Sometimes the hard part about embarking on a new goal is knowing where to begin. Going back to school is a worthy goal, but with today’s high college tuition and complicated financial aid system, it can require more planning than it seems. For instance: the FAFSA. Understanding how to prepare for the FAFSA seems like a good place to start your back-to-school plan, but actually, the real beginning is a couple of steps before that.

Here are 3 pre-FAFSA steps to prepare you for financial aid applications.

1) Define your education objective.

• Are you interested in a career-focused education program that will prepare or certify you for a specific career or job? (Examples of these include a professional diploma in culinary arts or paralegal studies, an associate degree in nursing or medical assistance, and a bachelor’s degree in accounting.)
• Or are you looking forward to obtaining a 4-year university degree to enhance your life or advance the career you’re settled in? These objectives are equally worthy—it just helps to have an objective clearly defined at the start, even if you revise your plan down the road.

2) If your education objective is earning a certificate or degree for a new career, do a little research on the salary and working environment you can expect in that job.

• Look for the career or job you’re considering on CourseAdvisor.com or the Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupation Handbook website. These sites can give you information on how much you’re likely to earn, the typical work-hours, typical tasks, what kind of education and training is required, and how much demand there will be for that job over the next 10 years.
• These details are important because they can help you decide how much it makes sense to pay for the education and training the job requires (how much bang you’ll get for your buck).
• If demand for the job is dropping, you may change your mind about going to school for it unless you live in an area where there is still a need for that occupation.
• Or, if the career’s average pay is low, you’ll have that in mind when you start considering the price of education programs.

3) Do a little comparison-shopping between education programs.

• Now that you know what kind of education program you’ll need to achieve your objective and how much you’re likely to earn in the job you’ll qualify for after you graduate for, you can get an idea of a reasonable amount to spend on college tuition.
• You may get financial aid to cover most of the cost, but if you have to take out loans, most financial aid experts say you should base how much you borrow on how much you’ll earn after graduation, so you don’t drown in debt. (Here’s where the research on average salary is helpful.)
• Liz Pulliam Weston at MSNBC Money recommends that you limit your student loan(s) to an amount that will cost you no more than 10% of your expected monthly gross income after you graduate.

The goal of these 3 pre-FAFSA steps is to define what you want to accomplish in school and get an idea of what your chosen program is likely to cost. Having this information will help you prepare for how much financial aid you’ll need after your FAFSA is processed.

What do you think of the new TV show “Community”? Does it help the president bring community colleges positive attention or does it reinforce the old cliché of community college as higher education’s Cinderella?

Almost half (44%) of U.S. undergraduates are community college students, earning more than 600,000 associate degrees and 320,000 professional and career certificates a year. Is it reality or fiction that some of those nontraditional students may end up having to live in their cars for a while at some point?

The unemployment rate just crept up over 10%, but back in July, TIME Magazine was already asking “Can Community Colleges Save the U.S. Economy?” and highlighting some of the stand-out benefits and problems of the community college experience.

The American Association of Community Colleges is on board with the TV show, operating on the belief that no publicity is bad publicity and seeing it as an opportunity to create a real “Community” community. While you’re on the AACC site, check out some profiles of real-life community college graduates.

Community colleges have always faced complex challenges, but maybe they really can save the economy.

Nontraditional students often attend community college, which has the flexibility and affordability that work best for adult learners. There are almost 12 million fulltime and part-time nontraditional students from all walks of life pursuing degrees, professional certificates, and lifelong learning at community colleges from one end of the country to the other.

Nontraditional Students Depend on the Lower Tuition of Community College

The relatively low cost of community college is a tremendous benefit for nontraditional students, many of whom may be single parents, workers in lower-paying jobs, newly laid-off workers, or the first in their family to attend college. Despite some tuition increases, a recent College Board financial aid report noted that tuition and fees for an average community college are still only about 36% of the tuition and fees of an average four-year college.

Federal Student Loans for Community College: A Problem Revealed

Since community colleges provide a substantial higher education service to nontraditional students, you may be surprised to learn that many community colleges don’t offer their students federal student loans. That’s the discovery of the Project on Student Debt, who reported last month that approximately 900,000 community college students in 31 states could not get federal Stafford, Perkins, and PLUS loans because their schools chose not to participate in the federal loan program. (Download a copy of the user-friendly report here.)

The main reason seems to be the schools’ earlier bad experience with the consequences of high student loan default rates. In the 1990s, schools with very high default rates were penalized by being shut out of ALL of federal financial aid programs, including the invaluable Pell Grants that so many nontraditional students depend on. After a few close calls with losing their Pell Grants, those schools developed a little bit of paranoia about offering any more federal student loans.

The good news is that loan default rates have improved a lot since then and no community college has lost access to Pell Grants in many years. The bad news is that old fears die hard and today, thousands of nontraditional students end up having to take out private loans to cover the last of their community college costs when they can’t get Stafford, Perkins, or PLUS loans.

Private loans typically have higher interest rates, more borrower fees, and less protection than federal loans, and can turn into unmanageable debt for the students who can least afford it.

How to Find Out If Your Community College Offers Federal Student Loans

What can you do if you think you may need a student loan for community college? Before you apply, call the financial aid office of the community college(s) you’re considering and ask if they participate in the federal student loan program (Title IV). Be sure to ask specifically about loans (Stafford, Perkins, and PLUS loans), not just the financial aid program in general. (All eligible colleges participate in the federal grants program, but apparently they don’t all participate in the student loan program.)

