You may have already heard of the government’s updated “College Scorecard.” This Scorecard compiles data from two-year and four-year schools nationally so that you may compare colleges’ annual cost, graduation rates, and average salary for students post-graduation. Also, the Scorecard site will calculate your family’s eligibility for federal student aid by calculating your Expected Family Contribution, or EFC, that critical number that is used to determine just how much federal aid you will receive for college.
Certainly as a parent planning for college, you will gladly welcome any type of information you can get your hands on that will help make the college planning process easier for you to understand and navigate through. If you are like so many parents, you feel overwhelmed and downright clueless about how to even begin to plan and save for your child’s higher level education.
You and your child want to make the best academic selection of school, but you don’t want your choice to break the bank. Also, you realize that so many financial options exist out there: financial aid, scholarships, loans — but what exactly are they? How are they different, and how do they really work?
Faced with such a momentous decision that will impact not only your child’s academic experience and future career, but will also directly impact your family’s financial health, no wonder you are overwhelmed!
Fortunately, My Tuition Score is available to you, the college planning parent. My Tuition Score is an online service that provides you with a quantifiable measure, your Tuition Score, of your financial preparedness for college. You probably already have experience with your credit score. You know that a high credit score means that your financial health is mostly likely in check, and that you have more freedom to make important financial decisions.
You also probably know that if your credit score is not as high as you would like, you can take actionable steps to improve it. Similarly, your Tuition Score, completely personalized to you, lets you know just how your family fares financially given your child’s desired school of choice.
The Tuition Score is valuable in its own right, but My Tuition Score offers so much more – it offers a wealth of information that will save you many hours of research, confusion, and frustration, and delivers all of this information instantly to you. Most importantly, since this information is tailored to your family’s unique situation, it gives you the peace of mind that only personal guidance can bring.
So what exactly does My Tuition Score offer, and how is it different than the College Scorecard? Simply put, My Tuition Score provides you information that is meaningful because it is personal. While the College Scorecard offers the hard, cold data you can use to compare schools, it’s the same data that all users across the Web will see.
My Tuition Score is different. After entering in some financial information, you will not only receive your Tuition Score to indicate how attainable your school choice is financially, you will also receive an in-depth report written specifically for you.
This report provides you with a complete view of your family’s financial obligations to your desired school, given the school’s costs, generosity (that is, its willingness and ability to knock down the price), and your ability to pay for them. You can quickly get a sense of how prepared, or unprepared, you are for the college investment.
For example, let’s say, after viewing your report, you realize that your child’s first choice of school is not very generous, and the school’s annual costs are just too high. Understandably, you feel discouraged!
Not to despair, the report will also show you nine other colleges in your selected area that offer more generosity than your desired school. Seeing how your school stacks up against others in its generosity is instant, and this alone could have an immediate impact on your decision.
The report also provides many invaluable hints to further guide users in the planning process, such as practical steps you can take to raise your tuition score, how to select the best schools based on your GPA and SAT/ACT scores, and what your best course of action is for saving based on your existing saving efforts and asset valuation.
The report even offers helpful suggestions to help your family lower monthly household expenses to allow for more financial freedom for college along the way.
Along with the report, My Tuition Score also offers two comprehensive manuals: a scholarship manual and a loan manual. If you are new to college planning, you, like countless other parents, may feel totally clueless about the different scholarships and loans that are available to college students.
Poring over the various college-related books and websites to try to understand all of them would take you many hours of time, and the sheer number of options would be overwhelming, to say the least. Using real-world examples, My Tuition Score guides you through the many scholarship and loan options in a clear, easy-to-understand way, all in one place.
While the personal guidance of My Tuition Score’s report and manuals will itself ease your mind as you embark on the college-planning journey, My Tuition Score extends that guidance even further by offering access to your very own College Concierge.
This means you’ll get 30-day online access to a real-live college planning professional who will help answer any and all of your college planning questions.
The prospect of your child attending college is a truly exciting one – one filled with anticipation and endless promise – but, actually planning for it and making it happen is another thing entirely.
With more than 4,700 colleges and universities to choose from in the United States alone, it’s no wonder you, as a parent, feel overwhelmed. Colleges seem exorbitantly expensive. The financial aid process seems so complex. So many scholarship and loan options abound.
Your emotions quickly turn from excitement to dread. Many college-planning resources exist to educate the public about the college selection, application, and planning process. But only My Tuition Score delivers reassuring, personal guidance designed specifically for you and your family.
