How to Appeal Financial Aid Awards

Webinar Transcription

01-13-26-How to Appeal Financial Aid Awards

Lonnie: [00:00:00] Begin. Hello everyone. Welcome to CollegeAdvisor’s webinar alongside Juno, “How to Appeal Financial Aid Awards.” To orient everyone with the webinar timing, we will first begin with our live presentation and then we’ll have the opportunity to answer your questions in a live Q&A. And then we’ll also have the opportunity to just talk about our services and all the great things that we offer to you.

Lonnie: So with that said, let’s now go ahead and, and meet our presenter for our webinar, Chris. 

Chris: Hi everybody. Uh, and thanks Lonnie for being here tonight. My name is Chris Abkarians. I’m one of the founders of a company called Juno. For the last seven years, we’ve helped now about 250,000 families figure out how to navigate the financial aid process.

Chris: Everything that we do is free to our member base. You can think of us like Costco for student loans and student [00:01:00] loan refinancing. My objective at the end of this webinar is really just to help you better understand your options for appealing your financial aid award letter once you get it. And I promise you, there are many more reasons why you might be allowed to appeal than you might think right now.

Chris: So thanks for being here and being interested in the topic, and hopefully everybody can get a little bit more money, uh, that uh, from the school directly. 

Lonnie: Absolutely, definitely that topic of financial aid and how to pay for the cost of college, I know creates a lot of anxiety, um, especially when it comes to like what your reward letter means and you know how to do the appeal.

Lonnie: So I know that our audience is in store for some great information, but before we get started, we would like to just get a sense of kind of just some more information about where you are. And so I’m gonna launch two polls. The first question is going to be, have you completed FAFSA for the 2026-2027 [00:02:00] academic year?

Lonnie: And then the second question, especially given our, our topic tonight is have you appealed a financial aid award letter? So the poll is now launching and mm-hmm. I’m, both questions should be available to you, should have popped up directly on your screen. And then also to let everyone know the handouts with the handout for this presentation will be available shortly.

Lonnie: Uh, so just give us one more minute and we will have that available to you by visiting the handouts tab and then go ahead and download it. Okay. So, as I was speaking, let’s see. I do have, I, okay. I’m starting to get some of the responses for the second question, but I do have a, a good mass number for have you completed FAFSA for the 2026-2027 academic year [00:03:00] yet.

Lonnie: And we have 96% of our live audience have already completed the FAFSA. That is awesome. That’s great. Love hearing that. Um, and then I’m gonna go ahead and close that response and then for our second one, I think I see the response is starting to kind of come in now.

Lonnie: Let’s see.

Lonnie: All right. So, so far the responses are coming in. We have about 75% that have not appealed an award letter yet. So I’m pretty sure they’re gonna get some great information from you, Chris. And so with that, I am now going to thank you everyone for participating in the poll. And with that, Chris, I’m gonna turn it over to you so that you can go over the agenda for the webinar.

Chris: Fantastic. So, uh, [00:04:00] let’s start off with a few housekeeping items, especially for folks who’ve joined a bit more recently. Uh, I’ll send you a copy of the recording of the webinar along with the slides that I’m walking through to your inbox later this week. So if you have to leave at any point or if there’s something you really wanted to take notes on and I went through too quickly, please don’t worry.

Chris: You’ll get everything that we’re going through sent to your inbox directly. Second. If you have any questions as we go through, please do feel free to ask ’em in the chat box or the Q&A box. I’ll monitor it along the way, but I’ll try to refrain from answering too many questions as we go through the slides just to make sure that we’re able to complete this in time.

Chris: And finally, uh, if you have questions that you don’t feel comfortable asking in public, you are always able to respond to the email that I’ll send you later this week. And just ask them privately. Either myself or someone else on my team will make sure to get you answers quickly as we can with [00:05:00] that. The agenda for today is what you see on the screen here.

Chris: We’re gonna spend about five minutes talking about the general timeline for financial aid awards. We’re gonna spend about 10 minutes talking about the first bucket of appeals, which we call merit-based appeals. We’ll spend the second bucket, uh, talking about need-based appeals, which is really a majority of what we’ll talk about tonight.

Chris: I’ll give you a quick five minute intro to Juno and I’ll save all the remaining time that we have left for any questions you might have that I had not yet been able to answer. Uh, just one other thing I’ll offer right now, if there’s, I’m not going to have time to answer every single question, but I do promise that, uh, I will get a copy of all of the questions that have been asked that I have not yet been able to answer and send you responses to those as well.

Chris: So please feel free to liberally ask questions as we go through, and I’ll make sure that you still get a response at some point in the next couple of [00:06:00] days. What you see here is really the putting everything in context fantastic. That over 90% of people who are listening right now have already completed their FAFSA form for this year.

Chris: It opened a few months ago in October. Uh, since you’ve completed it, you likely have received what’s called a student aid index, which is a number that I’m not going to talk a lot about tonight, but it is a number that plays a role in your financial aid appeals. We have a previous webinar that can help you better understand how that works, but you don’t really need to understand it.

Chris: I’m only offering this as something that you could learn more about. If you’re curious. What really matters for tonight is, uh, by this point, most people will have already applied to a college if you’re not already, uh, a rising, uh, college student. And for those who get admitted over the course of the next couple of months, you’re likely going to hear about your [00:07:00] financial aid award letter in right around the same timeframe.

