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Does anyone have experience with http://www.needaccess.org/ ? I'm an international student, so I don't qualify for student loans, and I don't want to burden my family. Do international students qualify for this? If so, how much is distributed? Can you get the maximum tuition amount?

NeedAccess is just another financial evaluation tool, more detailed than FAFSA, that some schools use to determine need. The aid that results is still federal loans.

As an international, you need to look for schools that grant their own internal aid to international students, or see if you can get private loans (which I think require a cosigner). There are other threads on this; I don't know much about it.

But internationals still need to fill out FAFSA and NeedAccess, right? Even though we're not eligible for federal aid, that's still how the schools determine if we're eligible for internal need-based aid, isn't it? I mean, to be blunt, how else will schools know how poor I am?

Do I need to fill out FAFSA/Need Access to be considered for merit scholarships if I've already been offered scholly $?

onionskin wrote:Do I need to fill out FAFSA/Need Access to be considered for merit scholarships if I've already been offered scholly $?

KFV wrote:But internationals still need to fill out FAFSA and NeedAccess, right? Even though we're not eligible for federal aid, that's still how the schools determine if we're eligible for internal need-based aid, isn't it? I mean, to be blunt, how else will schools know how poor I am?

Both of you need to read the instructions for each school and follow them. If they are not clear, call the school and ask.

^Haha, fair enough.

Although the schools' websites often are unclear, and sometimes contain wrong information. For any other international who's curious, we do go through Need Access, but we don't go through FAFSA (we can't). This contradicts the information provided by a lot of the schools after having your Need Access info sent to them, in which they state you must now do the FAFSA forms. Just ignore that. A few of the schools' websites - Columbia is one, I believe - explicitly state that FAFSA is not for us.

KFV wrote:^Haha, fair enough.

Although the schools' websites often are unclear, and sometimes contain wrong information. For any other international who's curious, we do go through Need Access, but we don't go through FAFSA (we can't). This contradicts the information provided by a lot of the schools after having your Need Access info sent to them, in which they state you must now do the FAFSA forms. Just ignore that. A few of the schools' websites - Columbia is one, I believe - explicitly state that FAFSA is not for us.

Also, a lot of schools don't use NeedAccess.