Financial Aid Webinar

Well, good evening everyone and welcome to the FAFSA webinar presented to you by Cairn University's Office of Financial Aid. My name is Andrew Allers, I'm the Director and our student Financial Services office. And I'm really excited for the opportunity to engage with you tonight and provide students and families with some some much needed information as we're getting set up here. Before we start, I'll ask for some.

Engagement in the chat, if you would, let us know where you're tuning in from and let us know if you filled out the FAFSA yet or if you haven't completed it just yet, maybe it's an in progress in another tab in your web browser. Let us know what the status is and we'll get started here in just a minute. As we start, I'll I'll talk a little bit about our student financial services office and we have two.

Main branches of work that we do. The 1st is what you might think of.

We assist in packaging, financial aid, getting students and families the information they need on payment options and those sorts of things. But the second critical mission of our office is to educate students and families about the process as a whole. We believe that if we can help students and families, not just check the boxes, complete the tasks.

But rather to get them to understand the bigger picture.

We can set you as the families and the student up for success in your finances and let the student focus more readily on their studies. And that's what we get a chance to do tonight is hopefully educate you, get you a little bit more prepared than you were yesterday on how to complete the FAFSA and understanding some some facets of the financial aid process.

Before I begin, I'd like to introduce you to the team from Cairn that's on this call. As I said, my name is Andrew, I'll be hosting tonight. Jodi and Andrea are joining from our admissions department. They'll be monitoring and moderating the chat. And our content expert tonight is Samuel Heidengren who's smiling face. You see on our slide there. Samuel is a financial aid counselor and our resident FAFSA and Department of Ed expert. He spends time pouring over the federal regulations so that you don't have to.

So with that, Samuel, let's jump right in. Why don't we start with an overview of our time together tonight?

Great. Thank you, Andrew, and thank you all for being with us tonight.

Alright.

So tonight we're just gonna talk about what the FAFSA is.

And how to complete it for this upcoming year?

We'll also talk about some important updates that were made this year for the 2425 FAFSA and then we'll talk about some next steps and expectations.

Before we go any further, though, I'd like to give you some abbreviations. These will also be listed in the chat.

We're going to talk through some of these things, but the FAFSA?

If whenever you see this, this is the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, and whenever you see FSA, this is Federal Student Aid, which can also be also be used interchangeably with the Department of Education.

Seems like there's endless abbreviations for every little thing as part of this process. So once again, we'll put those abbreviations in the chat. Please do refer back to them as we're moving forward and as Samuel mentions them as we go. So Samuel, let's start with the basics and set the foundation. It looks like from the chat, plenty of families have either completed or in the process of completing the FAFSA, but can you talk a little bit at a basic level about what the FAFSA is?

Yeah, the FAFSA, as I said, is the Free Application for Federal Student Aid. So this is the form that the Department of Education uses to gather financial information for both the parent and the student and they use their calculation to then determine what they believe is the federal financial need for your student. And this is something that needs to be done every year if you, if you would like to be considered for federal funding.

So who is the FAFSA for? The FAFSA is for any student who's planning to attend attend college or university or a gap year program for this upcoming fall 2024. So if you're planning to come to Cairn University, or you chose to take classes at Community College, or you're in the One Life program, the FAFSA is for you. If you are the parents of a junior in high school, all of this content is still relevant.

But you will not need to fill out the FAFSA for this year. That FAFSA will come later in October of this year.

So what does the FAFSA do? It does a couple things. It determines the federal financial need of your student, along with determining if they are eligible for a Pell Grant, which are federal funds that are given to your student and that they do not have to be repaid. The FAFSA also allows your student to take the opportunity to take out loans should they choose to, and the federal loans through the FAFSA.

Have some of the lowest.

Interest rates and fees compared to the average bank, so they're a really good rate.

So let's talk about how to complete it.

Start by going to Student aid Gov slash FAFSA.

If you have not yet created an FSA ID, that's Federal Student Aid. If you have not yet created your account for the FAFSA, then both the parent and the student will need to complete that at Student Aid Gov And once those are completed, then both the parent and the student together can fill out the FAFSA. And that can be done either separately, parent first, then student, student then parent, or together if you'd like to feel free to sit on the couch and and tackle that as a family.

Once you have, once you've completed the form, input your information, then you just need to sign and submit it.

A lot of helpful feedback and responses in the chat. A lot of you sound like you've completed it or are working on it. And Samuel. A couple of people are identifying that they're receiving notice that their FAFSA is in review or under review. Do you have?

Some insight as to what that means as part of the process.