Chris: And that’s really when you want to submit an appeal relatively quickly if you’re able to. And so that’s really what I really, uh, want to zoom in on in this process. This is a fantastic time to be talking about it because for most people it gives you a two month plus head start, but at least thinking about, am I going to appeal the results of my financial aid letter?

Chris: Are there things I should be paying attention to that maybe could help me get more money from the school or from the federal government that I don’t have to pay back? And so let’s just start off with, uh, a frame of mind to think about as you receive that financial aid letter. Uh, a really important thing I’d like to drive home is that you can consider that a first draft and not a final draft the school has.

Chris: And we’re gonna go through this in a lot of detail for the [00:08:00] next 45 minutes. Uh. There are many cases in which you are very validly allowed to appeal the results of that financial aid award letter by providing new information that the school has not yet had a chance to consider. And the school is not going to take any negative action towards you or your admission just because you are politely asking for a little bit more financial help to make the numbers work.

Chris: And so really just think of this as something that has pure upside. It might take you a little while, uh, hopefully less than an hour to submit an appeal. But once you do, the best thing that can happen is that you get a significantly increased amount of money, uh, that doesn’t have to be paid back. And the worst thing that can happen is that you wasted the hour.

Chris: There’s two types of aid that we’re gonna talk about for the next half hour. So as I mentioned a few slides ago, the first bucket is called merit based [00:09:00] appeals. And you can think of merit-based appeals as, uh, an opportunity for you to play schools against each other because they really want you to attend.

Chris: Merit-based awards are based on your high school track record. Say that you were a stellar athlete, or you accomplished something amazing, or you had a great GPA and standardized test scores and now you’ve been admitted to some schools and those schools are saying effectively we’ll give you a discount.

Chris: If you come here, you have an opportunity to appeal those merit-based awards and to really ask for more. So we’ll spend about 10 minutes talking about what that looks like and offering you a template that you could use to ask for more aid. The second thing you can, uh, appeal, which is more common and what we’ll spend a majority of the time on, is need-based appeals.

Chris: And what we’re talking about here is, uh, what you’ve submitted, the FAFSA. The financial aid [00:10:00] office received some results from the data that you provided into the FAFSA form, but that was incomplete. There are a lot of gaps that exist because of the way the FAFSA form is set up. There are things that it does not consider by default, and there are opportunities that you have to provide new information to that financial aid office so that they can recalculate the amount of aid that you could be eligible for.

Chris: So let’s, for some people, both of these might apply. For most people. One of these will apply and let’s dive in for a few minutes into better understanding how appeals work. To start off with, this is a global comment for both types of appeals. Being selective about spending your time on crafting the right appeal letter to the schools that you really want to go to is probably going to help you get better results.

Chris: Uh, so [00:11:00] we’ll talk over the next couple of slides through a few different strategies for how you can increase the amount of merit-based aid for which you might be eligible. Uh, but at a very high level focus on the school that you really want to go to. If you’ve been admitted to more than one. Uh, if you’ve been admitted to more than one, you have an increased opportunity to actually think carefully about how to negotiate between them.

Chris: Don’t use the term negotiate the financial aid office and the admissions offices hate that. But we’ll talk about the types of language that you could use and the arguments you could make that make them more likely to say, I really want you to enroll. What’s it going to take? And just remember, you’ve already been admitted.

Chris: They already want you to be a part of the class. They’re not going to change their mind simply because you’re asking for a little bit more financial help to make it work.

Chris: So let’s talk about the structure [00:12:00] of a good merit based appeal letter. Uh, and then just to, I’m gonna tap through just so you have a better understanding of what we’re gonna talk about. I’ll come back to this slide. We’re gonna hit on the structure of a good letter. I’m gonna give you a template for a merit based appeals, which will be something you also get to your inbox tomorrow.

Chris: Uh, I’ll talk to you about the process and who you should contact, and then we’ll move on to need-based appeals. And so the structure of a good merit-based appeal letter is really one that starts off by convincing the person who’s reading it that if they are able to put in the work of adjusting the amount of merit-based aid that the school has offered you, that you are likely to actually accept that offer of admission.

Chris: That’s really what they’re looking for here. And so be specific about why you want to attend that school so badly. What things that are happening on that school, the programs that you’re interested in, the clubs that you wanna be a part [00:13:00] of, things that you wanna participate in, uh, and try to make it sound as much as you possibly can.

Chris: Like you are absolutely interested in going to this school, but you, it’s come down now to just a financial decision and you need a little bit of help. Uh, if you have an opportunity to detail information that you hadn’t yet been able to provide, or let’s say new information since your application, something new that you have accomplished that would make them more likely to want you to attend even more.

Chris: Absolutely do share that in this letter. Uh, and don’t take any, what I would call hard ball stances, like threatening to withdraw if they don’t meet your demands or using the word demand or negotiate. Uh, and if you are telling one school that let’s say you’ve been been admitted to a few and there’s one school you want to go to that has offered you very little money, another school that’s offered you a [00:14:00] lot of money, um, you can use that as an opportunity to go to the school that hasn’t offered you, uh, a lot of money and say, look, honestly, this is a situation I’m in.

Chris: I I need help to make the net cost more comparable for me to be able to afford to attend. Just avoid excessively exaggerating what the other offer is that another school has provided you. Because you don’t wanna lose credibility in the process of crafting and delivering this story to the financial aid and admissions offices, uh, at the school that you really want to go to.

Chris: What you see in front of you is a, a really basic template for an appeal letter that last year, a little over 100 people actually used to help get more money. And so, uh, you can click the link that’s on this slide. You’ll get a link to this sent to you later this week. And just make a copy of that Google Doc and [00:15:00] edit it however you like.

