you ask the school what you should do.

Anna: So school dependent.

And then in your experience, does applying to school early decision affect, uh, needs-based aid appeal, like the timeframe and the, the likelihood of success

Chris: on need-based, it should, uh, impact it much less than. So for need-based, there’s two buckets of money that a school can draw from. There’s federal student aid that they can allocate to you, and there is institutional aid.

And the institutional aid is just, let’s say the school has an endowment and they have money that they’re able to give to people to help them make school affordable. Uh, that piece of it, depending on how quickly they have allocated it to other people, it might be harder for you to ask for more if you’re doing a need-based appeal later in the year.

But the federal, uh, piece of it. Uh, has less of a deadline associated. So there are some buckets of federal aid that you’ll be eligible for, uh, kind of regardless of when you submit that need-based appeal. Uh, so hopefully that helps.

Anna: Thank you. Switching to a Juno specific question, how does Juno make money?

Uh, what is, what did, what are the incentives for Juno? And someone asked, what’s the cost? You said there’s no cost, but I’m just naming that they asked that as well.

Chris: Yeah. Uh, great question. So Juno makes money based on the total amount of customers that we drive to different banks. But what I’ll tell you right now is that I believe more strongly in incentive alignment than anything.

So if the offers that we put in front of you are not the absolute best that exists for you, then please do not use our product. This is set up in a way where. First, we can’t take your payment information. We have no way to even accept it. Uh, there are no fees associated with the products that we put in front of people, and we encourage people to shop around even after checking the rates that we’re able to secure for you through our lending partners.

And so, uh, there really isn’t anything that you need to trust us for in this. Uh, I, I very much do hope that even if you don’t use any of the things that you, uh, use Juno, you do shop around as much as you can for the best thing in front of you. Uh, and hopefully, and what ends up happening in most cases is that people do find the best product through what we’ve been able to negotiate and tend to come back to us for each year that a student is in school.

Anna: That’s fantastic. Thank you. We have a student who’s trying to find the balance between. Following up on the status of their appeal and not annoying the school. Do you have any advice on how to find that balance?

Chris: Uh, it’s a really good question, and it is,

if your decision date is in early May, and it’s April 10th right now, uh, if you’ve submitted your, uh, appeal more than a week ago, then follow up with them next Monday or Tuesday. They, they know just as much as you do that there’s time pressure in this process. Uh, and at the very least, uh, ask if there is a date by which you expect to get some response.

Uh, if, especially if asking for the response itself is something that they’re not ready to do.

Anna: And if folks think they made a mistake on the FAFSA or the CSS profile, is there any way they can fix that?

Chris: You can. So there’s, uh, you can correct, uh, FAFSA form, but I would not recommend starting there right now because you’re in the thick of the financial aid season. So if you think that you made a mistake, it’s more effective to actually reach out to the financial aid office and tell them what you think the mistake was.

Uh, if you make a correction on your FAFSA form, the school’s going to get the updated information sent to them within three days. Uh, but they might not have or be aware that this change is coming, and they might not actually have the opportunity to correct the amount of aid that you’d be eligible for.

So if you’re thinking you made a mistake, you can log back into your pseudonym.gov account to check what your original submission looked like. If you now know that you’ve made a mistake, just email the financial aid office immediately after that, telling them what mistake you made and ask them how that might impact your financial need.

Anna: Helpful. Thank you. Can you appeal an appeal that’s been rejected?

Chris: Very good question. Uh, short answer is you can do anything. Uh, and I really do mean that, uh, but your likelihood of success is gonna be low. So, uh, for am merit-based appeals, uh, some schools won’t look at appeals at all and they, some of them really mean that.

Uh, and then some will give you something, uh, and it is totally fine to ask them if you can reach back out in the early summer to see if there’s any opportunity to get more merit based aid. Uh, in that case, that’s how I would frame that appeal. Appealed the appeal. On need-based. You absolutely can appeal and appeal, and especially in cases where you have something new that you want to share.

And so maybe you’ve already appealed and you learned something new just now that you could have added on to your argument. Please do appeal. The appeal.

Anna: Uh, there’s so many questions. Uh, Chris, uh, I’ll throw you one more and then I’ll, if there’s any you see that you wanna, um, get to, um, that’s great. What if folks don’t get an answer by May 1st, the decision date?

Chris: That’s a really difficult situation that I, I don’t have a good answer for. Honestly. This is the, we faced the same issue last year because FAFSA was delayed and schools had to push back their decision deadlines. Uh, this year there’s still are some issues that schools in. There’s no good answer here. I I.

But what I should say that I think might be more helpful for folks is, uh, I know we did this once before. Uh, if we can pull out the q and a from, uh, this presentation tool. I’ll go through and answer all the questions just by text that we have not been able to get to tonight. And when I send the tomorrow, I’ll send you the quick email that has the link to the recording and the presentation.

And then maybe one or two days after that, I’ll just send everybody, uh, along the document that has all of these questions answered. Uh, and hopefully that gets to anything that I’ve not been able to hit on yet.

Anna: Thank you so much, Chris. I’m going through trying to make sure I can save all the chat, uh, all the questions.

Thank you so much for your expertise. It is really valuable. Thank you students and parents for joining us. Um, we appreciate your time and I wish you all the best of luck on your appeals and all of your, your applications. Um, as soon as I have all of these saved, I will end the webinar. Um, but this, this, this signifies the end.

So thank you all for coming out.

Chris: Thanks Anna. Thank you everybody for, uh, for making this evening. Hope you have a great night.