Studentaid.gov



PSC-ED-FSA-TISD

Moderator: Christal Simms

October 24, 2017

1:00 pm CT

Coordinator: Welcome and thank you for standing by. At this time, participant will be on a listen only mode throughout the duration of this conference. This call is being recorded. If you have any objections, you may disconnect at this time.

Now, may I introduce your speaker for today (Julian Hyman), please go ahead.

(Julian Hyman): Thank you very much. Good afternoon everyone, thank you very much for joining us in today’s webinar. I will be talking about Eligibility for Federal Student Aid.

Just a couple of things before we get started, if you have any question during the webinar please feel free to type-in in the Q&A box and our team will answer them as soon as they can.

We will also have a few minutes after the presentation to answer any questions you might have.

If you need to upload this presentation, if you go on the upper left hand corner of your screen, you will see the name of this file eligibility for Federal Student Aid and you can upload it into your system. Thank you.

At Federal Student Aid, we helped – we are part of the US Department of Education and we are the largest provider of student financial aid in the nation. Every year we have over $120 billion in federal grants, loans, and work study to help students pursue their educational dream.

So let’s start with some myths and facts on Federal Student Aid. The FAFSA is a free application for Federal Student Aid, one of the myths that we often hear is the fact it takes a really long time to fill out. But in actuality, on average, the fact it takes only about 30 minutes to fill out and it’s actually easier to complete than you think.

Another myth, my parents make too much money so I won’t qualify for aid. In reality, there is no income cutoff to qualify for Federal Student Aid. There are many other factors that are taken into consideration besides the income to determine if you qualify for aid.

And remember when you fill out the FAFSA, the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, you’re also applying for other funds including state funds, academic and education scholarships from your institution and other types of financial assistance. So always fill out your FAFSA.

Another myth, only students with good grades get financial aid. In reality, while a GPA is important for a student to get admitted into a good school and it will also help with academic scholarships, a lot of the financial aid programs don’t take into consideration a student’s GPA.

It is important to maintain satisfactory academic progress in his program of study but Federal Student Aid will help student with an average academic record. So they don’t have to have really good grades to qualify for financial aid.

Another myth, my ethnicity or age makes me ineligible for Federal Student Aid. There are basic eligibility requirements but ethnicity and age are not considered. All of the information that I am sharing here today, you will find at studentaid. and I am providing links for you to go to our website and find more information about the topics that we’re sharing. Also when we respond to your questions, we will try to provide links for the responses.

I support myself so I don’t have to include my parent’s information on the FAFSA. This may not be necessarily true. If you support yourself and file taxes on your own, you may still be considered a dependent student for Federal Student Aid purposes. So we will go through some of the requirements and conditions to be dependent or independent student.

If you are an independent student, you won’t need to include your parent’s information on the FAFSA. But if you are dependent, then you must provide your parent’s information but the fact that we’ll ask a series of questions in order to determine your dependency status. So you can look for more information about dependency in that link dependency.

So who gets aid? So I’m taking all of this information from our website and I’m going to – going through the basic eligibility criteria to show you some of the requirements, basic eligibility requirements to receive Federal Student Aid.

Our basic eligibility requirements are that you must demonstrate financial need and this is for most programs, not all. You must be a US citizen or be an eligible noncitizen, you must have a Social Security Number, there are some exceptions for students from the Republic of the Marshall Islands and other areas. You must be registered with selected service if you are a male student and you must be enrolled or accepted for enrollment as a regular student in an eligible degree or certificate program. Those are the basic eligibility requirements.

In order to qualify for direct loans, you must be enrolled at least halftime in your program of setting. You must maintain satisfactory academic progress in college or in your career school. You must sign the Free Application For Federal Student Aid -- the FAFSA -- and this will state that you are not in default on any federal student loans and you do not owe any money on a federal student grant and that you will use your Federal Student Aid only for educational purposes.

And you will also show that you’re qualified to obtain a college or career school education by having a high school diploma or a GD or that you completed an approved high school or home schooling program. And again, all of this information I’m getting directly from our website. And that you are eligible to enroll in a career pathway program.

Satisfactory Academic Progress, what does this mean? Well, every school has their own standard for Satisfactory Academic Progress toward a degree or a certificate. It’s important for you to check with your school to find out each standard.

Basically, the school’s policy should tell you what GPA you must maintain to be considered in Satisfactory Academic Progress. How quickly you need to be moving towards graduation or how many credits you must be taking every semester, how an incomplete class, withdrawing or repeating the class or even changing majors or transferring credits from other school will affect your satisfactory academic progress.

