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Parents
Just how much you as a parent want to contribute in time, money, and effort in helping your child with financial aid is completely up to you. We recommend you let navigating financial aid be part of your child's college education. In other words, rather than taking care of everything, be informed about the process and ask your student questions like, "have you signed your promisory note yet?". The rest of this page will walk you through the process and inform you of when (calendar) those key questions should be brought up.
Parent Loan
The main way that you as a parent can help directly is by taking out a PLUS loan for your student. This is the only type of financial aid that we administer that is the sole responsibility of the parent. It will be held and guaranteed by the U.S. Department of Education. It does not include a grace period like student loans. For more detailed information, Please see our Types of Aid page.
The Process
The financial aid process at CU-Boulder is essentially 6 steps;
- 1-FAFSA- Free Application for Federal Student Aid. This is the form that all students who want financial aid fill out. It must be done each year that the student wants financial aid. The fastest, easiest, and most accurate way to complet the fafsa is online at www.fafsa.ed.gov.
a)-Scholarships- Our online scholarship application is functional by February of each year. Apply for scholarships as early as possible. Please see our Scholarship page for more information.
- 2- Document requests. We may ask for you and/or your student's tax return and possibly other documents to support your FAFSA information.
- 3-Award offer and acceptance. About March of every year we will send out award offers if your FAFSA and supporting documents have been received. If you're helping decide how much of the award package your child will accept, we always recommend accepting only what loans they need, to reduce the burden of loans after graduation.
- 4-Promissory note signing. Most of our promissory notes are now Master Promissory Notes (MPN) that only need to be signed once. Stafford loans and PLUS loans can be signed on-line at https://dlenote.ed.gov/empn/index.jsp.
- 5-Staying qualified. In short; getting good (enough) grades, proceeding at a satisfactory pace, and finishing within an acceptable amount of classes. Details can be found in our Satisfactory Academic Progress Policy (SAP). If your student violates our SAP policy, their aid will be suspended. In most cases, aid can be reinstated after signing a SAP contract.
- 6-Graduation and Repayment. Loans will go into repayment after six months of not taking classes, graduation or not. Everything that we award, except PLUS Loans, are the student's responsibility. If you've chose to accept a PLUS Loan, the parent whose name is on the promissory note will be responsible for repaying that loan.
You might want to impress on them the importance of repaying their loans ON-TIME and in-full to ensure their future financial health.
Privacy
Information that we can provide to you about your child is limited by the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA). At the post secondary level, parents have no inherent rights to inspect a student's education records. The right to inspect is limited solely to the student. Records may be released to the parents only under the following circumstances:
- Through the written consent of the student,
- In compliance with a subpoena,
- By submission of evidence that the parents declare the student as a dependent on their most recent Federal Income Tax form (IRS Code of 1954, Section 152).
For more information about FERPA, please see http://registrar.colorado.edu/regulations/ferpa_guide.html.
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