Yeah. So there are a list of outstanding issues that are current right now for this FAFSA. There's a there's a website that lists all the current issues that we can talk about later.

But there are all sorts of issues that are happening. Whether a parent tried to start filling out the FAFSA for their student and then they were unable to complete their portion, or they either a student or parent started to fill it out and they've been locked out.

Or the parent did not select the transfer IRS data and then tried to submit the form. That will cause a reject in your submission.

There are. There are many, many.

Reasons that one can be rejected if a student who is living internationally but is a eligible.

Citizen or non citizen, if they mistakenly check the wrong box and can try to continue through the form, that may also prove difficult as well.

So there have been there have been lots of challenges in this. If you have any specific issues, I'd love for you to contact me at Finaid at karen.edu. Please, please reach out and I'd be happy to help you with a specific issue.

Thanks again for putting questions in the chat. We're going to try to get to as many of those throughout our time together and hopefully address some of them with the content that Samuel has prepared. Now you referred to this a little bit, Samuel and some of these questions are leading you right into talking about some of the updates that have happened with the FAFSA this year.

If you all are like me, you've been getting bits and pieces from the news and from headlines. Everybody's got a little bit of a different agenda when it comes to offering information about the updates to the FAFSA.

We're living through the changes that the the Department of Ed has instituted for the FAFSA this year. Can you talk a little bit about that, Samuel?

Absolutely. So let's talk through some of the big updates.

So in previous years, in a normal year, the FAFSA would be available October 1st and after you submitted it within two to three business days, the FAFSA would then be sent to the schools that you listed on your FAFSA.

However, because of all the changes that were made this year, they had to delay that process so it was now made available January 1st of this year.

And when they initially made that announcement, they also said that schools would receive those FAFSA's in late January.

Late January has come and gone and the Department of Education has said that they will now be delivered to schools and universities the first half of March, so we are anticipating in the next two to three weeks.

This is causing many delays, but the the biggest delay is that the FAFSA, whether you submitted it January 1st or today or next week, all of those Fafsas have been delayed. So they will all come through as soon as they are able to be delivered. In that first half of March, when they first launched it, it was available periodically.

Which just meant that the site was shut down for a couple hours at a time and then it was back on for a couple hours at a time, which was.

Causing some problems for people submitting it in the last couple weeks that has not been the case, so you you should be able to fill it out anytime now and that it should cooperate.

Some other updates.

Whenever you're filling out the FAFSA, they're going to refer to any individual that is putting information onto the form as a contributor. This year, the parent and the students are both contributors and spouses as well.

But the parent can only fill out the parent information and the student can only fill out the student information on the new 2425 FAFSA.

There have been questions about who the contributing parent needs to be. This primarily is for students whose parents are separated or divorced, and so when trying to determine who that parent should be listed on the FAFSA.

The first option is if you know which parent provides the greatest support to that student. So if parent A pays child support and some and contributes towards the student's education, and parent B contributes housing, transportation, food, etcetera. Those are the 2 numbers that you're trying to weigh. And whichever one is highest needs to be the parent that is listed on the FAFSA.

If that cannot be determined if the numbers are too close or you're just not sure, then the parent listed on the FAFSA should be the one who provided the most recent support, so for 2023.

If that cannot be determined for whatever reason, then the parent who has the overall greatest income and assets should be the parent listed. Both parents can be on the FAFSA and if if the question if your parents are separated or divorced. If you're prompted with that and you select that, it will prompt you to list the parents information both parents information. But if for some reason there is not a good relationship there or none at all and it would be rather challenging to get the other parent on that is OK. There are questions that will walk you through that as well.

Samuel, if we have a question in the chat, if parents are married, what would your recommendation be? Do they only need one parent? Should they only have one parent? If two are possible, does it benefit at all to put both on?

So if the parents are married and they filed their taxes as married filing jointly, the tax year that we're using this year is 2022. So if on your 2022 tax return you marked married filing jointly.

Then only one parent has to be on because all the tax information for both parents will be listed and transferred from the IRS.

So along with some of these updates, they also changed how they calculate the financial need of the students. So they're now using what they call the Student Aid index. Once you submit the FAFSA, you may receive an e-mail saying what your Student Aid Index is. And that's the amount is, is what the government is anticipating that the student and the parents are willing to, should be willing to contribute towards the education. So that is how the government assesses that.

There may have been some scares early on when some headlines went out that the Department of Education may not be accounting for inflation. In this year's FAFSA, that is.

That is not the case. They have decided that they will include for account for inflation for this FAFSA.

So that will bring student aid index numbers down South that you have a greater financial need.