Chris: If you want somebody to review that appeal letter, um, really putting my hand up and volunteering right now, that, uh, I am happy to actually take a look at the appeal letter if, uh, you want me to, whether it’s this merit-based appeal or a need-based appeal and at least help guide you in the right direction.

Chris: We’re not charging anything for doing this. Uh, we did this for a few hundred people last year and more than happy to, all you’re gonna do is reply to the email that we’ll send later this week. Ask for help on your appeal letter and somebody on my team will help you get it in shape. Uh, and if you don’t need somebody to look at it, just click the link from the email, access the template, adjust the template to meet your, uh, personal situation and see if that works for you.

Chris: So here are the common questions that I get about merit-based appeals. Uh, first, when do you do this? [00:16:00] And, and I’d say that’s earlier is better than, than later. For most schools, you gotta work backwards from the deadline for enrollment, or at least for putting your deposit down and saying, this is where I wanna go.

Chris: For most schools, that’s gonna be the beginning of May. And so if you do want the opportunity to negotiate and appeal your merit-based awards, uh, the leverage that you have is. Actually accepting that offer of admission. Once you have accepted that offer of admission, you don’t have a lot of leverage to negotiate or to appeal your merit ba, merit based awards.

Chris: So start doing this on the earlier side. The moment that you’ve received, if you end up receiving, uh, merit, merit-based scholarship, is the moment at which you should start thinking about, okay, am I gonna get another one? Have I gotten another one? How do I try to use this to increase the amount or size of the merit-based scholarship from the school that I wanna go to the most?[00:17:00] 

Chris: You’re gonna send a letter. That letter is gonna go to either the financial aid or admissions office, and at some schools both, I can’t give you a blanket answer, but in a lot of cases, both, uh, once you’ve sent that letter, if you haven’t heard anything back within two weeks, I would recommend following up with a phone call to the financial aid office, simply asking to follow up on it.

Chris: And the reality here is in a lot of cases you might get approved for a much larger amount of scholarship. In most cases, uh, where something positive happens, I see people get a moderate bump in the amount of money that they’ve been offered by the school, and the worst case is getting denied. And even if you get denied, uh, you still have the opportunity to submit a similar appeal to other schools, uh, to which you may have been admitted if you are fortunate enough.

Chris: Good question here on, can you appeal both [00:18:00] merit and need-based? And yes, you absolutely can. And if this does apply to you, you should.

Chris: Uh, good question here on, are merit-based and need-based appeals done at the same time? Or can you do them separately? You absolutely can do them separately. The arguments that you’re going to make, as you’ll see for the next half hour are very different. Uh, but you can also do them at the same time as well if you’ve received all, if you get to the end of this presentation and you realize that there are valid reasons for you to appeal both, which there very well may be.

Chris: Uh, and I’ll touch on one more question here, uh, which is, is it possible to appeal to a top college using a smaller on college offer? It’s an excellent question and it’s one that, uh, you start getting into a little bit of negotiation strategy around what information do [00:19:00] you want to reveal to the school that you’re asking for more aid.

Chris: If you are, uh, let’s say if you received a lot of money from a highly competitive school, so one that has a low admissions rate, uh, and you received a lot less money. From another school that you just so happen to want to go to instead, but one that is a little bit easier to get into, then it might make sense in that situation to volunteer what the competing offer looks like and where that competing offer is from.

Chris: But to make clear to, uh, the other school that you’d still go to this other school as long as they were able to help you bridge the gap in finances. But if you think about the opposite direction, one where, and this is candidly more common, uh, you have been admitted to a more selective school, but they’ve offered you less merit scholarship, uh, and you’ve been admitted to a [00:20:00] slightly less selective or easier to get into school, but they’ve offered you a large merit scholarship.

Chris: Uh, in that case, it is okay to still tell the school that was harder to get into, that you have gotten significantly more a from another program. But you may not want to volunteer off the bat what the name of that other program is. So really just think about it from the perspective of what is the strongest argument you can make and what information should you provide in that letter and in your communications that makes it most likely that the person reading it thinks that you accepting your offer of admission is at risk.

Chris: I see a lot more great questions and just to recap, I will answer all of the questions that I don’t get to answering, uh, live over email over the next couple of days. And really just for the sake of time and to make sure that we spend as much time as we should on the need-based appeal section, I’m gonna continue going through [00:21:00] right now, and if we do have time at the end, I’ll save it for Q&A.

Chris: So really just to recap the merit-based appeal section before we move on to need-based, please don’t be shy about appealing. The most common mistake that people make in this process is not trying it in the first place. Nothing negative is gonna come of this. And as long as you are being polite and thoughtful about the arguments that you’re making, uh, you have a decent chance of increasing the amount of scholarship money that you can get.

Chris: We’re gonna move on now to need-based appeals, which is really where we’re gonna submit a majority of the discussion. And let me start it off with just a, a general comment. Uh, when we talk about need-based financial aid appeals, our objective here is to to realize that the financial aid [00:22:00] office puts together, uh, an aid package for you.

Chris: And they do it based on the information they have in front of ’em. And more often than not, not in all cases, but more often than. That information is what you’re able to provide on the FAFSA form. Maybe some other things as well. But typically what was available on the FAFSA form, and for those of you who filled it out, which it sounds like is almost everybody listening, that you may have noticed that there are some quirks about the types of information that FAFSA collects.

