Estimating financial need

The college application/ admissions process is opaque and nerve-wracking — and the financial aid piece of it, especially so. Need-based aid, merit aid, cost of attendance: it’s a lot to process and make sense of. And though admissions decisions can come in December, the financial bit may not become clear until April.

As I work with your family, I aim to clarify the process to the extent possible – as early as possible. It’s hard to make decisions even about which schools to apply to, if you don’t have a clear picture of what they might cost.

Here's how to estimate what colleges might say about your financial need.

STEP ONE

The first thing I ask families to do is to get or estimate their SAI -- the Student Aid Index. Even the name is obscure. It’s useful to find out what your SAI is earlier, so that you can start calculating what your actual college prices – not the fully advertised costs – would be.

The SAI is not the amount of financial aid you’re entitled to from the colleges and the federal government. Instead, speaking very, very roughly, it’s the amount the government thinks you can contribute to college, per year. So FAFSA may come back and say that your family’s SAI is 7500 or 22,000, or 35,000 -- which we'll very roughly estimate to mean they think you can pay about $7500 or $22000 or $35000. You, of course, may disagree.

When you subtract the SAI from the cost of attendance (tuition + room + board + other expenses), you get the number schools should be covering for you via grants, loans, and work-study (Financial Need).

Cost of Attendance – Student Aid Index = Financial Need

Not all will cover all of it. But some may cover more – thus making you contribute LESS than your SAI.

STEP TWO: The Estimators

How can you find out your SAI if the FAFSA doesn't open until October? First on my list is the Federal Student Aid estimator: https://studentaid.gov/aid-estimator/ This is from the FAFSA people, so it’s the most closely related to the real thing. But it’s a little shorter, so it might miss some factors if your financial situation is more complex.

Here is another one that is a little more detailed from FinAid.com: https://finaid.org/calculators/saicalculator/

COMMON ERRORS

When filling out the estimators – or the real thing – here are some common errors to avoid:

✓     Use tax info from the right year. For the 2027-2028 application year, it would be the 2025 tax return

✓     Family size includes other students living away at college, still considered dependents.

✓     If parents are divorced, only the parent who provides the most support counts (usually, this is the parent who lists the student as a dependent for their taxes).

✓     Don’t list: 

o   home equity for the home you live in,

o  college savings accounts not in your student’s’ or your parents’ name (such as, accounts in your grandparents’ names or the name of another relative)

o   the value of retirement accounts

NEXT STEPS

Once you have your estimated SAI, you and I can do several things:

• For one, we’ll know how you feel about it. If it feels too high, we know we really need to aggressively target merit aid

• We can start going through specific colleges. Each offers their own Net Price Calculators or similar tools, though accuracy of these tools varies a lot by school.

• We can address other parts of the process -- the CSS application required by some schools, separate scholarship competitions, and appeals, to name only some possible options.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Like the college admissions process writ large, the financial aid application process is complex. There are no guarantees, but there is data and there are trends.

We can make educated guesses on what schools might be willing to give you, but we won't know for sure until acceptances -- and financial aid offers -- come in.

With guidance and more info, those guesses -- and your results -- get a lot better.