A family we used to work with called us this week with questions about what her two senior daughters need to be doing right now to get prepared for college. My best advice is to start soon because the next three months are paramount to determining how much financial aid and scholarships you will attain, whether you get accepted to the schools of your choice, and your academic placement within those schools. Also, be careful of unintended financial mistakes that even school guidance counselors will ENCOURAGE your children to make. We are here to help:)
Most Pertinent Deadline: Last ACT registration is September 27
If you want to go to UT, or plenty of other large schools, the final application deadline is December 1st. Therefore, the last ACT you can take to have the results back in time is the October 26th ACT, and the deadline to sign up for it is September 27th. To sign up for the ACT go to http://www.actstudent.org/regist/ . Even if you aren’t going to UT, it would be worth your time to check out the deadlines of the application for the schools you are hoping to attend. Most will be much sooner than you realize, and you will need to register for the ACT/SAT about two months prior to that.
The best and easiest scholarship for East-Tennessee students: Deadline October 4th
If you are thinking about going to a community college, TN Achieves is the best scholarship that is currently available to Tennessee students. TN Achieves will pay for your entire first two years of community college tuition (up to $4000 a year), and there are no student required academics, financial need, or any other previously accomplished requirements to get accepted. Currently, every student who applies gets the scholarship. (There is a list of eligible high schools, but if you are reading this, you probably go to one of them). TN Achieves informs on their website that preference will be given to first generation college students, and students with financial need, but there has not been a year yet where more students have applied than they had scholarships to award. Therefore, every student who applies gets this scholarship. Of course you can lose the scholarship if you don’t do the requirements after receiving it, but they are not challenging. Check out their website to learn more about how it all works, and be aware that they are very strict about the October 4th deadline for the application. www.tnachieves.org
The easiest way to get more money for all schools: filling out your FAFSA by February 1st
The FAFSA is the application necessary to receive financial aid for college. It determines your families expected contribution. Most financial aid pages range from $15,000- $60,000 over a 4 year period. Even if you have a family income of more than $100,000 per year, you could still be eligible for financial aid (2% of families who received financial aid in 2009 made more than $100,000 that year), and the Hope Scholarship Tax Credit is available all the way up to families who make $180,000 a year. Subsidized student loans, which are available to most any income bracket, still require the FAFSA to be filled out. Regardless of your income, if you fill out the FAFSA, you will probably receive financial benefits of at least some kind.
If you want to get the most money out of the FAFSA, it would be wise to fill it out before February 1st. There are many different allotments of money that FAFSA dishes out (including Grants, Loans, and Work Studies) that are awarded on a FIRST COME FIRST SERVE BASIS, not on merit. They start accepting applications on January 1st. To be able to fill out the FAFSA, parent’s taxes need to be complete. This requires time and planning to have all of this done and submitted, so we recommend starting planning now. To fill out the FAFSA go to www.FAFSA.gov
The SMART student financial trap: Graduating in December
It may already be too late for you at this point, but, most of the time, it is a financial mistake to Graduate in December. If you can get out of it, we recommend you look into doing that. It is only a mistake if you plan on starting college in the spring. Colleges do not give out as many scholarships to students starting in the spring, and you will not be eligible for many of the scholarships that most students get who start in the fall. This is not a commonly known fact, and many guidance counselors will encourage students to graduate in December.
If you want to be done with high school, we recommend doing dual enrollment in the Spring instead of actually graduating. That way most of your classes will be paid for by the grant, you are still taking college classes that you will get credit for, and you will still be considered a first time freshman when you start in the Fall. Some of the colleges you are attending will offer dual enrollment classes, so you can actually be doing dual enrollment at the school of your choice, and still get all the benefits of being classified as a first time freshman in the Fall. If you have doubts as to how much money you will be losing by starting in the spring, call the admissions councilors at the school you hope to attend, and ask them about this issue. To learn more about this topic, you can also check out our blog http://goo.gl/48QsVP .
This is by no means a complete list of deadlines, but these are some of the biggest ones that affect acceptance and financial aid. If you have any questions about anything in the admissions process, please call us anytime. We don’t have all of the answers, but we almost always know who to call or where to look, or if we don’t, we are happy to look into it for free. Thanks again for taking the time to read this, we hope you found the information useful.
Bobby Nicholson
Team Leader
Outlier’s Advantage: Knoxville In-Home Tutoring
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