The number of students that a family has in college has also been removed from the FAFSA this year and from the calculation. They are still asking it on the form itself, but they have removed it from the actual calculation and to help make up for that they have included some what they call new parent allowances, which are calculations that will help offset the parent's income and the calculations that they took away.

From this year's FAFSA.

There are several different kinds of parent allowances that will help counteract those numbers.

And an addition is they are now requiring that family farms and small business assets be recorded on the FAFSA as well. So the value of animals, of property, of equipment, of inventory, those assets need to now be listed on the FAFSA and are part of the calculation.

The parent allowances will also help counteract those numbers.

So the new calculation is the Student Aid index. So the way the Department of Education calculates it is they take the whole cost of attendance, which is all the funds that you would ever need to use in a given academic year, and they subtract your student aid index and that is your financial need. So if the cost of attending Community College is $20,000 for the year and the student Aid index based on income and assets is only $2000.

Then your financial need is $18,000 and that is then that will then determine how much you're able to receive in federal funding and then we use that number to determine what you're able to receive in university aid as well.

We have already touched on this a little bit. I know that editing the FAFSA has been hit or miss for some of you. You have been able to go back and edit.

Either adjust numbers that you made or or check boxes that were not initially checked.

At this time, not everything is editable, and even once it's released, not everything will be able to be changed.

However, once the FAFSA's are sent to the schools.

At that time.

Both the parent or the student and also the schools should be able to make certain edits to your application.

And Samuel, when the FAFSA data is sent to the schools, the completer should receive notification that that's happened. So they should have some indication that OK, not only has your FAFSA been completed, but it's also been sent to the schools you requested, Is that right?

Yes, so each I believe each contributor, not just the student, but each contributor should receive an e-mail confirmation from Student Federal Student Aid confirming that your application has been submitted to the schools that you listed on your application.

And again we're we've been, we've been told by the Department of Ed and and FSA that that should be early to mid March.

Correct.

OK. And one more question here that I'm seeing that we can touch on before we move forward is on the Sai. I'm seeing one of our attenders mentioned that they didn't receive an Sai when they submitted. Is this something that you'd recommend putting in a ticket with FSA? Is this to be expected? What's your recommendation there?

Yeah, so there's there's a couple things. Either the form was submitted and is not totally complete, which would prove a rejection status. However, if you did receive a confirmation e-mail that your form was successfully submitted, and if you did not receive the student aid index at that time, then it should come at a later time and it should be no later than mid March when when we receive your FAFSA.

And one of the other key updates is that the IRS data again we're using fiscal year 2022 for fall of 24 in spring of 25.

The IRS data should automatically transfer. There should be a check box on the form and if you check that then your your data should transfer automatically. However, you still may be prompted to manually input some of your your tax information, so it would I would recommend having your 2022 IRS tax Return or Transcript handy when you go to fill out the FAFSA.

So it is required for completion transferring that that data. So you have to check the box in order for the form to be complete. If you do not check the box, as I stated earlier, there have been issues where parents have been unable to go back and check the box or finish completing the form.

So if you're if you haven't filled it out yet, be sure to look for that box and make sure you check it in order for it to be complete.

I.

Well, it's helpful to see some of these changes condensed into these few slides. This has been many months and years in the making and this is kind of you know, your version of the of your condensed version of what's really going to affect families most readily in the months moving forward. As we move into our next section here, I do want to give a reminder to those of you attending, please do drop your questions in the in the chat. We're going to have a time at the end in just a few minutes to go through a couple more of your questions.

As they come in. So take a minute to look down at your notes and see if there are some questions that have not been answered yet that you'd like to make sure are touched on, and we'll get to those in a few minutes.

Samuel, I know that you're looking to speak a little bit about Karens specific process for financial aid and how it intersects with some of these updates that we're seeing.

Yeah. So I'd like to to talk about the next step, so once you complete the FAFSA.

And we receive it in mid March, then both you as the parent and your student will receive a financial aid offer from our department.

And once you receive that, we will you will receive it both a physical copy in the mail on the address used on your FAFSA and via e-mail and all that we ask is that your student either sign and submit the physical copy back to our office.

Or simply reply to the e-mail with the aid they choose to accept or decline.

If you have been accepted already and have not reserved your spot, it's never too early to do that.

But once you once we've received your FAFSA and once you have been accepted.

Then you will receive your aid offer and we just ask that you submit it back to us if you have any questions about that or concerns about your your aid offer or if you would like explanations on.

On how it all works, please feel free to contact us at finada karen.edu.

And anytime with any questions I would be happy to help. Happy to answer any questions you have.

