Well, top of the morning to you lads and lasses, Pearl and Andy O'Loughwood, college planners, most credible college advisors and consultants on the internet. Happy day after St. Patrick's Day. Hello, Pearl. Hello, Andy. My wee lassie. 2024 PGA Champion runner-up, Pearl O'Loughwood. That's very lovely of you. Thank you. She had a great nine-hole round yesterday. A fluke. A St. Paddy's fluke. Luck of the Irish. And please join us in a synchronized sip of your coffee, Irish coffee, anything you're drinking this morning. Cheers to you. Okay, so this is a show about college stuff. Getting into college, paying for college, anything related to college, test prep. Always seems to be a fair amount of stuff to talk about every week when we do this 10 o'clock every Monday. So please introduce yourselves in the comments and let us know if you have any questions. Let us know that we're coming in loud and clear and in vivid green colors, emerald colors. Yeah. I don't know if we keep doing this, but it's amusing. You act like you don't like doing it, and then you're like the first one to get all ready and happy about it. In our costumes? Yeah. It's part of our shtick. Yeah, because that's what the world needs is more shtick. All right, so a few stories that we wanted to follow and call to your attention for this morning's episode. So one of them is just the latest updates in terms of another college bites the dust in terms of the test optional policies that is now requiring SATs and ACTs to be submitted. Then we'll talk about some latest and not greatest updates Updates to the FAFSApocalypse, the simplification by the Department of Education that's not really simplifying things. And then a very clever hack that my wee little ass here, Pearl, figured out, which I don't know how you figured this one out. It was in response to a problem that a lot of filers were having and are still having and will have. And then if we have time, you know, we'll cover some other stuff. I want to gear up a little bit about college essays, but this is really an opportunity for you to get some of your questions, answers, free college coaching. We do know what we're talking about despite our efforts. So, all right. So the latest college to abandon the test optional phase or craze is University of Texas, Austin, which is, you know, it's a competitive school. It's not, Yale or Brown or an elite school like an Ivy, but it's pretty close. And they just announced last week they're requiring tests because, according to President Jay Hartzell, the SAT and the ACT are a valuable tool for deciding who's admitted and making sure those students are placed in majors that are best fit. what I also thought was interesting, which is sort of buried in this article, I think it was in the university of Texas paper was that last year or this, you know, the cycle that we're in the middle of, um, 90% of students submitted their scores anyway, the university of Texas, Austin. So this wasn't like a huge problem where they weren't getting enough test scores. That was something that was 73,000 students who submitted their test scores at UT Austin. Um, and another little unrelated, The thing that they stuck in there, though, is I think because of all the applicants that are flooding them, is they just announced that they will have an early action deadline. They've never had early action, apparently, next year of October 15th. So most early action deadlines for schools are in the November 1 to November 15th range. But there's a handful of schools that UT Austin just joined, like North Carolina Chapel Hill. I think Georgia Tech. Yep. Those are all, yep, October 15th. And there may be one or two others that are sort of in the pool of usual suspect schools that our clients apply to. But don't let any of these deadlines for next year catch you unaware. There are separate deadlines for applying to college and getting in your financial aid applications for college. You've got to get a handle on all that stuff. So as you clash with 2025 families, start solidifying your college list, which will be at the end of the summer, most likely. Hopefully. Ideally. Yeah. That's, that's not later ideally, but it happens. People tweak all the time. That's right. You need to get a chart together of all of your deadlines, application deadlines, early action, regular decision, early decision, double secret, super duper, fragilistic action decision. And you're all of your financial aid applications. There isn't one deadline, universal deadline for either admissions or financial aid. So, I predict more of these similar types of announcements as more colleges are going to require you to take the SAT and the ACT. The SAT just changed. Officially, the first digital SAT was last Saturday, and every future SAT is going to be digital. We reported last week on some comments that our clients had given that the SAT, the new digital SAT was very hard. I know that's going to result in lower scores because the college board will in effect, curve the SATs. So it may have been hard, but I don't know if the scores are going to necessarily be lower. Pearl? Hey. Agreed. Okay. Noted. All right. So give us the lay of the land for what's happening with the FAFSApocalypse, and then we'll have time to talk about your cool little hack. Okay. Well, unfortunately, in fact, typical and true fashion, the Department of Education continues to push back its promised deadlines of, and in this case, financial aid workability, FAFSA