In our many years of helping students, we can advise every high school Junior start college campus tours now. Here are the questions we feel every prepared family should ask.

Campus tour guides are current students, work study or admissions personnel.  This means that they are invaluable resources for opinions about the best classes, campus social life, dining hall food and the worst dorms. However, they may not know much about financial aid, specialized learning services or how the administration makes decisions.  Read below for how to get the best answers for Finanical Aid.

Do your research online first

Campus tours an important component of any visit to a prospective college or university. It’s a unique opportunity explore a school’s buildings and grounds and ask questions with someone that spends time there on a regular basis.

Don’t waste this opportunity, part of maximizing your college tour is avoiding inappropriate or ineffective questions.   These questions would involve facts and figures about the school, applicants taking college tours can find out how current students experience these statistics.

Spend time compairing statistics like the percent of students who live on campus, average class size, graduation rate and so on.  These facts and figures available on the school’s website or from third-party resources.

The latter category, ineffective questions, can be subdivided into two areas: questions that are beyond the knowledge of your tour guide, and questions that can be answered by visiting the college’s website.

Ask questions about how current students experience these statistics.

1. Student-to-professor ratio, for example, ask if it truly feels that way. Are small classes found only in highly specialized senior-level seminars? Do freshmen ever enroll in small classes? Or you might see that 20 percent of the student body participates in the Greek system, so you could ask your tour guide how that affects his or her social experience on campus.
2. Ask about classes. Your tour guide may know very little about decisions that are handled at the administrative level. Asking about his or her experience in freshman-level classes is fine, but asking which classes are assigned adjuncts versus tenured professors may not result in an informed answer.
3.  Accessibility of advisers and staff.  Find out how seriously professors take their office hours. It’s worth asking how they utilize these opportunities with staff, so you can put their answer the student perspective that is worth knowing, even if it is a limited sample size.
4. Crime and safety are two additional topics to consider, especially for females. The statistics available on a school’s website can be useful measures, but your tour guide can also share his or her impression of campus safety. A campus that is statistically safe but where students have safety concerns can be a stressful environment. The campus website may discuss safety initiatives, like late night patrols and increased campus lighting, but the actual student experience may be more relevant.

A college tour can provide invaluable insight into daily life on a campus. Use your tour time wisely, and target your questions for maximum usefulness. Oh, and by the way, have fun on your tour(s).

Getting Answers For Financial Aid

For instance, financial aid may be an uncomfortable subject, as it involves both personal and parental resources. In addition, a student tour guide may not know how the school awards grants versus loans. Even if your tour guide has extensive personal experience with the system, his or her experience likely will not match yours. Instead, ask financial aid question when you meet with an admissions counselor.

The same goes for any specialized learning needs that you may have. Even if your tour guide shares a similar challenge, and is familiar with the available campus resources, he or she may not wish to discuss this topic with strangers.

If you would like professional assistance in correctly filling out your FAFSA, CSS Profile and other forms while saving you the time and frustration contact our office for your free consultation today.

Join me January 19th for CollegeWeekLive.com Paying for College fair. I’ll be giving a live webcast on how to secure financial aid at 5 pm ET!  I’ll be telling you all about “How to Properly Pursue College Financial Aid” including ways to maximize opportunities with the FAFSA and CSS Profile.

Register now at
https://www.collegeweeklive.com/event-schedule/paying-for-college

These are our top 5 tips for high school sophomore parents looking for college financial aid.  If your child is a sophomore in high school, you may be able to save yourself thousands of dollars on college tuition if you take this advice before the end of this year.

We feel the sophomore year is when you should set the stage for college financial aid under changes adopted recently. If you get busy with the holidays and slide towards New Year’s Day without examining and adjusting finances, you could lose an opportunity for aid that won’t return once 2017 arrives. College could end up costing you thousands more than it would if you were alert early enough.

Most people have inaccurate assumptions about getting financial aid. They figure if they need aid they will get it if they simply fill out the financial aid forms required, which includes the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) and the CSS Profile. By the time they sit down to do the forms, they’ve taken actions with their money that permanently will undermine the aid they will get and they are shocked when the college sees them as a lot wealthier than they are.

