Cost of College - How to Track Financial Packages and Appeal or Negotiate Where Necessary

By Karen Treon, Senior Editor & College Parent

As admissions decisions come in, students and families often shift from feeling stressed about applications to feeling overwhelmed by the decision-making process. Follow our step-by-step approach to compare your costs and determine your next steps. 

STEP ONE: Download our CPA Decision Tracker. The pre-populated fields will help you identify the things to identify and result in an apples-to-apples financial comparison. Your family can customize this tracker to suit your unique circumstances. Note: This tracker is designed for students who are reviewing multiple offers. If your student applied and was accepted via Early Decision, this tracker is not applicable to you. (If your student applied and was accepted ED, check out our blog post on ED next steps for helpful guidance. 

STEP TWO: Across the top of the tracker, your student will list the schools they have applied to. Even before decisions come in, students can populate some of the information, including the date they applied, the date of expected decision, and the Net Price Calculator estimate. As decisions arrive, students can start to fill in details.  Most likely, information will come in waves.  For example, a student will likely hear an admission decision first, followed by a possible merit aid award and a need-based financial aid award at different points in time. You won’t need to fill out every field for every school - some fields won’t be relevant.

STEP THREE: Double check Financial Aid deadlines. Make sure that your student’s FAFSA and CSS (if needed) are on track to meet the deadlines.  Add the deadlines to the tracker and keep track of progress there! Read more about FAFSA and CSS 

STEP FOUR: Remember the Net Price Calculator (NPC)? Your family likely ran NPCs on schools before your student submitted applications. If you have the results from those earlier calculations, enter them into the appropriate fields on the tracker. If you didn’t run the NPC for the schools your student applied to, now is a good time. You should also re-run them if your circumstances have changed. NPC results are estimates only, but are a good indicator of what a family can expect to pay.  Read more about the NPC

STEP FOUR: Enter financial package information that your student receives from each school. Schools don’t use a standard format, so our fields might not be perfect - feel free to modify the tracker as needed.  First, you will enter the expected costs (Cost of Attendance) as outlined in the financial package. Second, you will enter the need-based aid your student received - such as grants. You can also add potential loans here, but not every school will include that information in the letter. Finally, you will enter any merit aid and other renewable scholarships your student is receiving from the school or outside sources. These figures might not all arrive at once, but once you have them you can calculate actual cost. As you do this for the schools your student applied to, you will start to see the apples-to-apples comparison take shape.

A couple of nitty gritty notes on this . . . we make a few recommendations here that might seem a bit different from other advice you see. First, we recommend that you not consider loans at this point of the analysis because (a) it’s important to see what the no-loan options look like, and (b) because including loans at this point makes it harder to keep the comparison apples to apples.  Many families choose to utilize loans – we are just suggesting that you explore that after this apples to apples cost comparison. We suggest not including work study money for the same reason. Second, we suggest that you not include one time scholarship awards. These scholarships are often for smaller amounts, and because they are not renewable they do not serve to reduce the cost of future college years. Of course everything helps, but keeping this out of the apples to apples comparison and assessment helps give a clearer picture of cost.

STEP FIVE: “WOW this is more than we expected!” is not an uncommon reaction! Some families decide to try to negotiate with a school for a higher merit aid award or to appeal the need-based financial aid awarded.  These are two very distinct processes, and we have some guidance on each one below:

FINANCIAL AID (NEED-BASED AID): Let’s be clear what we are talking about here –  we are talking about students who submitted FAFSA (and/or the CSS where appropriate) and received a financial aid notice from that college. If a family feels that the financial aid award was based on incomplete information or the family has had changed circumstances, they can appeal the amount awarded and ask for more.  There are a few things to keep in mind when going through this process. 

• These appeals are made through the Financial Aid Offices at individual universities – not through FAFSA and the Department of Education.  If a student is considering several universities, they will need to make these appeals to each university separately.  

• These appeals are made based on special circumstances or changed circumstances, and students must lay out what these special and changed circumstances are.

• Students should contact each Financial Aid Office directly and make sure that they understand the process and have the appropriate form(s) for the appeal. Do this before anything else in order to avoid wasting time.

• Read this helpful Forbes article about financial aid appeals for more information.

Merit Aid Negotiations (Requests for More Assistance):  Many schools award “merit aid,” which means that the school discounts the student’s cost due to achievement or skills. Some schools do this based on objective formulas and other schools apply more subjective standards to determine merit aid. If a student would like to ask a school for a higher merit aid award, here are a few things they should keep in mind:

• At most schools, the admissions office (not the financial aid office) handles merit aid awards.  Students should reach out to their admissions officer to ask about their merit award and the possibility of increasing it.

• It helps if students start by doing some research and understand what level of merit aid might be expected from a particular school.  Doing that research also serves to show genuine interest in attending a school.

• If a student decides to ask for more merit money, they should emphasize their interest in attending the school and state that they are hoping to find more merit aid or scholarship money to make it more financially feasible.

• A student might ask the admissions officer if they would consider new information (such as senior year grades and any senior year accomplishments or achievements or unreported and higher test scores).  Students might also provide information about other merit awards received from other schools.

• Students can also ask admissions officers for guidance on other sources of money that might be available, such as institutional scholarships awarded by the university. These are often application-based and are listed in student portals.

Staying on top of email communication and student portals will help families keep track of information and avoid getting overwhelmed. Make sure and take advantage of our tracker to keep your information straight and help keep your family’s decision process stress-free.