workability. So we know that the FAFSA was late in becoming available this year. It's a new version of the FAFSA altogether. That became available January 1st. And since January 1st, and here we are past the mid-March point, initially there was a promise of January 31st when the FAFSA information would actually be transferred to all of the colleges that were applied for in the FAFSA. Well, that deadline And of course, on that deadline, there was no such transference of information. There was only an announcement from the Department of Education that they are delaying that transference of information till mid-March. Well, lo and behold. We have come and gone through mid-March, and there is still no clear timeframe. In fact, the opposite is the FAFSA information is still, even though people have been able to submit the FAFSA, there has been no information that's been submitted that's been transferred to any of the schools. there is currently no ability to log back into an already submitted FAFSA because the FAFSA caps students at 20 colleges to list in the FAFSA. If you have 29 schools, those nine extra schools will have to wait to be submitted. As of now, it is impossible to log into an already submitted FAFSA to add those additional nine schools, much less make any changes on the FAFSA or anything. But seriously, adding schools that may now have become, as we all know, this is a very fluid process. And schools you may have been applying to at the outset in September and October, by this point in March, you may have adjusted your list. You may have added additional schools when you've had some initial results come in. You can't add those schools right now to the FAFSA, which is bananas. Well, just to be fair. We're not condoning applying to more than 20 colleges. If you want to talk about bananas, let's talk about how many schools kids apply to. Yeah, 12 to 14 is a good number. Just for any of you who are watching with younger kids, 20 plus schools is unbelievable. Yes, except this possibly goes to getting the list right in the first place. Because if you overshoot and then you hear a lot of, negative feedback from those initial applications, you may find yourself scrambling to, well, where can I still apply and where else can I make my list? And then you're shoring up your list with schools of more likelihood of admissions. But, unfortunately this year you're not going to be able to submit that FAFSA just yet. So now we're ultimately, ultimately you will be able to, isn't that, isn't that when you want to make, make sure people understand. So, right. So although we're in this turmoil and seemingly, you know, never ending turmoil and, and, and like, Oh my God, I'm going to lose out on something. Like I'm applying to these schools and I can't have the FAFSA and whatever. Everyone is under the same constraints. Again, just to reiterate, no one schools have, nobody's school has received any information. At some point, that's going to change. Unfortunately, the now second time they promised the transference of this information is now. It's not happening now. And when it happens, it's going to take from that point of when they release the information, they have to do it in batches because of, I guess, how old this system still is in spite of that, that it's now been a new version. They're not going to release it onesie twosie. It gets downloaded by the college. By batch. But even then, it's going to take two weeks to actually get to the school and where a student would be able to log back into that FAFSA to do anything with it. That is the current state of affairs with no further information about when that is supposed to happen. Obviously, and as Andy was just pointing out, everyone's under these same conditions. trials and tribulations. And whenever the dam breaks, so to speak, it'll break for everyone. And there's going to be some equalizing, normalizing for everybody. You're all going to receive financial aid packages before you need to make a housing deposit commitment. And of course, it appears at this point that those deadlines are going to be pushed back. Okay. Okay. All right. Now for the hack. Well, if you have any questions, this is a lot of stuff we're talking about today. So let me just say hello to everyone. So Lori is here. So is Chris Couch. And Lucy, Elango, Myrtle, Pamela, Stephanie, Christine, our wonderful assistant. Setu, I hope I pronounced that correctly, Steffi Adegboyega. Yvette, Joy. If any of you guys have questions, pop them right in the comments. Elaine. Don't be shy. Jadhev. Vanushka. Michelle. Sparta. Walisa. Brianna. I'm so bad at these. Perra Robinson. Linda. Pam. Hey, hey, hey. Nicole. Karen. Karen. Two Karens in a row. Rick. Shelly. MD. Siddharth. We should have your mirror. Evelyn, Leslie, April, Julia, Corey, Saturday. That's a cool name. And Lynette. Welcome. Join us with your questions if you have them. Particularly about this FAFSA apocalypse. So the FAFSA is the main financial aid application that every college requires. There was an overhaul. Two years ago that was announced, and it just finally happened, and the department bed and their contractors and everyone just dropped the ball in terms of testing it. And there's all sorts of weird things. They published a list. I don't know if they updated it recently of things that are wrong with the FAFSA, things that they caught. Every week. Okay. There's a new huge laundry list of what's wrong with it. So I would hazard a