A lecture by A.I. Counselor focused on how applicants can reduce college costs by becoming a "coveted asset" to universities. Two main paths are described: (1) gaining admission to selective (top ~60–85) colleges that increasingly offer no-loan financial aid for admitted students with demonstrated need, and (2) positioning oneself in the top 25% of an institution's admitted-student profile (GPA/SAT/ACT or by filling a specific campus need) to receive larger merit or need-based aid. The speaker also recommends actively comparing competing aid offers and contacting schools (or having parents intervene on finances) to request matching or improved packages.
Chapters
All right, welcome back. Week three, video two. I think I have that right. Today we're going to talk about how to be a coveted asset for the university with the end game of not only getting into the school, but getting money that covers your schooling. Okay? So as you all know, we cover financial aid in great detail. But I want to add this one video here in this course because it's so important and so many people get driven off course when they don't think about this that it ends up sabotaging their career plans and their university plans. And that's the question of the price tag. So the first thing you need to know is, and I think you'll see this play out if you look around previous classes. So your child is either a junior or senior, maybe earlier, but the classes before who have graduated, you'll hear stories that one person received one particular financial aid package and somebody else received something quite different. And we'll hear these stories and it's hard to compare, right, because everyone's finances are different. But you'll hear stories of people of similar finances coming out with very different financial aid packages. So why, how is that even possible? I thought this was supposed to be based on finances. Well, the reality is that colleges, as we talked about in the last video, are looking to build a community, a community made up of different students with different roles. And that in order to get the right pieces in place, they sometimes have to give more money to entice those pieces to come into place. Right? So if you're a coveted asset in the form of being filling a role that the university really wants and they feel like they really need, you'll see oftentimes the financial aid package will reflect that in the form of more grant money or scholarships. So that's one of the things to know, is that if you, if you're applying to colleges, you want to be the coveted asset, not just for the purposes of getting in, but also receiving financing, and that not all financial aid packages are the same. And it's the question that I get all the time. It's not fair. I don't understand. Just know it's the reality. Colleges are businesses. They're in the community building business, too. And the ways that they do that is by paying, in effect, paying students to come to their schools in the form of more generous financial aid packages. So there's two kind of areas you have to think about this in. The first are the most selective colleges in America. The most selective colleges. And I'll go to the board for this one. The number is changing and it's going up the top 60 to 85 colleges. And sometimes they vary. So you want to check on the college's website to see if it's changed. But by and large, the number of schools going on this list is increasing. Are putting out no loan financial aid packages for students who need financial aid. Okay, we cover this in the financial aid course. But to keep in mind, if you have the credentials and the story to get into a top, and by top, I mean selective college, the college is going to make sure you go there, that finances is not going to stop you from going there. And this is how we get stories of people going to Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Penn for less money than they would at the community college down the street or to the state college. Because these top 85 ish schools have, have the endowments that allow them to cover the loan needs of the school of the students. Okay? So if you have the ability to get into these top schools that offer no loan financial aid packages, that's one way you reduce your financial burden. Okay. The other way you do it. And this is the second category. And of course you could apply to either one of these. The schools that fall out of this list, so the schools that do not offer no loan financial aid packages, they still want to compete. They still want top students to come to their schools with high GPAs, high SATs, and fill specific needs of those universities. And the way they do it is by giving money in the form of grants, scholarships, and generous financial aid packages. And the reason why I put top 25% here is they really focus in on the people that fit particular needs. So like we talked about in the last video, every marching band needs a drummer, right? Every school needs an opera singer. I think if you feel some kind of need at the university, they're going to make a financial aid package that's more generous than if you are a student that didn't fill a particular need. And, or if you're in the top 25% of the admitted students profile. So if you're looking at the admitted students profile from the previous year in every school, every fall puts out what the admitted student profile is. So it says this year we accepted students who had an average GPA of X and had an average SAT of Y. If you are in the top, if you would have been in the top 25%, 25 percentile of that admitted student profile for the previous year, your chances of getting a more generous financial aid go up substantially. Because what they want is they want to drive up the numbers. Because these numbers, the gpa, sat, act, Remember our obsession with numbers go into play, come into play. When it comes to ranking in the U.S. news & World Report, the schools are obsessed about their rankings. We talk about the numbers, obsessions. The school loves to brag about how it's ranked. And the way that they do that is by working the number of students in this top 25 percentile to make sure they come there by offering them financial aid packages. So they decide, you know what? I'd rather go here and graduate with less debt than go somewhere else. Caveat being, if you qualify for a school that has a no loan financial aid package, you might get the best of both worlds, depending on your interest. Right? So that's the interesting point about financial aid. It's something that's evolved over the last 10 years. It didn't exist when I went to school. But more and more schools are noting that if they're going to compete, they got to start giving financial aid packages that have no loans, that students are no longer willing to take on burdens of substantial student loan debt because they're not seeing the bang for the buck at the end of the day. And the only way you can do that is by lowering the loan packages so that people can walk away with less debt. It makes these schools more appealing over other schools. And people with the SATs and GPAs and ACTs and all these credentials that are measured by the US News and World Report are more likely to go there. So that's my point. You want to make sure you're a coveted asset for the school by being in the top 25 percentile or be so coveted that you're going to make it into one of these schools with no loan. No loan packages. At the end of the day, you're going to try to figure out the best fit for you. But finances is one of them. I know for a lot of people where it's a key consideration. So keep that in mind as you move forward. The other thing I want to stress, and we talk about this in the spring as these financial aid packages come in and you get these acceptance letters, which is a very exciting time of year, you'll receive your financial aid packages and you'll get one from one school and you get one from another school. Right? Schools know this happens and they actually advertise that they're open to it. Sometimes you'll get a financial aid package from your dream school A that's not as generous as the package you get from dream. Not so Dreamy School B. So what do you do? What we encourage our students to do is if the schools are viewed as being comparable, is that you contact school A and you say, I really want to attend your school. This is where I want to go. But the finances I'm getting are not comparable to what I'm getting from this other school. And this other school must be viewed as a competitor or comparable to school A. For the listen to you. But nine times out of the 10, if School B is viewed as comparative comparable, there it is to school A, they will give you a financial aid package that matches school B. You got to work the phones. And this is a role. The only time I really encourage students to step back and let their parents step up. When it comes to finances. The parents can play a key role in making sure that the student gets a financial aid package that's right for them and it's not going to burden them or the parents with tremendous debt, especially if they're in a position of having two schools that are comparable and the second school is giving them a better financial aid package. We'll talk about that in the spring. There's a lot of things I can give you in the spring when it comes time to decide where you want to go to school. How to figure out financial aid packages, how to improve your chances of getting that financial aid package, and ultimately how to improve your chances of getting in if you get wait listed or deferred. Okay, so these are things to think about. Finances, of course, covered in another course. But this is one thing I really wanted to stress in this course as we move forward on trying to figure out how to make yourself that coveted asset. So on the next video, we'll dive into one last exercise before we do something really fun. Okay, I'll see you in the next video.
