Finances

National Grants

  • Pell Grants
  • Academic Competitiveness Grants and
  • National SMART Grants

Local Grants

  • Civic organizations
  • religious institutions

Negotiate with top choice

Benefactor

  • AmeriCorps
  • Peace Corp
  • National Health Services Corps
  • ROTC

Abroad

Scotland’s St. Andrews, the alma mater of Britain’s Prince William and wife Kate, U.S. students pay only $21,650; Canada's McGill University charges just $17,400 for Americans studying for a B.A. (Read More: “Royal College Bargain” by Emily Lambert)

Tax Tricks

  • The American Opportunity Tax Credit
  • the Lifetime Learning Credit
  • Asset Protection

    A college will use one of three different aid formulas to determine how much of a price break you deserve. The so-called Section 568 formula, used by a small but impressive group of schools that includes Dartmouth, Duke and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has an interesting loophole that involves the value of your home. At these schools the home equity that goes into calculating your net worth is capped at 120% of your income.

    Troy Onink, a financial planner (and FORBES contributor) whose Russell, Pa. firm, Stratagee, specializes in walking families through the college funding minefield, explains what this subtlety means to one client of his.

    This is a Connecticut family with an income of $144,000 and a son now applying to three of the schools on the Section 568 list. They used an inheritance to pay off the $514,000 mortgage on their house. Had they left the money in a bank account they would have qualified for no aid. With the mortgage paid off, he says, the son will be good for $20,000 or so of aid per year, assuming he gets into one of those schools.

  • Bunching
    All three aid formulas give a break to families with more than one child attending college at once. Suppose, for example, that you have income of $160,000 and assets of $900,000 and the formula dictates that you can afford to spend $80,000 a year on college. If you have one student in a $55,000 school you get nothing. If you have two you get $30,000.

    Strategy: Persuade your oldest to take a gap year after high school. That gambit could be worth up to $55,000.

Ask Guidance Counselor