Jason Porter and Henry Lopez-Cruz both had their financial aid sorted and ready to go at the start of the fall term. But they still wanted to double-check.

So the two first-year students at Clackamas Community College attended the school’s Financial Aid and Scholarship Application Workshop last month.

It’s a hands-on event designed to guide students and families through the financial aid process, including applying for the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA, the Oregon Student Aid Application, known as ORSAA, and Clackamas Community College’s own scholarship application.

Students and families park at one of the many tables set up throughout the space, open their laptops, pull out their tax documents, and get to work. Meanwhile, college staff float around the room to answer questions and look over their shoulders for help.

“I just wanted to make sure that, you know, my classes were well-funded,” Lopez-Cruz said, “so that in like a month, I wouldn’t get, like, a fee of like $1,000 or something that I didn’t know about.”

Porter attended the event for similar reasons. He went to Clackamas’ spring workshop, too.

“I came tonight just in case, like, I had trouble logging in or I had trouble, like, figuring anything out,” he said. “I had all the same info on file, so it was pretty easy for me.”

College can be expensive, often costing tens of thousands of dollars per year for tuition, room and board, and supplies. And applying for financial aid can be stressful.

Right now, families and students are seeing soaring sticker prices, reduced federal loan limits and smaller savings. They’re also figuring out how to pay for college while colleges themselves struggle financially.

Financial aid 101

College advisors suggest students and parents start by learning the basics. Financial aid falls into four key buckets: federal, state, institutional and non-institutional.

Federal funding includes grants, work-study programs and student loans. State funding here includes the Oregon Opportunity Grant, Oregon’s largest state-funded, need-based grant program for college students. The grant provides funding to more than 30,000 Oregon resident students each year, according to state officials.

For institutional funding, sometimes students are automatically considered when they apply to a specific school, but that isn’t always the case. The College Board’s CSS Profile is used for students to apply for money at hundreds of private colleges nationwide, including Reed College in Oregon and Whitman College and Whitworth University in Washington.

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Students can also get money from sources other than government programs and the colleges themselves. What’s often called “non-institutional funding” is typically one-time money for specific programs or needs. But Oregon’s OSAC Scholarship Application lets students apply for multiple scholarships at once. State officials said OSAC awards more than $10 million annually through more than 600 scholarships.

Financial aid applications often require specific information and must be completed in a certain order. When in doubt: FAFSA first.

A combination of these funding streams may be enough for families. Increasingly, more and more families are relying on financial aid to pay for college.

But experts — along with students like Porter and Lopez-Cruz who’ve gone through the process — say applying early is one of the best ways to maximize how much money you get.

And applications are already open for several funding streams that families might not start thinking about in earnest until spring.

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Prospective students applying for college today are entering into a shifting landscape.

“I think that right now families are getting a message that college is really expensive,” said Anastacia Dillon, associate vice president for financial aid at Lewis & Clark College in Portland. “And they’re also getting messages that maybe a college education isn’t a good value in terms of outcomes.”

This is despite research showing that, over their lifetimes, people with a college degree have much higher earning potential and report higher levels of health and happiness.

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Dillon has worked at Lewis & Clark for more than 25 years. She’s seen how the world of higher ed has changed, not only for individual families, but for the institutions as well.

Federal funding for higher education has been slashed. Birth rates are down, leading to lower enrollment and less money for both private and public schools. Many higher education institutions are facing substantial, multi-million-dollar budget cuts. Americans are facing rising costs from inflation. And families are questioning, perhaps more than ever, whether college is even a possibility.

“There are several steps that a family has to go through to apply for admission to a school,” Dillon explained. They have to complete the FAFSA, submit information to individual colleges, receive offers from those schools, then sit down and decide between the aid offers from all the other colleges.

“That’s really an overwhelming process,” she said.

Dillon stressed that schools’ sticker prices often differ greatly from what families actually pay. Even at a private liberal arts school like Lewis & Clark, nearly all students receive some amount of financial aid. And Dillon works with students throughout their time in college to maintain financial stability.

Private colleges typically have higher sticker prices, but they can often be more generous with financial aid. Average student loan debt varies by institution type — private vs. public, in-state vs. out-of-state, etc.

According to U.S. News & World Report, 2024 graduates from a private, nonprofit college nationwide borrowed more on average, $32,806, than public college graduates, who took out $25,549.

That’s where employees like Dillon come in.

“I really believe that financial aid is where the rubber meets the road in terms of higher education,” Dillon said. “We’re working with families who are bringing their hopes and dreams for their children to our office, and we’re working with them to figure out how it actually works — like on a monthly budget basis.”

Overcoming barriers

One of the most common fears Michell Gipson hears from students and families is just that applying for financial aid will involve a lot of questions. Gipson coordinates financial aid services at Clackamas Community College.

She said they also fear their application won’t be accepted. Some families are navigating the application process in a language they don’t know as well. Others have incomes that put them in the no-man’s-land middle of financial aid — earning too much for need-based assistance but not enough to pay outright.

“The first year is really difficult for students because they’re figuring out what financial aid is,” Gipson said, noting that this year in particular is difficult because colleges and students are learning about federal loan changes. “So, we’re having to walk through all of that with them.”

She said one of the biggest misconceptions about financial aid is that students submit their application one day and then get awarded the money the next.

But officials like Gipson have to review applications, ask follow-up questions, go back and forth with the federal government, make sure everything meets regulations, and then come back with an offer.

Institutions often have teams that try to find additional funding for students who need it. Clackamas has its Coordinated Student Resource Team, for example. Lewis & Clark also offers a program that pays students when they take on unpaid internships, so money isn’t what stops them from gaining important professional experience.

“I think sometimes people who work in financial aid can be looked at like they’re just, you know, counting numbers or whatever,” Gipson said. “But this team really cares about every single student that comes across their desk.”

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Tips to rock your financial aid applications

Gipson and Dillon both stressed that the FAFSA application in particular has been streamlined and simplified. Still, they advised going slow.

“The FAFSA is not a long and complicated form,” Dillon said, “but I really encourage people to, before they sit down to file the FAFSA, just take a kind of a cleansing breath,” she paused to breathe out, “and don’t rush through it.”

In general, make sure you have your documents ready. Sit down with the taxes from two years prior — that’s tax year 2024 for next school year — Social Security numbers and your FAFSA ID.

Dillon said to prioritize submitting the FAFSA application quickly, you can always add more schools later.

“What I always recommend is to make a chart of all of the different deadlines for all of the different schools, and then you just pick the earliest deadline,” she said. “What’s the school that wants the FAFSA the earliest, and then you file it by that deadline, and then you know you’ve met the deadline for all of the other schools as well.”

Clackamas students Porter and Lopez-Cruz said it’s crucial to get the process done sooner rather than later.

“You can only get as much money as early as you do it,” Porter said, pointing to the finite amounts that schools and scholarship organizations have. “It’s like they run out so quick with how many people apply for it. It’s just really important to get it done as quick as possible.”

Lopez-Cruz agreed, adding that if you put it off and things get complicated, you’ll want that extra time to figure it all out.

And at the end of the day, the two students said you have to put yourself out there.

“Don’t be afraid to ask for help,” Lopez-Cruz said. “Everyone needs help at some point. If you don’t know what you’re doing, it’s better to ask someone that might, instead of just going into it blind and making things worse.”

News Source : https://www.opb.org/article/2026/11/13/fafsa-what-you-need-to-know/