{"id":152,"date":"2011-09-26T09:00:30","date_gmt":"2011-09-26T13:00:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/takingthenextstep.com\/cms\/?p=152"},"modified":"2014-11-19T15:16:16","modified_gmt":"2014-11-19T20:16:16","slug":"financial-calculators","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/takingthenextstep.com\/cm\/financial-calculators\/","title":{"rendered":"Financial Calculators"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/takingthenextstep.com\/cms\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/11\/Financial-Aid-Calculator.pdf\" target=\"_blank\">Read the entire article<\/a><\/p>\n<p>The [financial] calculators will also lay bare some institutions&#8217; methods for distributing financial aid and could lead to conversations about how those methods reflect colleges&#8217; values. Students &mdash; and parents, faculty members, board members or anyone else &mdash; can experiment with the calculator to see whether an improvement in test scores or grades, or a change in a family&#8217;s financial status, would make a significant difference. And prospective students can do the same at other colleges where they might apply, leading to an increase in comparison shopping and making a competitive financial aid policy important earlier in the process than it might otherwise have been. &#8220;This is a win for the consumer, and I think long-term it&#8217;s a win for institutions that actually do provide competitive financial aid,&#8221; said Daniel Lugo, dean of admission and financial aid at Franklin &amp; Marshall College, which recently launched its calculator for need-based aid. &#8220;There&#8217;s going to be a shaking out. There are a lot of places that maybe on paper, from their sticker price, look like an affordable choice. Once people see what their package looks like, they&#8217;re going to get the truth about their institution.&#8221; In the past, the details of financial aid awards &mdash; or even their broad outlines &mdash; were available to only the admissions and financial aid offices. With the calculator, and some curiosity and persistence, anyone could put together a chart of how aid is awarded, generally speaking: the difference between the award for a wealthy but high-achieving student versus an average student with more financial need, or the monetary value of a tenth of a grade point or 100 points on the SAT.<\/p>\n<p><strong><em>Be sure to read the <a href=\"http:\/\/takingthenextstep.com\/cms\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/11\/Financial-Aid-Calculator.pdf\" target=\"_blank\">whole article<\/a> on a new federal requirement that colleges display &#8220;net price calculators,&#8221; which prospective students can use to estimate how much they will have to pay after federal or institutional grants.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Read the entire article The [financial] calculators will also lay bare some institutions&#8217; methods for distributing financial aid and could lead to conversations about how those methods reflect colleges&#8217; values. Students &mdash; and parents, faculty members, board members or anyone else &mdash; can experiment with the calculator to see whether an improvement in test scores [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/takingthenextstep.com\/cm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/152"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/takingthenextstep.com\/cm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/takingthenextstep.com\/cm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/takingthenextstep.com\/cm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/takingthenextstep.com\/cm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=152"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/takingthenextstep.com\/cm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/152\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":154,"href":"https:\/\/takingthenextstep.com\/cm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/152\/revisions\/154"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/takingthenextstep.com\/cm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=152"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/takingthenextstep.com\/cm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=152"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/takingthenextstep.com\/cm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=152"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}