guess, because I'm not the one who does all the financial aid applications in our business, but you do. I would hazard a guess that what you're going to run us through is not one of the published hacks by the Department of Education. So ladies and gentlemen, you are now hearing for the first time an underground hack for the financial aid applications. And it has to do with figuring out your student aid index, which is the number that the government now thinks that you can afford. for one year of college as based on all the inputs in the FAFSA. And up until, I think for most people this year, you fill out your FAFSA and you submit it and then you're in the dark. They can't find their student aid index, how much the government thinks you're supposed to be able to afford. But you somehow stumbled on, you're like Indiana Jones here. She stumbled on how to figure that out. Okay, so what does this mean? If you would follow ordinary instincts or even the instructions in the Department of Education as to how you should complete the FAFSA, both there's a student has an FSA ID, username and password, and one parent has an FSA ID, username and password, both of which will be needed to fully complete the submission of a FAFSA. But they have to be logged into separately and in a certain order because before a parent can go ahead in and they need permission to work on that kid's FAFSA, et cetera, and permission is given once you're logged in. So to do the FAFSA properly and so that you can actually get the student aid report with the numbers and the date of submission, et cetera, which most people really just can't get. at this point, you do it this way. The student is going to log in first with the student's FSA ID username and password at studentaid.gov. That is the Department of Education website for completing the FAFSA and for loans, et cetera. The student completes all tabs of their portion of the FAFSA, which includes inviting the parent to complete their portion, which we'll circle back to. But you go all the way through the student's FAFSA, but you do not enter any colleges that in that student's FAFSA because if you do and then you go to the parents and you do the parents portion and submit it and then hope to go back into the students and see a student aid report, you're not gonna see it. It's going to say that the FAFSA has been submitted and it's in review. if you put that school in. So don't put any colleges in. You're gonna put every other bit of information. The very last thing you do before you submit the student's portion of the FAFSA is input the school. So I'm telling you to just save the application just before the point in time you would enter a school. Just hit save and then log out of the student's account. Parent then, the invited parent, We'll then log in with his or her FSA ID, username and password into that same site. And we'll log in and see there's a pending invitation for them to complete their portion of the FAFSA. When the parent goes in, parent can complete fully the parent's portion of the FAFSA and submit it. Go all the way through and submit it. log out then the student logs back in to their fafsa simply to and this is it this is the hack go right to the college tab enter the college and then you submit that fafsa when you submit the fafsa then because now it's already gotten all of the parent financial information The confirmation page will appear. The student aid report will be there. The number that the student aid index is will be printed and you can save that confirmation page. And it's just a little bit more of a clue than you would otherwise have until the point in time that they're ready to issue a financial aid package. So that's my hack. Have at it. That was like reading IKEA directions aloud. So how did you even like discover this? And why? I mean, I think it was really just haphazardly. It may have been such the case that I was like in the kid's account and then got like booted out because the FAFSA site wasn't working or something like that. I just continued with the parent. And I backed into it and all of a sudden a student aid report appeared with the student aid index. And I was like, whoa, okay, what did I do? What did I do? So there you have it. Stroke of genius. All right. So this is your opportunity for some free college coaching, some questions. And we have a question from Lori, our client from Tennessee. I noticed the CSS profile. So just to back up before I answer this question, there's two main, but not only two, there's two main financial aid applications that are in use. FAFSA, which we've been talking about today, that's required by every college in the country. then there's roughly 300 or 400 mostly private colleges that require an additional form called the CSS profile, which is much more complicated, much longer, and has never had any problems being updated, unlike the FAFSA, because it's private. It's done by private people, the College Board. So anyway, so Laurie's question is about that. I noticed that that CSS profile asked how long I've been self-employed. Does a longer versus shorter number of years look better or worse? I don't think it matters at all. The only thing I could guess that could be an issue is if you became self-employed three days before you filed your CSS profile and you did so in order to all of a sudden claim a lot of expenses and try to game the system or something. No one would ever do that. I don't think it really matters one