Chris: Some of it is outdated, some of it doesn’t give it the opportunity to communicate other costs that your family might incur. And the need-based appeal process is really about providing additional information to the financial aid office so they can reconsider the way that they calculate their standard math for the amount and types of aid that you might be eligible for.

Chris: And so lemme just start off with, uh, a [00:23:00] very high level view on what the financial aid office sees. Uh. From their perspective, everything starts with the cost of attendance. And the cost of attendance is gonna be a number that’s published on each school’s financial aid website. Uh, it’s supposed to be, uh, thick of it, like the sticker price of what that college costs for the upcoming year.

Chris: It’s tuition plus fees, plus the cost of health insurance, room and board living expenses, books and supplies. All of that totals a number that will get published each year. That represents the fully loaded cost of going to school for one year at a time. You filled out FAFSA. FAFSA had a bunch of math.

Chris: We’re not gonna go into that math tonight, but if you’re curious about the math that goes behind FAFSA, there is a recording of a previous presentation that I’ve done with College Advisor that goes through that for 90 minutes, but the FAFSA form goes through a lot of math and it calculates [00:24:00] this thing called Student Aid Index, which is just a number that by itself doesn’t mean anything.

Chris: When you take your cost of attendance number and you subtract student aid index from it, that equals your level of financial need. And so in the example you see, you see on the slide, uh, let’s pretend that I’m the financial aid officer. I would look at the person in this scenario who’s going to a school that costs $20,000 and had a $1,500 SAI and say that they have about $18,500 of financial need.

Chris: Now, that doesn’t mean that I can give you $18,500 worth of financial aid because what’s available to me is gonna change from one school to the next. Some schools might have policies that let them provide a lot of money from their endowment and other savings to help you lower what you have to borrow or pay.

Chris: A lot of schools only have the money that’s available to them [00:25:00] from federal funding sources, which is candidly in some cases. Not a lot and often leads to a lot of federal loans. But the bottom line is this is the formula. And the reason I’m telling you this is because what we’re gonna do in the appeals process is, and for the next couple of slides just help you understand some things that you can communicate to the financial aid office that might make them recalculate that what you see in the middle of the slide, your student aid index number, what you’ll notice is the smaller that number is, the greater your level of financial need, the greater your level of financial need.

Chris: The more likely, in some cases it is that the school can offer you different forms of need-based aid. And so I’m gonna try to structure a a little bit of the remainder of this conversation around what are the gaps that exist in FAFSA? Uh. [00:26:00] We’re working up and backwards from what is that Student aid index number.

Chris: And what’s important to understand is that there’s three buckets of things that you answered on the FAFSA form that influenced your SAI number, which influences the amount of financial need that the financial aid officer thinks that you have. The first bucket of things is your income data for the household, and we’re gonna go through that in a lot of detail.

Chris: The second bucket is questions that you answered about the family’s assets. And the third bucket is a certain set of questions that you answered about the size of the family and about the number of people who are going to college. Uh, what I’m gonna leave you with for the next couple of slides is really gonna be a more of a checklist of about a dozen of the more common reasons why you may be able to appeal the inputs that go into your FAFSA form.

Chris: And these are the ones that are more commonly accepted by financial, off financial aid [00:27:00] offices overall. I’m gonna give you three quick examples before we go through, uh, a bunch more of this. Uh, so we’ve now settled that the FAFSA form, the way that it’s currently set up, simply does not capture a full picture of your family’s financials.

Chris: And this whole appeals process is just meant to provide some additional data in areas where you are allowed to provide additional data and specifically in four reasons that the financial aid office is allowed to reconsider. Uh, I am wording it that way specifically because people will throw a lot of different reasons at the financial aid office for why they should be eligible for more need-based aid.

Chris: And oftentimes, many of them are not valid when it comes to this need-based appeal. The more you can structure the reasons why you’re asking for more need-based aid [00:28:00] around the types of reasons why the financial aid office is allowed to recalculate these numbers, the more likely it is that you’re actually going to have successful results.

Chris: The most common mistake I see people make is just throwing spaghetti at the wall of 20 different reasons, one of which, or two of which might actually be valid and important, but that can get lost in the noise and in some cases taken less seriously than if those right two reasons were talked about in greater detail in the financial aid appeal letter.

Chris: So the first example I want to give you here is just income data. Uh, you may have noticed that the FAFSA form for anybody who’s going to college in fall of 2026 is based off of your income and really your tax returns from two years. And that’s how the FAFSA form is always set up. That’s how it always works.

Chris: It uses your income information from two years [00:29:00] ago, and in a lot of cases, that’s no longer representative of your household’s income. And so if one of the FAFSA contributors, uh, and let’s just assume for simplicity, one of the parents who filled out FAFSA has had a reduction in income, or has lost their job since those taxes were filed, you absolutely should appeal the results of your FAFSA so that the school has an opportunity to effectively say, okay, well originally we calculated everything based on this income assumption.

Chris: Let’s now update it to what the new assumption is and see what the results look like. The second broad bucket of reasons, and we’re gonna go through this one in quite a bit more detail, is. Your family’s assets. You answer a few questions from the FAFSA form, uh, about different forms of assets that you have, and those have a very big impact on the student aid index number.

Chris: [00:30:00] What’s a little bit strange to some people is that there’s nowhere that you can actually record, uh, ongoing significant costs that are a drain on those assets because what the FAFSA form is trying to do at a very high level is say, based on your income and based on your assets and based on the size of your family.

