Educational Avenues

The Cost Of Attendance (COA) is a fixed amount that colleges use to award aid to students. Students with additional costs can appeal for more aid, if, for example, they are having to travel, or buy more expensive textbooks, or incur more costs due to a disability. The point is that the COA is fixed and financial aid administrators would be "over-awarding" by going over this amount. However, during this COVID-19 pandemic more families need to appeal if their financial situation changed. After all, the financial information that colleges receive is from the prior-prior tax year. The virus has turned the world upside down, and many families are not in the same financial situation as two years ago.

Corona Virus forces Universities to teach online.
Compelled to close their campuses to limit the spread of coronavirus, U.S. universities with Chinese branches move at lightning speed to take teaching online.

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2020/02/25/coronavirus-forces-us-universities-online-china?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=43c58e35d2-DNU_2019_COPY_02&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-43c58e35d2-199400937&mc_cid=43c58e35d2&mc_eid=4bc3b05686

Coronavirus forces U.S. universities online in China

Today’s article on WSJ underlies the stress and anxiety of wealthy parents over the high costs of elite colleges. https://www.wsj.com/articles/college-financial-aid-loophole-wealthy-parents-transfer-guardianship-of-their-teens-to-get-aid-11564450828?shareToken=st5e714eb494f843528413efe52293d1f2&reflink=article_email_share

Claire Law’s comments to Doug Belkin's coverage:
I read the WSJ article about parents gaming the system with transferring guardianship of their kids. Wow. That takes some nerve! However, I must admit that I felt for the woman who had exhausted her home equity to pay for her older kids’ college and now was transferring her last child’s guardianship to a friend, thus giving him “independent status” , thus resulting in a less expensive cost of attendance. I just wonder if colleges’ Strategic Enrollment Management - which is legal – sends a message to parents that if colleges can leverage financial aid to get parents to pay, then parents can do what’s legal in order to leverage their funds, limit their borrowing, and preserve their sanity. Interestingly, these parents are shopping for the most expensive colleges. Their perception may be that these are the only colleges worth going to, a result of college’s SEM, marketing, enrollment management strategies that colleges employ to manipulate supply-demand and desirability of their product that is sold in less than transparent manners.
I work with many families, from millionaires to poverty-line, Pell eligible students. I’ve never thought nor seen this level of gaming the system where a parent puts their child into guardianship. What level of desperation are they in? What amount of federal PLUS loans and private alternative loans are they struggling to pay back? Nevertheless, that “guardianship” strategy is not one they could think of on their own. These families are being coached by a forensic expert in the law of financial aid.
You could argue that an 18 year old is considered independent when it’s time to go to war and maybe die for the country. But they can’t go to college as independent students until they’re 24 years of age.
If SEM and the leveraging of financial aid is ethically wrong, so is changing guardianship for the sake of getting more aid. Two wrongs don’t make a right, even though they’re both legal.

College Financial-Aid Loophole: Wealthy Parents Transfer Guardianship of Their Teens to Get Aid The Education Department is looking into a tactic that has been used in some Chicago suburbs, in which wealthy parents transfer legal guardianship of their college-bound children to relatives or friends so the teens can claim financial aid.

At the IECA Spring Conference in Chicago I met former Secretary of the Department of Education, Arnie Duncan. He said he supports of education, any type, proprietary et al, as long as it's good education and truly helps students. He didn't address the large loan debt that borrowers shoulder just to get a college degree.

National College Advocacy Group visits Princeton University

College admission and financial aid keep changing and yet remain the same. Federal procedure and institutional missions mutate each year but the need for families to educate their kids in away that is affordable doesn't change.

The mind is not a vessel that needs filling, but but wood that needs igniting. Plutarch AD 46- AD 120

We're organizing a community forum on Teens & Substance Abuse at Bishop England High School (Daniel Island, SC) on Nov 29, 2016. Come join us! http://thedanielislandnews.com/news/exploring-disease-addiction

Exploring the disease of addiction | The Daniel Island News Exploring the disease of addiction Wed, 11/16/2016 - 8:27am admin By: Claire LawAddiction is an equal opportunity offender. It creeps in and hides under our very eyes. It doesn’t matter whether one is well-to-do or poor or on skid-row. It doesn’t matter if a person is faced with jail if he or she do...

http://www.stirjournal.com/2016/04/01/i-know-why-poor-whites-chant-trump-trump-trump/
This article provides insightful commentary of the history of the American poor class.

I Know Why Poor Whites Chant Trump, Trump, Trump From the era of slavery to the rise of Donald Trump, wealthy elites have relied on the loyalty of poor whites.