Webinar: A Counselor's Guide to Financial Aid Appeals

Presenters: Dr. Mark Salisbury & Erin Hack

A hot topic in the counseling world right now is how to help students and families appeal for more financial aid when their award letter comes up short with what they need to pay for college.  Now more than ever, colleges are willing to say “yes” to appeals for more financial aid and scholarship money.  This workshop provides detailed guidance for counselors on how to help students and their families appeal to colleges for more financial aid and how to improve the likelihood of a successful appeal.   According to Sallie Mae, only 29% of families who received a financial aid offer from a college appealed for more aid but 71% of those appeals were approved, leading to higher grant amounts in most cases.  This workshop will give you the training and confidence you need to support students and families with the college financial aid appeal process.   "A Counselor's Guide to Financial Aid Appeals" will be presented by My College Planning Team, a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization that partners with counselors to help families minimize their costs and maximize their value at the right college for their students. 

Learning Objectives:

• Learn the differences between the three main cases for an appeal (need, merit and competition).  Strategies will be taught covering each of these areas.

• Understand what an appeal looks like from the perspective of the college.  Being successful in appealing for a better price requires having better information.  One set of information that can really help is just knowing the way things look from the perspective of the other side of the table, the college. 

• Gain a simple "how-to" guide to use with families when appealing for a better financial aid package.

Mark Salisbury is a nationally-renowned author, speaker, educator, and champion of college price transparency as a primary way to simplify and improve the college admissions process. His work has been highlighted by the New York Times, Forbes, NBC, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and NPR. In addition, he is a regular guest on a myriad of podcasts addressing college admissions and the higher education industry. Mark earned his PhD from the University of Iowa and holds additional degrees from the University of Minnesota and the University of Kansas. Before launching the TuitionFit project (tuitionfit.org) to empower the public by crowdsource college price transparency themselves, he was an Assistant Dean of Academic Affairs and Director of Institutional Research at Augustana College in Rock Island, Illinois, a Board member for the Higher Education Data Sharing Consortium.

Erin Hack is a school counselor at Batavia High School in the western suburbs of Chicago. She has over 13 years of cross-functional expertise in high school counseling, higher education leadership, and college career counseling environments.

Before becoming a high school counselor, Erin worked in higher education as a college career counselor and Director of Career Services. It was during this time that she earned her master’s degree in school counseling as she sought to use her talents and passion for helping high school age students.