way or the other. The other thing about these FAFSA delays is that they're going to be affecting people who are not qualified for financial aid because they're pushing back this whole timeline further and further in terms of when housing deposits are due. And obviously that affects all the bed party plans. Oh, God. Right. And the photographs and the posts on Instagram. The important stuff. Right. So what is your best guess in terms of your insider guess in terms of the timeline? So my guess would be what they did in 2020 during the height of COVID. They just pushed back all the deadlines a month. So instead of May 1st, June 1st. I hope that they get their act together and do something similar. I imagine they're going to be pressed to do something. The other thing I wanted to point out Pay attention for those who are currently applying for financial aid. to any changes your school, in light of this, may be making in terms of its requirements. For example, Cornell University, for its returning students, typically only requires the FAFSA to be submitted. And that was true for this year, too, until this whole FAFSA kerfuffle, they mid-year sent out to the whole student body that they are now requiring the CSS profile, and it was due March 1st. So that... Pay attention. Again, every school is aware of these funky circumstances and they're not going to hold everybody. But pay attention. There may be changes in the various schools you've applied to this year midway. Just in general, monitor all the communications that happen after you file because you're going to pick up stuff that you didn't realize you had to do. All right. Question from Michelle Vaccarelli. Hello and good morning. I signed into my FAFSA account this morning to see what the status of it was. And I noticed it read form processed, but corrections are needed. Okay. The correction states that if I and my daughter needed to provide a signature, however, the provide a signature button is grayed out. So what's the deal? Okay. Now, first, does it say did you log in with your FSA ID? And if that's the case, I would say have your daughter log in with her FSA ID to her account, and then she should be able to provide her signature. Well, the other point that she made was she, you know, to submit the FAFSA in the first place, she could have sworn that she signed it. I mean, I don't know how you, how you submit the FAFSA without signing it. Can you? Well, that's what, where I'm telling you. If it, yes, that's what I'm telling you. Like your child could have done her part. And then, um, Without submitting it and hitting that signature button, but adding that college, this is what I'm saying, you as the parent would have done the parent portion, submitted it, and then thinking, oh, I still have to go submit, go back to the students, and this is probably what you're now witnessing, go back to the student's account, and then it says it was submitted, even though you didn't actually do that. Again, probably one of the 30 problems with the FAFSA that's listed each week. So she said she used her parent FSA ID. So I would go back, have your student go back in, log back in with their FSA ID username and password, go to activity and she should be able to submit and that should cure that issue. Otherwise, corrections can't be made until sometime supposedly in March, as we're now past the eyes of March. Exactly. And expecting a delay. It won't be till April. Yeah. It won't be till April because we're already, we have fewer than two weeks left to this month. And we have not been told that any... information has started to be transferred and it's going to take two weeks from that point before any student or anybody else could actually log in, access, make changes, et cetera. So that brings us to April. Yeah. They are trickling information in apparently to some schools, but there's, you know, they need to do like a million bits of data transfer. Right. All right, good. So I see some more comments coming in here. This is again, this is your, if you're just joining us and you have a college related question, Fire away. Michelle says, thank you. Excellent. Hopefully that's the case. All right. Thomas. Live in New York. Family income on W-2 is $190,000. They own a home. I have retirement accounts. No savings. Would I qualify for financial aid realistically? Realistically, not at a public university, either in or out of the state of New York, but realistically, potentially at a private university. in or outside the state of New York. So don't give up. It's possible. By the way, we've had two clients actually get into the University of Notre Dame, fight in Irish, which is very cool. That is not why we're dressed like idiots, but we are, We've got a couple of things coming up here that could be valuable resources that I guess I'll go back and post these in the comments. So we're doing a webinar this Wednesday. If you're on our email list, in today's email, I gave a link to that, how to discover your financial aid pot of gold, how to defeat the nasty leprechauns in the financial aid office. Even if you think you can't qualify for anything, it's about how to get money so that you can comfortably afford your kid's tuition and you don't have to sell vital organs. or load up on debt or something like that, or both. We also have our SAT test prep class, our next one that's gearing students up for the May SAT, which is starting next Monday. That's at lockwoodtestprep.com. And we have our