Worried how to pay for college? Here’s how to maximize your chances of getting the aid you need

Getting into college can be hard. But figuring out how to finance college so that neither parent nor child are left financially hard up? It’s a new, highly annoying level of hard — at least if you hope to get an adequate financial aid package to supplement your and your child’s college savings. For any parent with a child in the 8th, 9th or 10th grade, now is the time to strategize how to maximize your access to both merit-based and need-based financial aid. Where things stand now The cost of one year in college for one child — never mind two or more — is always eye-popping. For this academic year (2024-2025) the average annual sticker price for a private, four-year college including tuition, housing, food, supplies, transportation and the always mysterious “other” is $62,990, according to the College Board. For a four-year program at a public state university, the average came to $29,910 for in-state students and $49,080 for out-of-staters. The good news: The “net” price of a year of college can be much less, once you account for federal and school aid (both need-based and merit-based), coupled with scholarships and federally subsidized loans. But just how much less depends, among other things, on your family income, how well you’ve strategized withdrawing your savings for college, and — this is key, college experts say — whether your child’s academic performance puts them in a school’s top 25% of incoming freshmen. Another consideration may soon be what Congress will do. House Republicans are considering a proposal that would, among other things, end the subsidized loan program for undergraduates and change the rules for getting Pell grants. Whether the proposal makes it into law is anyone’s guess. But if it does, it will change the calculus for how families fund a college education. That, coupled with confusion over the Trump administration’s expressed desire to dismantle the Department of Education, has in some ways made Beth Walker’s job a little easier. As the author of “Buying College Better” who counsels families on how to financially plan for college years before a child applies anywhere, Walker said, “It’s never been as easy for me to advocate for taking back control of this purchase — and thinking about it with a consumer mindset.” What to do now There are several things you and your kids can do ahead of time to put you in the best position to pay for college. Get good grades and test scores: The better your children do scholastically, the more likely it is they will qualify for merit-based aid. A big key to unlocking merit aid is to get strong standardized test scores (e.g., on the SAT or ACT), said Mike McKinnon, executive director of the National Institute of Certified College Planners. He strongly advises students to study and take practice tests starting as early as middle school to improve their score before they take the official test in 11th or 12th grade. Earn college credits ahead of time: McKinnon also recommends that students try to earn college credits or advance placement in a subject while still in high school. Doing so may let them skip certain required college courses or even graduate early, thereby curbing the total cost for their degree. Among the ways to get that leg up is to take advance placement courses during the school year, college courses during the summer or college-level examination program (CLEP) tests. Check the colleges your child may be interested in attending to see what credits those schools will recognize. At the very least, convey to your kids the value of getting their degree sooner rather than later. Roughly 22% of those earning bachelor’s degrees take longer than that to graduate, according to the Education Data Initiative. Be clear-eyed about your budget: When your child is in 8th or 9th grade, start projecting the financial resources you will have available to pay for college. Todd Fothergill, founder and CEO of Strategies for College, created a free college budgeting calculator called CostHero that lets you input a detailed list of income, savings, expenses and likely federal loans and tax credits to consider when assessing what your family can reasonably afford to pay. It then gives you two budgets based on your inputs — one in which the parents incur no debt and one in which they do. The results will help you frame your thinking about where you might need to save more or spend less. “You can take the time when your student enters high school and get serious about planning for college. Or you can have the colleges and the government give you the plan they have and it’s really expensive,” Fothergill said. Planning for more than one child in college at the same time: Say you have a 7th grader and a 9th grader. You will be dealing with college bills for six years, and doubly large ones during two of those years when both kids are in school simultaneously. So it pays to strategize especially carefully for those overlap years. You want to minimize your income in the “base” years — which is two years ahead of when your child matriculates, Fothergill said. It is information from those two years that is included on the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) form, which is a key form schools consider when determining your aid package. So, for example, if you plan to sell stocks to help pay for tuition, don’t sell them in that two-year window because it may artificially inflate your income during the base years and you may get less aid as a result. Know too that recent changes to FAFSA rules mean that families with two or more kids in school at once get less of a break than they used to, Fothergill noted. Also, not all schools make their aid decisions exclusively using FAFSA. Some use the CSS profile from the College Board to determine how much institutional aid to give. And the rules governing how much a family is expected to contribute using the CSS differ from FAFSA’s. So, before applying anywhere, research what governs aid decisions at schools your child may want to attend. And get your child’s Student Aid Index number, which is generated by the FAFSA form once completed. Start looking for scholarships: There is a wide variety of scholarships available at the national, state and local levels and also at individual schools. So do some research to see which ones might be a good fit for your child. The College Board has a free tool that can get you started. Apply to colleges most likely to give you what you need: There are now many comprehensive, online sites like Niche.com and Dabima.com that let you research every major aspect of a college relevant to potential applicants — from academics and financial aid to school culture — and assess how your child compares to the average student at a chosen school. Niche.com, for instance, provides users with the 25th to 75th percentile range of standardized test scores among students who’ve been admitted. So if your child’s score is above that range you’ll know they would be in the top quartile. And Niche lets you see, based on GPA and test scores, how your child would rank, relative to accepted students. In addition, it offers a list of Best Value Colleges, which considers many factors, including net price for tuition room and board, student-faculty ratio, student reviews, return on investment for a degree and how likely the lowest-income students are to move up the economic ladder after graduation. By the end of this year, Fothergill is planning to make another tool he created called ListHero available to consumers. It is currently used by educational consultants to identify the top list of schools that offer the best fit and education for their clients at the most affordable price for them. While students may still want to apply to “reach” schools, it’s important for families to realize that if their children do get in, it may be a very expensive ride if a child’s academic performance lags that of fellow classmates at the school, Fothergill said. “Colleges don’t invest [aid] money in the bottom quartile.”