Kinds of Financial Aid
There is one thing 99% percent of college students have in common. Is it beer? Partying? Feeling like just a number? Nope, none of those. What all of the college students you and everyone else knows have in common is the need for financial aid. While there are a few lucky ones whose families are rich and don’t need any kind of aid, most of us just aren’t that lucky. So what kinds are available and who gets them?
The first thing to know is the two conditions by which you can receive financial aid. The first on is merit. This is when your grades or activities receive enough accolades and sometimes meet certain requirements for financial aid. Certain SAT scores and GPAs can get students thousands of dollars’ worth of scholarships. This is the main way to get any kind of money from schools that you won’t end up having to pay back.
The other condition is need. This is when your family is judged to not have the means when filling out the FAFSA to be able to pay for college on their own. You get kinds of aid through this like the occasional scholarship but mostly loans and other alternative ways of paying for school like a campus job that’s funded by the federal government.
The most common form of aid handed out is probably loans. This is the kind of aid that will need to be paid back to whatever organization you got it from. While the interest rates aren’t that high for college students, most students won’t be able to pay it back until their late twenties at the earliest so the costs can really add up.
You can also receive grants that are need based. These are rare but have been increased in recent years by both the states and federal government. You really have to have a lot of need to receive these accolades, but it’s really worth it to try for these over loans.
So in the end, you don’t want loans to be paid back for the rest of your life. Scholarships and grants are what you want but these can be hard to get. But at least college is the one domain where having a poorer family can pay off in some way.