If it turns out that the community college you were considering does not provide federal student loans, you may want to talk to other community colleges in your area until you find one that does. Community colleges fulfill a vital mission in the higher education service they provide to nontraditional students. Making federal student loans available to students who need them should be part of that mission.

What is financial aid for nontraditional college students? Is it different from financial aid for traditional students who go straight from high school to college each fall?

Nontraditional Student Week

November 1-7, 2009, is Nontraditional Student Week, an annual recognition of nontraditional students in the college world. Nontraditional Student Week is sponsored by the Association for Non-Traditional Students in Higher Education, an international organization that advocates for adult learners.

What exactly is a nontraditional student? Believe it or not, there is still no “official” higher education definition, even though a college head-count from the National Center for Education Statistics suggests that 70% of all U.S. college students are age 25 and up (6.8 million students).

A general definition of a nontraditional student is one who doesn’t follow the path that goes straight from high school to college at age 18. Nontraditional students are also referred to as nontraditional learners and adult learners (because they are usually adults who have been in the workforce for at least a year or two if not longer).

Here are some of the characteristics that define nontraditional students (as defined by the NCES and a growing number of higher education officials). You don’t have to meet all these criteria to be considered a nontraditional student—just one is enough. A nontraditional college student is one who:

• Doesn’t go directly from high school to college in the same calendar year
• Is age 24 or older
• Goes to college less than fulltime for at least part of the academic year
• May attend college one or two courses at a time
• Attends college while also working a fulltime job (35 hours or more a week)
• Meets the federal financial aid definition of “financially independent”
• Has dependents other than a husband or wife (usually children, but sometimes others)
• Is a single parent
• May have a GED instead of a high school diploma

Where’s the Financial Aid for Nontraditional Students?

Many nontraditional students might say there’s a big item missing from the list above: A nontraditional college student is one who isn’t eligible for financial aid the way traditional college students are.

In fact, getting financial aid can be a real challenge for adult learners. Although it’s true that federal financial aid (Pell Grants, Stafford loans, and more) doesn’t have an age limit, there are still a number of Catch-22s that tend to apply only to working adults.

For example, since Pell Grants are targeted toward very low-income students, nontraditional students who hold down a even a low-paying job while attending college classes may make just a little too much money to qualify for a Pell Grant.

Adult learners may find themselves ineligible for federal loans for the same reason—even if the paycheck they earn barely covers their living expenses. And there are other criteria (enrollment status and length of time to complete a degree program) that often disqualify nontraditional students from Pell Grants and other federal financial aid.

On the plus side, officials from the Department of Education and Department of Labor are much more aware of the holes between their two sets of rules. They’re working to synch up their departmental policies so that the rules work together rather than conflict with each other.

Nontraditional Students are the Students of the 21st Century

The nontraditional student is the hot college student these days, for a variety of public and commercial reasons. (Educating workers for new industries and getting them back to work is crucial for our economy, but higher education is also a profitable big business.) Nevertheless, conflicting policies on financial assistance aren’t the only holes in the higher education system.

Working Learners, a report from the Center for American Progress proposes an overhaul of higher education to close up those holes and allow nontraditional students to be better served. The report’s suggestions may sound familiar to you, since adult learner advocates have been recommending such changes for years: accessibility, flexibility, more respect for professional certificates, career path coaching.

On the subject of more accessible financial aid for nontraditional students, the report also suggests the creation of a new “Micro Pell Grant” for students “who want to take one course per semester or an occupational certificate.”

It may feel as though the U.S. higher education and financial aid systems are skewed in favor of traditional students in a lot of ways, and they probably are. Not intentionally, just as a result of the influence of earlier times. But the country is going through a big change and this may shift more attention and resources to our huge population of nontraditional students.

As a hat-tip to Nontraditional Student Week, please write in and share your experience as a nontraditional student seeking financial aid. Did you learn any financial aid application tips you could pass on other students? We would love to hear from you!

Our Guide to Finding Scholarships & Grants for College is available! We set out to create a guide to financial aid that would help you understand the difference between scholarships and grants and what to expect about financial aid overall. Before we knew it, we had over 50 pages of private scholarships, tips on successfully applying for scholarships, information on federal education grants, and so much more.

Along the way, we came to realize that there was an underlying reason why our grant guide was so important. It wasn’t just to provide you with information that clarifies the different types of financial aid, but to help you identify the legitimate sources of grants and scholarships. You wouldn’t believe some of the scams we came across.

You’ve probably seen Internet or TV ads touting free government grants for school. The ads claim that, if you qualify to receive a “free grant” for your education, your application is guaranteed to be accepted, and you never have to repay the money – all they request is a processing fee in order to send you an application package that “is chock full of proprietary information” about getting this free money for school. The truth is, their application package is filled with general information and agency contacts that you can find online with a simple Google search.

These ads are tempting – the last couple years have been financially difficult (sometimes impossible) for most of us, so we’re lured by the possibility of free money. FinAid.org reports two-thirds of bachelor’s degree recipients last year graduated with an average debt of $23,000, so any extra funding to avoid this level of student loan or credit card debt is appealing.

But, armed with the right information like our guide to financial aid, you can quickly identify grant scams, and find that legitimate federal assistance and private and federal scholarships are freely available and accessible with a little diligence.

Click here to download the college grant guide!