You need to know how often your school will evaluate your progress. You need to find out what will happen if you fail to make satisfactory academic progress, and you also need to find out whether you are allowed to appeal to your school division if they say that you have not made satisfactory academic progress.

So, all of that is important for you to remain eligible for Federal Student Aid. If the school decides that you are no longer eligible for Federal Student Aid, you also need to find out how you can regain eligibility.

So here’s some quick links for qualifying for Federal Student Aid. So if you need more information on any of the basic topics here, you can click on those. But I am reviewing most of the topics or most of the information under those topics.

So what is an eligible non-US citizen? A US national which includes natives of the American Samoa or Swains Island, a US permanent resident or someone who holds on an I-151, I-551 or 551C with a permanent resident card or an individual who has an I-94 from US citizenship and immigration services showing one of the following, either refugee, asylum granted, Cuban/Haitian entrant or status pending, conditional entrant, victims of human-trafficking or holders of the T-visa either a T-2, T-3 or T-4 or the holder of – or a child of T-visa holder or a parolee.

So any of these people are considered eligible non-US citizens and may apply for Federal Student Aid.

We have an additional list here. If you are a “battered immigrant-qualified alien” who is a victim of abuse by a citizen or permanent resident spouse or if you are the child of a person designated as such under the VAWA act or the Violence Against Women Act. If you are a citizen of the Federated States of Micronesia, the Republic of the Marshal Island, or the Republic of Palau. If this is the case, then you may be eligible for certain types of Federal Student Aid.

So here is information on what type of aid is available for those specific citizens and certain Native American students born in Canada with a status under the Jay Treaty of 1789 may also be eligible for Federal Student Aid. So to get a full listing of all of the people that are considered eligible non-US citizens and may qualify to apply for Federal Student Aid, I recommend that you go to our website. And again you can go look at these links right here for non-US citizens.

Staying eligible, so remember once you’re in school or career school, just because you qualify for the first semester to obtain Federal Student Aid doesn’t mean that you will always remain eligible.

It’s important for you to make sure that you stay eligible for Federal Student Aid by paying attention to a few things including keeping track of your graduation and the requirements to get to graduation and also, by remembering to apply for Federal Student Aid every year by filling out the Free Application for Federal Student Aid every October 1 or after October 1 every year.

So we’ll go over a few frequently asked questions. If I have been granted Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals or DACA, am I eligible for Federal Student Aid? Undocumented students including DACA recipients are not eligible for Federal Student Aid but you may still be eligible for state or college aid in addition to private scholarships.

It’s very important to check with your college or your career school and their financial aid office for more information on what type of financial aid may be available for you.

If I have been granted DACA, should I still complete the FAFSA? You should check with your high school counselor or the financial aid office at your institution to see whether you should complete the FAFSA and how they want for you to complete the FAFSA and if that’s the way to apply for state and college student aid.

To begin with, in order to fill out the FAFSA, you must enter your Social Security Number. While completing the FAFSA, you must answer the “Are you a U.S. citizen?” question with “No, I am not a citizen or eligible noncitizen.” After submitting the FAFSA, you should check with your college’s financial aid office to see what types of financial aid you may be eligible to receive.

Very, very frequently asked question is, does my parents’ citizenship or immigration status affect my eligibility for aid? No, absolutely not. Your parents’ citizenship or immigration status does not affect your eligibility for Federal Student Aid. In fact, the Free Application for Federal Student Aid or the FAFSA doesn’t even ask about your parents’ immigration status.

So what if I have documentation that isn’t listed above? If that’s the case, then you are not an eligible noncitizen and cannot receive Federal Student Aid. So then that’s where you – if your school determines that you should fill out the FAFSA, that’s where you would fill it out as not an eligible citizen.

Some examples of that case would be if you only have a notice of approval to apply for permanent residency but do not have the permanent residency yet or if you are in the US on an F-1 or F-2 nonimmigrant student visa or a J-1, J-2 nonimmigrant exchange visitor visa or if you hold any G series visa pertaining to international organization.

If I’m not an eligible noncitizen, can I get any type of financial aid to study in the US? Yes, there may be some scholarships and other aid you can get. You can check with your country’s embassy or consulate here in the US or with the appropriate government office back in your country to see if they offer anything.

I know sometimes the consulate sent out press releases to the school of scholarships that students may qualify for. Also we have a link on our website on that takes you directly to the US Department of Labor’s free online scholarship search that you can use to look for scholarship.

