college..financial aid? please help.?

Rodolfo Merel: Tink:There is no "income cutoff" for financial aid, and in fact, Bill Gates' children are eligible for "financial aid", if they were to decide to apply for it when they get to college age.There are MANY factors that determine your eligibility for financial aid - if your eligibility was determined by your parents' annual income, the financial aid application (the "FAFSA") would be 2 questions long. "What is your name, and how much did your mom and dad earn last year?"When you actually sit down with the FAFSA, you'll see that it's 104 questions long - and nearly every bit of information that you provide in those 104 responses is used to determine your financial aid eligibility.You'll see that there are topics there that you haven't even hinted at in your question - things like "How many brothers and sisters you have", "Whether any of them go to school", "What taxes your parents paid last year", "Whether you had any income last year", "What kinds of savings an! d investments do your parents have", and lots, lots more.Even if your parents earned a few million dollars last year, you would STILL qualify for at least two forms of federal student aid - access to the Stafford lending program for you, and access to the PLUS lending program for your parents. If you don't understand how loans can be a form of financial aid, it's only because you haven't tried to apply for any other type of student loan yet. The government's Stafford and PLUS programs ARE available - you'll need a lot of luck and some extraordinarily good credit to find any other lenders making student loans right now. (Plus, the government's loans are much cheaper).So - no - there is no cut-off for financial aid. The only way to determine what forms of aid you qualify for is to complete the entire FAFSA application. When you do that, the Department of Education will use your information to calculate an Expected Family Contribution score for you, and that EFC will be used t! o determine what forms of aid you are eligible for.For more in! fo, I highly recommend the really helpful Department of Education booklet called "Funding Education Beyond High School: The Guide to Federal Student Aid". You can either read it here: http://studentaid.ed.gov/students/attachments/site... or you can ask your Guidance office for a hard copy.Good luck to you....Show more