Chris: Uh, we run some complicated math and we think more or less this is how much you should be able to pay towards school for the year. Uh, but by default the way the form is set up, it doesn’t take into consideration the fact that somebody in the family might have a chronic health expense or something else that can’t be avoided.

Chris: And you have the opportunity to appeal and to provide specific reasons that let the financial aid officers say. Hey, actually these results don’t make sense because the family can’t have this much money left to pay for college after accounting for these specific valid reasons why, uh, their income and assets get used for other things.[00:31:00] 

Chris: And the third and very common, I’m gonna repeat this three times for the next 10 minutes because it’s so important. Uh, reason why you’re able to appeal is if you have more than one child in college at the same time, this might apply to you right now. If you’re listening, this might end up applying to you a few years down the line.

Chris: But what you need to know is that the FAFSA form asks you a question about the number of people or students and children in the student’s household who will be in college for the upcoming year. And unfortunately, the way the form works now, it doesn’t matter what number you put there. You could put one, you could put five.

Chris: And the results of that FAFSA don’t change. This is a bit of a quirk. It used to work very differently if you had multiple children in school at the same time, the math, the FAFSA form used would account for that. It would say, [00:32:00] okay, if we’re effectively trying to say that you’re able to pay $10,000 a year towards school, uh, and we’re using the same inputs.

Chris: If you have one kid, 10,000, if you have two kids, it should be less than 10,000 per each. That’s not how the form works anymore. If you have more than one kid who’s in school in the upcoming year, you have to appeal to each student’s financial aid office and provide some specific information, and the financial aid officer is allowed to take a look at that and reconsider the amount of aid for which you might be eligible.

Chris: I am gonna take a really quick scroll through a handful of questions here. Uh, and more likely than not, we’ll just keep going through here. Uh, okay. I see a question here that I, I’d love to touch on, which is, could I repeat instances where your offer of admission could be at risk? Uh, [00:33:00] I, I don’t wanna speak universally, uh, but very likely your offer of admission is at zero risk.

Chris: If you’re asking for more merit based aid, you have already been admitted. The school already wants you as a student, and as long as you’re not being rude in the requests that you’re making, they’re not going to resend your offer of admission because you’re asking for more merit based aid when it comes to need based aid.

Chris: Some schools say that they are need blind, which means that they will give you an offer of admission regardless of your ability to pay for the school. Uh, some schools are not need blind or are, let’s say, need aware. There’s a bit of a gradient if you wanna appeal your need-based aid results to a school that is not need blind, just wait until after you’ve received the offer of [00:34:00] admission.

Chris: Uh, the only thing I would avoid doing, the only risk in this process that could theoretically exist in my mind is one where you listen to what I show you on the next three slides and you say, oh, this is a very valid reason that applies to me. I want to make sure I let the financial aid office know that I’m, uh, that this applies to me and I want them to consider it, uh, as they are pulling together a financial aid award letter for me.

Chris: But to do that before you’ve actually received your offer of admission. In that case, I would just recommend waiting until after you’ve received your offer of admission to then appeal your need-based aid award. And so for the next three slides, I’m Mely gonna do is go through, uh, a set of four to five reasons, uh, on each one that are more commonly accepted and that apply, uh, for the same buckets I showed you in the [00:35:00] last slide.

Chris: And so for the first one, let’s talk about changes in income or employment that have occurred in the household. Uh, we touched on the first point here, which is if there’s been a reduction in income since you filed your 2024 taxes, you absolutely do want to let the financial aid office know what that is.

Chris: Uh, you have the opportunity, uh, to provide them with pay stubs. Uh, or something else that can actually show that there’s been a material change versus what was in 2024 taxes, and you should do it. Unfortunately, if somebody in the household has been, uh, laid off or otherwise lost their job, uh, then the income adjustment would be down to zero for that person.

Chris: You really need to let the financial aid office know, because otherwise they are blind to that happening. There’s no way for them to know until you can consider it. Uh, just small [00:36:00] note, hearsay. If you voluntarily resigned from a job, uh, in the most recent two year window, and that’s the argument that you’re making, it’s just far less likely that the financial aid office would, uh, consider that in the process.

Chris: Uh, a relatively common thing that you might not have noticed is one time income that would’ve showed up on your 2024 taxes. Uh, can have a big impact on your FAFSA results, but it’s not something that’s ongoing. So really just think of it that way. If there are things that happened one time, let’s say like a one time bonus or a one time sale of something that impacted your income, uh, that’s not going to be repeated in future years.

Chris: You do have the opportunity to let the financial aid office know that and they may be able to normalize or otherwise adjust the income input that they use in your SAI calculation. Uh, [00:37:00] same goes for a reduction in child support. Uh, if this applies to you, what the FAFSA form sees is the, what you reported as child support received, uh, as of the, and if that has changed, then you do also need to let them know that.

Chris: Let’s talk about things that FAFSA doesn’t see that also weigh on your pocket. And so there are, and I get very common questions around this, I have a lot of expenses. I can’t afford to pay what the school says I should after I see the financial aid award letter, and that’s very common. Uh, what I wanna leave you with here is just the, the more common reasons why the financial aid office will listen to that argument and give you the opportunity to at least think about anything here that might apply to you.

Chris: So first one here is [00:38:00] unexpected medical expenses. Uh, and so really here talking about significant out-of-pocket costs, those that are not covered by insurance, uh, let’s say there’s an emergency surgery or some serious illness. Uh, you may get asked to provide some supporting documentation about the number that you say, uh, this actually impacted, but just know that you do have the opportunity to provide this info.