You should also ask the school or the career school that you are planning to attend whether they offer any type of scholarships for students like you and you can also check out the EducationUSA website for scholarships that you can apply for.

Let’s go through a little bit about information on dependency status. So when I fill out the FAFSA, who’s my parent? Dependent students are required to report parents’ information on their FAFSA. So for this purposes, parent means your legal, the biological or adopted parents or stepparents or a person that the state has determined to be your legal parent.

So here’s a guide that you can use to determine the students’ dependency status. But again all this information is found on our website if you need more explanation.

So here’s a little infograph that shows you, that helps you to determine if you are a dependent or independent student or whose information you should include as your parent. So you can follow this infograph to determine if you need to report any parental information.

It’s important to understand that that the following people are not your parents unless they have legally adopted you. A widowed stepparents, grandparents, foster parents, legal guardians, older brothers or sisters or aunts or uncles. All of this information is found on our website. But if you’re still not sure who you can report as a parent, you could call our 1-800-4-FED-AID (800-433-3243 number to get more guidance. And here we give you the exact link of where to go to find out more about dependency.

Applying for aid. Every year on October 1, the FAFSA opens up. So this is the information that you will need to gather to apply for Federal Student Aid. Your Social Security Number, your Alien Registration Number if that applies to you, federal tax information or tax return, any records of untaxed income that may not have been included in the tax return. All of your information about your bank accounts and any information on investments other than the home in which you live.

So, the principal residence is not counted as an investment. If you don’t have all this information when the FAFSA opens or when you’re ready to fill out the FAFSA, you could start filling out the FAFSA and save it. And then once you have all this information to report, you can come back into the FAFSA and finish it.

So the fastest and easiest way to fill out the FAFSA is electronically at . Depending on your eligibility status, you may have to fill out a paper FAFSA. For example, there are some schools that require undocumented or DACA students to fill out their FAFSA on a paper form. So you could go to our website and print it out and then turn it into your financial aid office.

So if you – if that is the case, you can take it directly to your financial aid office or mail it in for processing however they determine that it needs to be done. But what’s so important for you to do is check financial aid deadline.

Each state and each school has its own FAFSA deadline. So look at there at the school’s financial aid website to look at what their deadline is. And if you want to find out the state’s deadline to turn in the FAFSA for State Financial Aid, you can go to deadlines and you can – it’ll link you to the state of your residency and it will tell you when the financial aid deadline is for that state.

So when do you submit the FAFSA? Every year, the FAFSA launches on October 1. The FAFSA must be completed every year that you are attending school.

Again, it’s very important to find out what your state and your college financial aid deadline is and most of the time, the earlier you fill out the FAFSA the better. So here’s a little table that will tell you – that will give you some detail on when to fill out the FAFSA and which year’s tax information is required.

So for current high school seniors that will be graduating in May or June of 2018 and will be attending college or university in August of 2018, let’s go down to the third row. So they will be attending college from July 1, 2018 to June 30, 2019.

So they will be submitting the FAFSA that just opened up on October 1. This is the 2018, 19 FAFSA. That FAFSA can be submitted from October 1, 2017 to June 30, 2019 using income and tax return information from 2016.

So again, current seniors that will be attending college in August of 2018 can fill out the current 2018/19 FAFSA with the tax return and income information for 2016.

I’m going to share some resources and again, I’d like to remind you if you have any questions that we can answer for you, please feel free and type them in and we will answer them for you.

So I’m going to share some of the resources that are available to you on Federal Student Aid. We have some helpful guides we print out periodically.

The first one we have here listed is the Federal Student Aid for adult students. This will give information about financial aid for adult students. We have a resource guide; it’s called financial aid and undocumented students. This will give information about financial aid for undocumented student. So you can go on here to those links and you can download those PDFs for your use.

And if you haven’t already done so, you can like Federal Student Aid’s Facebook page. This is our Facebook page and a lot of the current information and activities and the announcements, any of that information is normally shared as our status in a very timely manner.

Also we are on Twitter, on Twitter you can follow us on Twitter, it’s @FAFSA. So here is where we have a lot of interaction with students and parents and anybody that has information about the FAFSA, about Federal Student Aid, about deadlines, even technical information or instructions are mentioned on Twitter.

Every month we have an office hour where we are live answering your questions with #fafsa or #askfafsa. So you can follow us and get all this information from Twitter.

And we are also available on YouTube and we have been answering questions that we are receiving on YouTube. Any time we have new videos that will help you, give you information about the overview as a financial aid process, how to apply for your FSA ID, how to apply for the FAFSA. Any of those videos that we have you can find them on YouTube for your use.

