As this website has already discussed in several prior articles, many factors are evaluated when determining if a student is eligible for financial aid. For instance, a family’s income and savings is often used to calculate how much money a family can be expected to contribute to a child’s tuition. In addition, the number of children a family has in college at the same time can also impact financial aid determinations. Since families cannot contribute as much to educational expenses if they have multiple children in school at once, having siblings can help with financial aid.
I am a triplet, and my situation shows how having siblings can help with financial aid. All of my brothers and I graduated high school at the same time, and all of us enrolled in college at around the same time as well. Although we chose to attend different schools, we all began college within weeks of each other and graduated around the same time as well.
On all of our financial aid paperwork, we disclosed that we were triplets and all of us would be in school at the same time. As a result, colleges reasoned that our family only had a fraction of the resources that a family might have if only one child from a family was in college at once. As a result, all of my triplet brothers and myself experienced a serious windfall simply by virtue of the fact that we were multiples.
In addition, even if you are not a twin or a triplet, having siblings can help with financial aid. For instance, as mentioned in prior articles, along with being a triplet, I also have twin older brothers who are about six years older than my triplet brothers and me. When each of my brothers and I attended our first year of college, our older brother was in law school.
When we filled out financial aid paperwork, we conveyed how our brother would be in law school at the same time that we were in college, and as a result, the finances of our family would be impacted. This reality may have also helped each of my brothers and myself to obtain financial aid to pursue our undergraduate degrees. As a result, having siblings can help with financial aid, even if your siblings are not the same year as you in school, and perhaps even if they pursue graduate degrees while you pursue a college degree.
As my personal experience shows, having siblings can help with financial aid only if all of the children of a family are in school at the same time. Of course, it rarely makes sense to coordinate matriculation into a school just to assist with financial aid decisions. Students usually wish to attend college immediately after graduating high school, and others also choose to attend graduate school at specific times in their careers.
Nevertheless, there may be times when people have flexibility in when they attend school. For instance, many people have some flexibility over when they attend law school, since they may be working a job in the meantime, and wish to interrupt their career sometime in the future to head back to school. In these circumstances, it might make sense to coordinate attending school at the same time as siblings so that everyone has the best chance possible of earning more financial aid in school.
Having siblings can help with financial aid, since your brothers and sisters can provide valuable support and information on reducing educational costs. Since my older brothers had attended college and law school before me, they told me valuable information on how much school costs and ways that people can cover these expenses. Although my older brothers did not obtain financial aid for college, their example still helped me conceptualize what would be needed for me to reduce my educational expenses to attend college.
Furthermore, siblings can provide emotional support when it comes to financing college and graduate school. It can be easy to believe that your troubles are unique to your own situation, and that other people do not need to experience the issues that you face. Indeed, people usually do not talk about educational expenses, so it can be hard to swap stories about dealing with student debt and find support from friends and colleagues.
However, having siblings can help with financial aid, since they can provide vital support to emotional assist each other when dealing with student debt. Indeed, my triplet brothers and myself talked about student loans frequently throughout college and graduate school, and it was important to have this emotional support. Individuals can share stories with siblings and ask for advice from brothers and sisters in ways not possible with other individuals, and this emotional support can be really important to dealing with financial aid and student loans.
All told, we all know how siblings can help each other out and provide valuable emotional support throughout childhood and beyond. I personally have four brothers and they demonstrate how having siblings can help with financial aid. Siblings can lower the estimated family contribution of a student because families have less resources to provide any one child if multiple children are in schools at once. In addition, siblings can provide valuable information and emotional support needed to contend with the challenges of paying for college.