Tag Archives : Financial Aid

If you’re already wondering how you will be able to pay for that MBA or JD that you’re pursuing, earlier this year the federal government made an announcement that might be of interest to you. Under the government’s Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) program, you may qualify for forgiveness of the remaining balance due on your eligible federal student loans after you have made 120 payments on certain loans while employed full time by certain public service employers.

Students owe it to themselves to consider the true cost and the true reward of the educational opportunity before them. It is has been said that borrowing money to pay for school is an “investment” and not debt, but try telling that to the loan services when they send out the monthly bill.

Last week we announced our new Veritas Prep Guide to Financial Aid, a free resource for new admits or anyone else who’s thinking ahead and wondering how they’ll pay for their graduate degree. We spend most of our time working with applicants who are stressed about just getting into school; how to pay for it is considered a “nice problem to have.” Once you are faced with this problem, however, it will likely hit you like a ton of bricks, so it pays to start thinking ahead and familiarize yourself with the financial aid landscape.

Grad school applicants spend countless hours stressing over the admissions processing and wondering about whether or not they’ll get in, but they tend to forget their next-biggest source of anxiety: If they do get in, how will they pay for the whole thing? To take some of the mystery out of the financial aid process, we’ve just released The Veritas Prep Guide to Graduate School Financial Aid.

In another sign of economic stress, Harvard has announced that its $36.9 billion endowment may face “unprecedented” losses in the coming year.

While a Harvard spokeperson declined to comment specifically on how the anticipated losses would affect university operations, the university has confirmed that it will continue to offer free tuition to students whose families earn less than $60,000 a year, and offer reduced tuition to families with annual incomes of as much as $180,000.

In the wake of the credit crisis, one question that has been top of mind for many prospective law students is whether the hefty loans relied upon by so many will, in fact, be available when it comes time to cut the check to the old office of the bursar.

The loan packages required to attend an elite law often soar well above $100,000 in total and are typically cobbled together through a variety of government-backed loans (Stafford, Perkins, and PLUS) and private loans. Given the way loans are drying up in other markets and industries, it was a reasonable question to wonder if they would still be there for students.

Obviously, one of the primary factors that govern a graduate school applicant’s enrollment decision is The Almighty Dollar. As in: how much will this cost, what kind of aid can I get, and what sort of earning potential am I looking at once I finish? Analyzing educational cost is a complicated task because students must first identify actual numbers (sticker price – available scholarship and grant money) and then put those numbers in the proper context by understanding loan repayment and properly estimating future salary figures.