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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]The loans are financial aid, but not part of the Cost of Attendance because you don't cough up the money until after attendance is done. [/quote]
When I read this (re-) interpretation of COA to exclude financed costs (which I assume is not a slight of hand on the part of the helpful poster, but probably the official way of speech) it's difficult to not get annoyed. Usually, tricky and misleading interpretations of commonly understood terms like cost are the hallmark of a sleazy business.

On the flipside, do subsidized loans have prepayment penalties?  If not, there doesn't seem to be any reason to not take them. You can always invest the money until interest becomes due. If you've saved, that is.[/quote]

Yes, feels like slight of hand, a little hard to get up to speed, but at least it is consistent across schools, so the sooner you figure it out the better.  (But this is why the handful of top privates that offer packages without loans are offering a better deal, and schools that have an extra institutional loan are charging more.)  The Federal loans are officially part of the aid package, if you decide not to take the loans there is paperwork, and a different award letter needs to be generated.  So the schools are getting their terminology correct, even though the loans are above and beyond Cost of Attendance.  There aren't prepayment penalties, but there are origination fees, so another point to consider beyond interest.[/quote]

Yes, I wouldn't call it sleight of hand because they list the real total cost of attendance on the same page and it IS important to know what you are actually going to have to come up in the fall with via cash flow/savings sans loans etc.  [/quote]

The thing is, if a school says they meet 100% of demonstrated need, they are saying they will provide enough aid *after loans*, such that their COA estimate matches their estimate of the family's ability to pay.  There are lots of ifs there, but when my DC was comparing offers, the COAs came in remarkably similar. What varied was how the aid broke down merit/FA and how many loans were offered.  It was also necessary to look at how expenses were estimated, to keep offers apples to apples and relevant to our situation, but there wasn't anything too unexpected there.[/quote]

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