early registration happening right now for our bootcamp, our summer applications and essays bootcamp, which is going to be running all summer. July, August, some brief instruction before July, and a lot of working sessions with people editing and getting everything done so you don't have to scream and threaten your kids all summer. That's at lockwoodcollegeprep.com slash bootcamp. Are you able to thumb type those in? Okay, just good that way. Yeah, there's a lot of stuff happening, and I would say the number one mistake that families make is in any part of the college applications admissions process is not getting out in front of things it's it's sort of passively waiting for your or assuming that your guidance counselor whether it's at a private high school or a public high school is going to you know kind of map everything out for you and and proactively but you know most of the time when I meet with 11th graders, they're almost a little dismayed to learn all the stuff they should have been doing from ninth grade forward, because that's part of the body of work that gets judged when you apply to college. So I've seen a slight uptick in eighth and ninth graders, which may sound early to a lot of people watching this, but eighth and ninth graders actually, you know, coming in and talking to us. I did a presentation last week at the Manhasset library where there was a mom who had a first grader and a third grader. I know what you're thinking. She's too late. I said, ma'am, you really should have started this in utero. Don't you think you have something to tell the class? So that, that is early, but the, um, the thing to remember is that when you're applying to college, which is hopefully that summer after 11th grade before 12th grade, what you're doing is summing up everything in your entire high school career. So the first time that you actually start grappling with what have I done and what's gonna help me communicate the value that I want to to all these colleges that I'm trying to get into, even though I look the same on paper as 50,000 other kids with the same grades, the same scores or whatever, the time to be thinking about that is not when you're sitting down to first type up an essay. It's before that. And that's not a commercial for hiring a college advisor in ninth grade or eighth grade or 10th grade, because frankly, several of the kids that I meet with are just not ready to embark on something like that. And it's kind of a waste of money to hire a college advisor if your kid's not mature enough or motivated enough to want to do that. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't be thinking about this stuff. So you're not blindsided and caught unaware by the time you're starting to fill out your activity section and you're like oh I've got three things and there's 10 spaces or I've got um 10 you know 10 activities and 10 spaces but all these activities are like the same stuff that everyone else does right like national honor society when when our daughter lizzie who's going to be a senior in college coming up when she was inducted into the national honor society in 11th grade I sort of looked around the auditorium I was you know trying to Estimated I saw Lizzie. Congratulations. He made it to the top 70% of your class, which she didn't think was funny, but it was true What can I tell you? All right. So any other questions coming in here before we wrap up? I See something from Michelle here Yeah, all right. So my daughter's more than likely going to choose to go to Hofstra I spoke with the financial aid counselor over there and they stated as of now that Decision day is still May 1st, and I have not yet gotten any aid package from them as of yet due to FAFSA delays. If they don't move the date to 6-1 as you expect, will it be time to appeal or negotiate the award letter? They always extend the deadlines if you need to appeal a financial aid award. But. Even if you're appealing a financial aid award, whenever that deadline is, don't miss the deadline. If you're intending to go to that school, put in your housing closet, even if you're still waiting to see if an appeal is going to be successful. You don't want to miss that. And then circle back and be like, oh, wait, I missed the deadline. But you could lose your spot. And then you might be thinking, well, is that going to hurt my leverage or my ability to negotiate? And my answer is, it's not ideal. I wouldn't recommend doing that if I had a choice. But it's, like it or not, putting the ethics aside, because I'm a college advisor, the practice of walking away from a housing deposit is so common that you When you put a housing deposit down, that doesn't mean that they think that they've locked you in. It's just a couple hundred bucks. So many people walk away. Not to judge a couple hundred bucks, but in comparison to the cost of one year at that institution, which could be upwards of $50,000, $60,000, $70,000 a year, $400 deposit doesn't seem like a tremendous commitment to them. Nice. Nice carve out. All right, so that wraps up this week's episode of College Coffee Talk, College Irish Coffee Talk. Do you think you'll be wearing this the rest of the day? No, but Wednesday for sure for our webinar. Really? All right, we'll get that dry cleaned. Of course. Okay. Thanks for joining us, and if you're watching this on replay and have any questions, pop them into the comments section, and we will get to them as soon as we can. Have a great week.
