Pursuit of college financial aid varies widely among high schools - by John Fensterwald
by John Fensterwald
California high school seniors are losing out on potentially hundreds of millions of dollars each year in financial aid – and forgoing the opportunity to attend college they assume they cannot afford – because only half of them fill out the forms for financial aid, according to a new report from Education Trust-West.
But some high schools and some districts do a far better job in
encouraging and assisting students and parents to provide the information, according to Ed Trust-West, which also released a database of all high schools’ and districts’ rates of seniors completing forms for FAFSA (the Free Application for Federal Student Aid) and Cal Grants, both of which are required for California students to receive state financial aid. Ed Trust-West also published the 100 high schools with the highest completion rates in its report The Cost of Opportunity: Access to Financial Aid in Califorina.
Those schools were large and small, charter and district schools, with high and low percentages of