Chris: Uh, a little bit more commonly, if there’s ongoing medical treatment for someone in the student’s household, say there’s some chronic medical condition, uh, very high medication expenses, medical equipment expenses, these all apply as well. Uh, these are very valid reasons for unavoidable things that also drain the family’s financial resources that should be taken into account.

Chris: I’m not saying that they will always be taken into account, but there is a decent [00:39:00] chance that the financial aid office may take these into account. That same applies to caring for an elderly or a sick family member. Uh, somebody who has to take on those financial responsibilities, uh, like the costs of in-home care or assisted living or even somebody in the household, having to frequently help ’em provide these services and the costs associated with them are valid reasons that could be considered.

Chris: Uh, what I’ll say is far less likely is trying to present to the financial aid office absent these reasons that you have a large amount of credit card debt or personal loan debt or your own student loans that prevent you from being able to pay. It is unfortunate, but the reality is that in a lot of cases, it’s just less likely that they’re going to consider that.

Chris: And then the last bucket, uh, of things to chat about here [00:40:00] before we spent about five minutes on the process for a merit-based appeal, for need-based appeals is, uh. You are, you answered a handful of questions in the FAFSA form about the number of people in the student’s household and the number of people who were going to college.

Chris: Uh, I’m gonna talk you through how changes to those answers can have a very material impact on the things that you should do in this appeal process. So first, and I’m really just repeating what we said five minutes ago, that if you have or a sibling in college at the same time, or if you’re a parent listening and you have more than one child in college at the same time, then you have the opportunity to appeal that from the perspective of each financial aid office at each school that they have been admitted to, they have absolutely no idea that there are multiple kids in school at the same time in this household, you may have answered that there are two [00:41:00] people in the household going to college on the FAFSA form, but that is not something that is automatically taken into consideration.

Chris: You’re gonna have to appeal separately to each student’s financial aid office to let them know that this is the case. And more likely than not, you’ll be asked to provide some, uh, supporting information about the net cost for the student at the other school. So, to give you an example, if you are, uh, student A is going to school and you’re being asked to pay $30,000 out of pocket, student B is also going to school, but is on a full ride, uh, appealing in that scenario isn’t gonna do anything for you.

Chris: Uh, but if both students are going to schools where you’re being asked to pay a lot out of pocket, then appealing is much more likely to do something for you. Just keep that in mind. Know that there are many scenarios here where you will want to and need [00:42:00] to appeal that. The second bucket of things here is changes in the size of your family.

Chris: And so if your family size has grown since you filed your, uh, FAFSA, or since the FAFSA form takes into account that whatever your family size was in 2024, you have an opportunity to update that. But a lot of people skip through it and don’t do it accurately. Uh, it’s just important to let the financial aid office know.

Chris: And so the reason that matters is the way the math behind FAFSA works. It says the larger your family, the more of your income cannot be used to pay for college. And so if you have a larger household now, then you want to make sure that it was accurate when you submitted FAFSA. And if it’s not that you do have the chance to let the financial aid office know what that new, larger number is, because that can make a pretty material impact on all of these numbers.

Chris: [00:43:00] Uh. And then unfortunately, if there has been the death of a parent or guardian, uh, you do have to proactively let the financial aid office know that so that they can take into consideration, uh, and if there has been divorce or separation after the FAFSA was submitted, uh, but before the student is receiving financial aid funds for the upcoming year, you could let the financial aid office know because it could make a little bit of an impact.

Chris: We’re gonna spend about five minutes on, on this part here now, which is just a quick rundown on how these need-based appeals work. Uh, you, you’re gonna start off by contacting the financial aid office, and in most cases, the financial aid office should now have a portion of their website [00:44:00] that gives you instructions on how to submit a need based appeal.

Chris: In some cases, they’ll ask you to email it to a specific inbox. In other cases, they’ll ask you to fill out a form on a page and to attach supporting documentation. But just know it is more likely than not going to start off as a letter again and a letter that cites the specific reasons why, uh, you think you are eligible to appeal your need-based aid.

Chris: Uh, the financial aid officer who actually receives your appeal is gonna review it on a case by case basis. What really happens is that they have the authority to make some adjustments here and there. Under a certain set of rules that can impact, uh, the way that all of your aid gets calculated. Uh, they will review every appeal, uh, and after they’ve reviewed it, they will notify you of the results.

Chris: And you actually do have an [00:45:00] opportunity to appeal the appeal itself if you didn’t get the results you want. But really only if you are able to provide new information that is valid, that can be used by the financial aid office. Uh, and so what to do is start off with that formal appeal letter. The more you can quote or at least cite specific reasons, uh, that are similar in line to the ones that I provided you in this deck, candidly, the more likely it is that that appeal is going to have a chance for success.

Chris: If you’ve been listening to me for the last 45 minutes and immediately think of a handful of reasons why, uh, you may be eligible for appealing, uh, you can start working on collecting some of the documentation to support that. Now, because more likely than not, you will be asked to provide some forms of supporting documentation.

Chris: Uh, and if you need help with somebody [00:46:00] reviewing what that appeal letter itself actually looks like, uh, again, please respond to the email that we’ll send later this week, and we’re more than happy to help. Uh, a little interesting nugget for folks is that schools are actually now required to let you appeal.