So this is a sample aid offer. This is what the physical version looks like. The e-mail version looks almost exactly the same.

So it will have your the student's name and address that they used on the FAFSA, and it will have all of their scholarships that are there.

And.

This part right here, this section, about halfway down. This is where we need the student to either sign that, check that first box that they accept all eight, or check the second box and specify which aid they choose not to. This is typically done with federal student loans.

So if we received your FAFSA by March 1st or the beginning of March, again, your student will be notified that we have received it. And if your student has been accepted, then we will be sending out financial aid offers within three days of receiving your FAFSA.

So student filled out the FAFSA, we receive it.

Your student has been accepted within three days of you receiving that e-mail from from Student Aid. You will have your financial aid offer in your inbox.

Again, if you have any other questions about that, feel free to connect with us.

You can e-mail us at Finney at karen.edu or go to our website karen.edu/aid. Also coming up in one month from today on March 22nd. We have another open house so if you have not yet visited Karen that would be a great great great time to do so. You can meet other students who are are looking into colleges and are in the exact same boat as you are as well as get the full experience all at once.

Yeah, getting on campus for an experienced Karen Day is, is a great opportunity. And I also wanted to just reiterate you know just how serious we are about in this year of of the FAFSA being delayed and everything kind of getting pushed back. Just how important it's going to be for us to be pushing those aid offers out as quickly as possible and getting them into your hands so you can and start to make.

Umm, difficult decisions.

So let's get into some questions here.

Thank you again for all of you who have submitted.

Some items in the chat looks like Samuel's reconnecting here in a second. Wanted to touch on a few of the things that have been brought up. I saw a couple or a message or two asking about merit scholarships. I think there may have been a question regarding some transfer scholarships from.

From other institutions, there certainly are opportunities for that and our admissions team I'm sure would love to talk to you about.

What that's going to look like and how you can get connected with those opportunities?

Those will be part of anything like that will be part of your initial offer of aid if you can get the information to us in enough time, so certainly be looking to do that.

We've also been getting some questions about some clarifications on the under review or in review icon. As far as we're aware if you have completed your FAFSA, done everything that you needed to on your side of things in review is an acceptable.

Status. That means that it's ready to be sent to schools and the Department of Ed and the FSA is processing things on the back end. And that status should change in that time frame of early to mid March that they've identified as it gets sent to schools. So keep an eye on that status, see if it changes.

But as far as we understand, in review is an acceptable status for where we're at in the process.

Absolutely.

We've got a question about coming for an athletic visit. Awesome. We're excited to have you on campus and you have questions about reserving your spot when you're on campus. That's a great time to have that conversation before leading up to it and what it would look like to reserve your spot, what that entails and the admissions team can can follow up with you on next steps there.

A couple more questions about scholarships and other opportunities. As I mentioned, those will be included on the offer of aid and there's also some additional scholarship opportunities that could have applications attached to them and those are things that.

Your admissions counselor can talk you through. They'll have some insight as to your specific eligibility for the scholarships and if if there are things that you can pursue.

And so when you get that initial offer of aid, you know, be sure to.

Have a conversation with your admissions counselor about what you're seeing. Have some conversations with financial aid and see if there are additional opportunities for you to apply for additional scholarships that you may qualify for.

Yeah. So I see the question.

Well, great. I think I hit a lot of the questions that have been asked. If there are any that we have not been able to touch on in this time, we'd love to reach out to you and connect in another way, look at your situation individually and possibly give you some some extra.

Assistance in that way. Really want to thank you all for for the insightful questions during this time and hopefully some of them have been helpful for all of you, not just the person asking.

As we close, I want to draw your attention to a couple of resources.

In the that we have available that will be in the chat for you some links. These are.

Are.

Some resources to help you move forward. There's a an online Karen FAFSA guide that will be in the chat.

A FAFSA issue reporting hotline, which I think one of you had a question about. That'll be in the chat as well, and to alert FAFSA to some issues, so take advantage of those. All links will be included in the follow up e-mail that will be sent to you at the conclusion of the webinar, and that'll drop in an e-mail cheering box later this evening.

As well as a recording of our time together.

We're here to help.

Please don't hesitate to reach out to us once again. Our team is is here to not just, you know, check boxes and make sure that that tasks follow through for you, but to to help you understand the process. Please reach out.

And we'd love to talk to you about that. Thank you once again for joining us for our webinar tonight. I want to thank.

Give thanks to our presenter Samuel and the admissions team for their support on the back end as well.

And once you have a great night and we'll see you on campus soon.

Thank you.