By Jan 1st, much of your fate will be sealed because your tax return will become the key factor for computing aid. And just as people try to adjust income so they get as many tax deductions as possible, financial aid takes the same diligence.

Please be aware that many of the adjustments you make to enhance financial aid are the opposite of those you use to cut your taxes. So, if you go to a tax expert, make sure it’s one of the few who understand the unique financial aid formulas that lead so many families off course.

It is important to get an early preview of your EFC (Expected Family Contribution) and the (Estimated Family Contributions) calculations. These are used to provide an estimate of what the family will be asked to pay for the year. Families should get an accurate preview from a trained expert.

Here are the top 5 tips for high school sophomore parents looking for college financial aid.

1. Shift Your Income
   
   If aid is likely, try to move any income you might have coming in 2017, or during the college years, into the remainder of this year. That’s easier said than done. But this is the last year you can have a sizable income and not lose financial aid. In 2017 and during the college years, you want to keep your income as low as possible not by turning down work, but by being as savvy about financial aid as you are with tax deductions. So if, for example, you are going to get a big bonus at work next year or get a big payment from your business, you will want to try to get that done in 2016.
   
2. Plan Investments
   
   If you’ve planned to sell stocks, bonds, mutual funds or other investments to pay for college, this is the last year you will be able to do it without cutting into your financial aid. By the time your child is a junior in high school, capital gains from selling investments will increase your income unless you can sell other investments at a loss large enough to wipe out the gain. So consider selling investments while your child is a sophomore. However, please note there could be tax and investment consequences from this action, so get advice from an expert who understands the entire picture including financial aid. And remember, don’t start selling investments if your calculation shows you won’t get aid.
   
3. Max Your 401k
   
   Although you cut your taxes when you put money into a 401(k), 403(b), IRA or other retirement savings account, the savings can work just the opposite for financial aid. If you stash money into retirement savings accounts during your child’s high school junior year or during the college years after that, your taxes will be low, thus making it look like you are able to pay more for college. As a result, colleges may cut back your aid.So for those families who aren’t going to be able to maximize their retirement savings each year and handle college costs too, they may want consider stuffing retirement savings accounts as full as possible during your child’s sophomore year rather than later.
   
4. Give To Charity
   
   Rather than giving to charity each year, give a big chunk this year, telling the institution it’s for now and the upcoming years.
   
5. No Accounts In Student’s Name
   
   Any investments or savings in an account that belongs to your child will poison financial aid eligibility. That is why families that need financial aid shouldn’t use Uniform Gifts to Minors Act (UGMA) or Uniform Transfers to Minors Act (UTMA) accounts. One can move money out of these accounts and save instead in 529 plans kept in parents’ names. Parents may be able spend down UGMAs on a high school student’s immediate needs like computers, upcoming summer camp or private high school expenses, while adding equivalent savings to 529 accounts. But please be warned, parents need to handle this cautiously since the money does belong to the child.
   
   Here is why UGMAs and UTMAs are not good. Under the unfair financial aid formulas, colleges, except a student, can use almost anything they have saved for college, so the college taps 20 percent of the student’s savings right off the bat or 25 percent at private colleges. But the identical savings in a parent’s name would only be tapped up to 5.65 percent.

Consider parents with a $40,000 college fund saved in their own account. The college would require them to use up to $2,260 for the first year of college. But if the same account is in the child’s name, the college would require $8,000 to be spent that year for college. Aid would be cut substantially because the family would appear to be able to spend $8,000 that year for college.

The logic behind this may seem sound: Parents have many expenses to cover and not just college. Yet, students should contribute money to their education. The problem with this logic is most families don’t have nearly enough saved for college and if they’ve made the mistake of saving for college in their child’s account rather than their own, they will have to pay a lot more.

So a parent would have to dig more than $5,000 extra out of their pocket to pay for college that year, compared with what they would have paid if they’d saved in their own account. And $40,000 is a modest example when four years in college can easily top $100,000.

If you would like more valuable information and calculations on your family’s EFCs, please contact our office.