Chris: There was a change to the rules around FAFSA, uh, a few years ago. One of those changes is that the financial aid office is required to consider all requests for appeal. Uh, and they’re supposed to publicly list the process for those appeals on the actual websites for the schools that you’re interested in.

Chris: And so you’ll typically be able to find it on the financial aid page itself. Uh, I just wanna, before we move on from this, leave you with quick overview of things that are very unlikely to count in an appeal process so that you are just less likely to waste time around this one. [00:47:00] If you had a reduction in 401k values since what you reported in the FAFSA, that won’t count.

Chris: And the reason it won’t count is because you never reported your 401k anyway in the FAFSA form. If you did, then you actually should appeal to remove that, but you were not supposed to report the value of your 401k in FAFSA anyway. Uh, and so that would count. When you submitted FAFSA on the day that you submitted it, you reported the value of your investment accounts in total.

Chris: Uh, if the value of those investment accounts has gone down since the day that you submitted FAFSA to the day that you wanna appeal, that is not something the financial aid office will consider. Unfortunately, that could impact the next faf. So you fill out for the following academic year, but it won’t impact this year.

Chris: Uh, and in other cases, if a parent says, I got this, uh, uh, aid letter from the [00:48:00] school, the school is asking me to borrow a significant amount of federal loans that are called Parent plus Loans, I don’t wanna do this. Uh, that is not something the financial aid office is really able to do much, if anything about.

Chris: Uh, so just because you, if you qualified for this and then you said you just don’t wanna do it, you want the school to give more money? It’s highly unlikely that they would do so. Uh, I’m gonna spend about five minutes on this next section and then I’ll try to flip the Q and a if we have time. Uh, but an important thing I want people to just be aware of is, uh, this whole appeal process is about reducing the amount of money that you have to pay out of pocket to go to school.

Chris: And it’s especially important for the upcoming year because there have been some significant changes to the amount of money that parents specifically are able to borrow from the federal government to help pay towards school [00:49:00] for anybody who is starting college from July 1st of this year. And on, uh, you’re gonna fall under a new set of federal student lending limits, uh, that look like what you see on the bottom right hand of the slide.

Chris: And unfortunately, these new limits don’t cover the full financial need for a lot of people. And so the more you can reduce the amount of money or base increase the amount of money that, uh, the school might be able to give you, and thereby reducing the amount of money, money that you may have to borrow, uh, the better.

Chris: So super high level, uh, for people who are going to school, uh, to undergrad. Historically, uh, at the end of this entire financial aid process, a lot of parents, I think most recent year by 600,000 parents would end up using this thing called a parent plus loan. And they were able to use that for whatever the amount of unmet need was that remained [00:50:00] starting this upcoming fall term.

Chris: You’re capped at $20,000 per year through that program per student, and you’re also capped at $65,000 lifetime. What that means is, uh. If you needed to borrow money, uh, to go to college, and let’s say you’re the parent borrowing on behalf of the students from the federal government, you could borrow 20 up to $20,000 in each of the first three years of school, and then you’d only be able to borrow $5,000 in the fourth year of school.

Chris: And so you’ll really need to plan ahead for some more complicated situations. And that is part of what brings me here. We started Juno a little over seven years ago because my co-founder and I needed to get student loans to pay for business school. We started an idea to say, could we bundle together 500 students at [00:51:00] Harvard, at UPenn, at Columbia, and at Stanford, and ask different lenders if they’d be willing to negotiate on the rates and the terms that they would provide to all 500 of us rather than us go one by.

Chris: In effect, we formed a buying group for student loans. It worked phenomenally well for the last seven years. We’ve grown that to over 200,000 people and it’s completely free for students and for parents. Uh, the way it works is that the only reason it works is us getting to scale and having negotiating leverage.

Chris: And so one of the links that I’ll send you, uh, tomorrow and something I kindly ask that you consider spending one minute looking at is a really brief, uh, it’s a page to our website. You sign up just telling us I might need a loan for the upcoming fall. This is my expected graduation year. And if I know which school, this is, the school that [00:52:00] I’m attending, everything else that you could answer is fully optional.

Chris: We don’t share that information. All we do is use the size of the group that we’re able to collect. To increase the amount of negotiating leverage that we have. And in May we go to all of the lenders in the market and say, here’s this group of 20, 30, 40,000 people who might use your product as long as you’re able to give the best version of that product to this group.

Chris: And on June 1st, we make available to everybody. Uh, we really just send you a single email that says, this is how you can check your rates without impacting your credit score. The whole purpose of this is to encourage you to shop around, and this process ends up giving people the lowest possible rate and lowest overall cost because of the way that we set it up.

Chris: I’m gonna make a couple of quick promises to you. The first is, there is no cost whatsoever to sign up to Juno. You can just think of [00:53:00] it like joining a mailing list. And all we’re gonna do over the next three months is send you some rare periodic updates on how our negotiations are pending. Uh, and then send you an email that says, this is how you can go check your rates.

Chris: There is no credit check that’s required to sign up to Juno. Uh, the only thing we ask people optionally is to self-report their credit score and arrange, but you don’t have to do that. It’s just helpful because about 80% of people do tell us what that is and it lets us say, alright, we’re making sure that for the people who are in this group, uh, the offers that we’re getting from lenders are going to actually be good for each person.

Chris: Uh, and joining this group does not obligate you to do. Anything at all. You can ignore it, you can leave it. Uh, the only thing I would ask is to not trust anybody who tells you that they might have the best [00:54:00] lending product available for you, but to instead shop around as much as you can once you need that product over the summer.

