The New York Times
Financial Aid Rules for College Change, and Families Pay More

No matter how she parses it, Roberta Proctor cannot make sense of her son's college bill. Her income and her assets have not changed. If anything, she says, her family's finances have deteriorated somewhat.

So, she wonders, how could she possibly owe an extra $6,000 for the coming school year, when tuition has not increased anywhere near that amount?

But she does. Like Ms. Proctor, a Californian whose son just finished his freshman year at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, thousands of American families might find it harder to qualify for financial aid this year and might be asked to contribute more money toward the cost of college because of changes to a complicated federal formula they barely know about, much less understand.

Taken together, these changes, some based on overly optimistic predictions of inflation, have required families to count a greater share of their incomes and assets toward college expenses before becoming eligible for financial aid. As a consequence, tens of thousands of low-income students will no longer be eligible for federal grants; middle-class families are digging deeper into their savings; and some colleges are putting up their own money to make up the difference.

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