Financial Aid Supports Educational Fulfillment

Financial aid is a fund aim to help students shoulder their education expenses in a private school, college or university, like tuition and other miscellaneous fees, textbooks and other necessary materials, board and lodging, and other related expenditures.  The government fund for a public education is not a financial aid, since it is accredited as an award given to a particular student.  A scholarship is more like a financial aid.  In fact, scholarship is sometimes thought of as analogous to financial aid.

Financial aid can be categorized into two: merit-based and need-based.  The merit-based includes a scholarship awarded by individual university or college and merit scholarships as granted by any outside organizations.  Merit-based awards are usually given to an outstanding academic achievement.  It is sometimes handed out without considering the financial needs of the applicants.  In fact, there are many colleges out there that automatically considered their admitted students for a merit scholarship.  Meanwhile, in other schools, a separate application procedure is required.  An athletic scholarship is one great example of a merit-based financial aid.

Need-based, on the other hand, is granted to students based on their financial needs.  The FAFSA or Free Application for Federal Student Aid is basically used to determine institutional, state and federal need-based assistance eligibility.  In some private institutions, supplemental applications may be needed to process institutional need-based assistance.

At the start of 2000’s, there were colleges that took the initiative to discard debt from financial aid packages.  Most of the offers were directed to students with parents earning less than the qualifying income set by the university or college.  Figures were varied depending on the institution.  The steps were specially designed to draw more student applicants from the lower socioeconomic background, to minimize students’ debts and to provide offering body an advantage against t

heir competitors in alluring commitments from recipient students.  Some of the colleges, as well as universities that are already practicing the no-loan financial aid package as of November 2, 2007 are Arizona State University, Davidson College, Columbia University, Harvard University, Michigan State University, North Carolina State University, Princeton University, University of Pennsylvania, University of Virginia, Rice University, Williams College, and Yale University.

In the United States alone, the federal government is offering a need-based financial assistance program named as Federal Student Financial Aid or FSFA.  It is highly composed of various grants, scholarships, loan and work programs that include SMART Grants, Federal Pell grants, Academic Competitiveness Grants or the ACG, Federal SEOG Grants, Federal Stafford loans, Federal Work-Study, Federal PLUS loans, and Federal Perkins Loans.  To be granted with any of the federal student assistance program, student applicant must fill-up the FAFSA, or the Free Application for Federal Student Aid.  The FAFSA makes use of a particular calculation taking into consideration assets and income to ascertain the student’s EFC or Expected Family Contribution for his or her college education for that particular school year.  The EFC is usually used by most colleges in deciding the appropriate financial aid a student must receive.  Therefore, it is important for students to completely fill-up the FAFSA every year to be given the appropriate financial aid.       

It is essential that you are aware how financial aid is achieved.  Bear in mind that it is a commitment made by the higher learning institution that you are attending to, by the federal government and of course, yourself.  Each of this has its own job to take care of, processes to undergo through and standards to live up with.  While for your part, both as a consumer and a student, cannot be overly stated. 

A lot of national governments do provide financial aid subsidies for students who are enrolled in universities, despite proposed policies to modify such subsidies that have endangered debates in some countries like the United Kingdom, Canada, Scandinavian countries and Germany.  The reliance on such subsidies is not as widespread in the United States, although this may change.