Chris: Uh, and at some point during that process to just spend 30 seconds seeing if what our process has been able to pull together does actually get you the best result. Uh, with that, I think we’re probably wrapping up on time, but I wanted to maybe leave you with this. Uh, I will send you a copy of the slides, the recording of the presentation, uh, to your inbox in the next couple of days.

Chris: I know that there’s a lot of questions I’ve not had a chance to answer directly. But I will, uh, go through those questions over the next couple of days and just send everybody one longer list of answers to those questions so that everybody can be more aware of, uh, the, the general answers to those. And again, if you have anything that you need help with, whether it’s reviewing your appeal [00:55:00] letter, uh, draft or asking questions that you didn’t feel comfortable asking in the public chat, please feel free to respond to the message that we’ll send you and somebody in my team will get back to you to help on it.

Lonnie: Yes. Well, thank you Chris. So we may have time for a few more questions. I am actually gonna share more about the work that we do here within College Advisor. Sure. And then Chris, if you wanna, you know, look through some of the questions and, and see if there’s anything that you may wanna answer out loud.

Lonnie: Um, feel free to do so, or I’ll, I’ll provide a few questions. Sure. Those who are in the room, you, we all know how overwhelming the college admission process can be. We know how overwhelming it can be when we think about appealing financial aid, award letters, and, you know, trying to sort all through that.

Lonnie: So our team here, uh, within CollegeAdvisor, we have over 300 former admissions officers and admissions experts that are ready to help you and your family navigate the college admissions process through [00:56:00] one-on-one advising sessions and essay editing through our digital platform. CollegeAdvisor has had 10,000 total lifetime clients in a 4.8 out of five rating on Trustpilot with over 750 reviews.

Lonnie: Increase your odds and take the next step in your college admissions journey by signing up for a free 60-minute strategy session with an admissions specialist on our team by using that QR code that is on your screen. During this meeting, you’ll receive a preliminary assessment of your academic profile, along with some initial recommendations.

Lonnie: And at the end you’ll also learn more about our premium packages we offer that will pair you with an expert who can support you in building your college list, editing your essays, and much, much more. So you have that resource available to you on your [00:57:00] screen alongside the resources from Juno within the public chat.

Lonnie: I did place the link there. If you want to get access to it now, um, you’re able to find that award letter and then you’re also able to find the, also the link to sign up for Juno. As well. All right. So Chris, we do have three more minutes. Were there were any questions that stood out or did you want me to ask a few questions to you?

Chris: Uh, one that got repeated a handful of times, very good question is about how the new parent plus lifetime load caps work. Yeah. So I mentioned that there’s a $65,000 lifetime cap, and the way that works is per student not for a household. And so if you have one student, then you’re able to borrow, uh, up to $65,000 through Parent Plus on their behalf.

Chris: And that’s across all four years of school, uh, where no more than 20 K of it can come in any single year. Uh, if you have a second [00:58:00] student, then there is a separate $65,000 lifetime cap that’s tied to that student. Uh, and another very common question I get is. Can each, let’s say you have one student. Does each parent have the ability to independently borrow $65,000 for that student?

Chris: And the answer is no. Uh, you can really just think of it as tied to each student on their behalf. There can be a maximum of $65,000 that’s taken out to pay from the Parent Plus program to pay for college. Uh, now what I didn’t mention here is that there is this grandfathering process, uh, that, uh, I can send you a little bit more information about.

Chris: But if you’re listening and your children have been, uh, were already enrolled in college this year, and you had already borrowed any federal loan on their behalf, whether it’s a loan they took out themselves called a, a Direct Stafford Loan, or whether it was a Parent Plus loan, uh, [00:59:00] already, and I mean before July 1st, 2026, then those new caps that I explained don’t apply.

Chris: You’ll still be able to continue borrowing, uh, up to the unmet need from the Parent Plus program, uh, for a few more years from now. 

Lonnie: Okay. All right. Well, I, I did see a few questions also about, um, early decision. Do you wanna touch upon that, like, you know, appealing a letter if someone said, is it possible, you know, to appeal a letter through early decision, knowing that it’s like binding?

Lonnie: You wanna add anything there, Chris, to our audience? 

Chris: Uh, so you can always binding or not appeal the need-based portion of this because it’s really, that’s, that’s about adding more information that can impact how federal and state funds, in addition to any funds that the school has themselves get allocated, uh, when it comes to [01:00:00] merit-based aid.

Chris: It’s really hard to, if not close to, impossible to try to appeal the results of that for binding early decision because at that point, uh, you’ve kind of given away your leverage in exchange for a slightly better chance of getting in. And so I’d just be aware of that. In that case, I’d focus more on the need-based appeal and the merit based worth it.

Lonnie: Great. Great. Awesome. Well, thank you so much Chris, uh, for answering those questions, and thank you for this informative presentation. I, you know, as a, as an advisor, I also was gathering some new information too to support my students within college advisors. So definitely appreciate all the content that was shared as Chris shared.

Lonnie: Also, we, this presentation was recorded so it will be available to you all. It will be sent out as well as the handouts, um, and any other additional information from this presentation. So with that, [01:01:00] everyone, we are now going to conclude again, thank you Chris, so much for your time. And thank you everyone for showing up to our live webinar.

Lonnie: Have a great evening, morning, afternoon, whatever time it may be as you’re reading, as you’re listening to this webinar. Bye-bye. 

Chris: Bye 

Lonnie: Bye.