And here is our Federal Student Aid information center. In this page, you will find a lot of the frequently asked questions that we already have answers for. And if you don’t find your answers here, you can always email us, you can chat with us live during normal business hours or you can call us. And we have very flexible long business hours. I believe, it’s from 8 am to 10 pm everyday excluding holidays. So we are always ready to answer your questions.

And that’s all we have for this webinar today. Again, I’m going to have a few minutes. I know we have a few minutes, if you have any questions for us, after the webinar, we will have a very short survey that we’d like for you to just take a couple of minutes to respond to.

Let’s see if we have few questions here, coming in.

What is the status for adopted students is, one of the questions. Status for adopted students, well again, adopted students would be considered a non-eligible noncitizen. So depending on the college or university, they may or may not be required to submit a paper FAFSA.

So it just depends on what college or university they will be attending but as far as receiving Federal Financial Aid, DACA students are not eligible to receive Federal Financial Aid. But they are eligible to receive other types of assistance depending on the college or university that they attend.

There are also some scholarships and in the resource guide that I shared here, we do share some resources of places where undocumented students and DACA students may apply for scholarship.

All right, another question we have is, I have to do the FAFSA every year but will I just maintain eligibility every year or how do I figure out if my eligibility is in jeopardy? Again, as we’ve mentioned earlier, it’s very important for you to look at your school, your college or university to see what they need or what the requirements are for that school, for you to remain in satisfactory academic standards.

For example, one college or university may say that you must have a B average. Some may say that you need at least a D average so, and I’m just being hypothetical here so it’s – everything depends on that individual school to determine if you are eligible to, or if you are in satisfactory academic standard.

If you lose Federal Student Aid eligibility, for example, if you are default of a federal student loan or if you don’t maintain satisfactory academic progress or if you are convicted of a drug offence, then you must go back to your school to see how you need to regain eligibility.

How does an undocumented student complete a FAFSA without a Social Security Number? So I know for example, some universities in Texas have students fill out a paper FAFSA and turn it into the school financial aid office, they also have a Texas Financial Aid application it’s called the TASFA. So every college or university may require them to fill out a FAFSA but normally it would be a paper FAFSA turned in directly to the school.

Another question that we have here, do parents need their own password and do parents and students have to fill out their own FAFSA or a combined FAFSA?

So the first response, the password, the FSA ID, yes. If the student is a dependent student then yes. One of the parents does need an FSA ID. The student will need an FSA ID and the parent will need an FSA ID. It will be only one FAFSA that is completed.

So it’s one FAFSA per student and if the student is a dependent student, then there will be two FSA IDs, one for the student and one for the FAFSA. And this will be – the FSA ID will be used to sign the FAFSA and it’s only the students’ FAFSA but there is a student section in that student FAFSA and there’s the parents’ section in that student FAFSA. And this is only if the student is considered a dependent student.

So thank you for those questions. And let’s see, do we have any other questions? Are graduate students eligible for federal aid? We recommend that every student apply for the FAFSA every year. Graduate students are eligible for student loans and in order to obtain student loans, you must complete the FAFSA every year. So yes, graduate students are eligible to apply for Federal Student Aid.

Where do you find the school, college codes? Well, the school or the college FAFSA codes are found on the college or university’s financial aid website. So you could go there and look for those schools. Also, if you’re completing the FAFSA and you are unsure of the code, we have a field, when you’re entering the field in the FAFSA; you can enter up to 10 colleges or universities.

We will try and help you find the school codes. So we will ask you the city if you know the city, the state, if you know part of the school name. So we will ask you those questions to help you find the college FAFSA codes or college or university code.

Let’s see, any other questions? Again, let me go back to our Federal Student Aid information center. Our main phone number, if you have any questions, you can go here to this website or you can call us at 1-800-4-FED-AID.

If you have no more questions, thank you very much for attending this webinar. Thank you for – we have another question.

Let’s see, if you inherit a trust from a deceased parent, does that affect your ability to qualify for scholarship? The majority of scholarships, each scholarship normally is funded by a donor – a person or a foundation or a business organization determine the qualification requirements for that scholarship.

So if this scholarship has for example, financial needs as a requirement, then this may disqualify you from that specific scholarship. But again, every individual scholarship has their own qualification requirement.

At Federal Student Aid, we do not have scholarships. We have grants, loans and work study. But as far as scholarship, that is all determined by the specific donor for that scholarship.

Thank you very much for your participation, thank you for all your questions. This webinar will end right after you answer the survey questions.

Thank you very much.

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