For people, that is somewhat of an individualis thing what yu can afford to pay. That depends on priorities. Be careful about the amount of debt. The student can borrow. Well cosign the loan. Well take care of later. Never borrow over the course of a degree more than what the average starting salary for the career yourehe interested in. Gerri your total debt shouldnt be more than the firstyears salary. Students. Gerri you can figure that out. That is not impossible to figure that out. That isit tough for some peoplen some careers to actually do. What careers really pay off for students . Those tend to be stem careers. Those require a lot of discipline, prep work. Stem is the science, technology, engineering and mathematics. Some areen even in liberal art disciplines, the mathematics but those are very rigorous courses of study. The average starting salaries are quite high for those jobs. If you can get them. Gerri i know a lot of people, a lot of ceos are pushing the next generation to go into these fields. 28 now going into stem careers, up from 20 in 1997. Were seeing more and more students doe it. But i have to tell you, there are some really sting codegrees out there that people spend a lot of time and money getting. What are some degrees that really dont have payoffs . In part depends on the student. Gerri thats true. Liberal arts are difficult. Of coursfe some are lowpaying professions. Art, that doesnt say one shouldnt do that but you should not borrowing a large amount of money assuming you will make the huge big bucks to get out to sustain thatin debt. But soft skills, no matter what you have, that is important, whatever you major in. That is lacking thing in employers, students lack soft skills. Critical c thinking. Communication skills. Develop those regardless what they major in, that they have a better shot getting a job when they get out. Gerri Worst College degrees for return on investment, communications. Hello. A lot of people in this build having that. Nutrition, hospitality, tourism, religious studies and theology. I know a lot of people in that category number five. Hard to make aon lot of money. When you look at schools with best return on investment, same schools all over. Harvey mudd college, mit. Tell us about these schools where the graduates just do super wellch. The top five schools to pay scale, harvey mudd, mit, cal tech, stanford, Stevens Institute of technology. Those of course have high returns on investments because they tend to be schools where there is large stem graduates, a percentage of the graduates. That is one thing to bear in mind, somewhat selfselecting. Those are students in highpaying majors that they go there. In returns of looking return on investment, look at your aid package, what are you actually paying . Avoiding the debt. If you go to school, where you dont incurnc a lot of debt you have more flexibility majoring because youre not tied down to certainyo career because you hae to pay off the student loan. Gerri talk about things people do wrong applying for aid. Some look down, look at package and will have to get more aid. Some mistakes are silly, like putting down wrong Social Security number but beyond that what are some mistakes people make . They think somehow this is altruistic charitable thing. They dont realize a business decision when you apply for Financial Aid. The college wants you, attractive you will get a better package. Gerri youre a product. The student i is a product at marketplace. Right. Youre looking at colleges and they target you where you live, s. A. T. Scores, to target you as likely student to go to the school. You needik to be savvy with the process. Remember when you stripi away ivy, you basically have a business. The college will not show you you how to maximizable. Best case advantage. File forms on time. Bigpt mistake to accept at schol to apply for Financial Aid. Some people wait until too late. Miss priority deadlines. Gerri not too late right now. You can still apply. Cal cheney, great advice and great perspective. Thank you. We are kicking off day 3 of our users guide to financing your College Education. It is that time of year, my friend, when perspective students all over the country are getting Financial Aid offers from colleges, right in the mailbox. But our next guest says these can be deceiving. How do you decode the offers and pick best one . Mark cantor, Senior Vice President and publisher of advisors network. Author of filing the fam is a. Your work is wellknown in this sector and this category. Warn folks what theyre up against here. Not like colleges are necessarily going to tell you anything. In fact when l you get that aid package, they might leave a few things out. Likeew what . First of all, they might leave out cost of attendance at school. Theytt may just list direct coss like tuition and fees but not all other costs, room and board, books and supplies, computers and transportation, personal expenses. Gerri well that is not the whole story. Not the whole story, right . Mom and dad will have to pay a lot more. You also say there is missing, or misleading information about loans. Help us understand that. Well, the award letter is going to list the Financial Aid that youre getting but they may not distinguish between loans and grants. It may characterize a loan as though it reduces your college cost, listing just the name of the award and award amount, not identifying it as a loan. Gerri wow. So, as youre looking over that list, it is harder for you to distinguish what is the free money and money you have to pay back. If youre going to do any analysis at all of these numbers you have to know both those things. You say there is also an issue with frontloading grants. Tell us how that works. What does that mean . So, what you need to do is analyze the award letter is look at the net price, which is the difference between the total College Costs and just the grants and other gift aid money that doesnt need to be repaid. But, about half of all colleges do what is called frondloading of grants, they give you better grants the freshman year than during the sophomore, junior and senior year. Your net price that freshman year may be lower than it is in subsequent years. Gerri that is important to know, if youre counting on your situation financially to be same every year that may not happen that g way. Is there any way to get the school to be honest about it, be up front about it . Sometimes you can ask them and they will be honest, ask, are you frontloading grants . Other times you might have have to ask grants as senior compared with grants as freshman. Use college navigator. Gov, look at grants for freshmen and all undergraduate students. If there is significant difference it means the School Practices frontloading of grants. Gerri you want to obviously compare offers, right . Try to figure out which offers your child is getting is best. How do you do that . You compare them based on net price, not the net cost figure. The colleges promote net cost i which subtract entire Financial Aid package from cost of attendance. That Financial Aid package includes loans that dont reduce cost. Compare with just discounts the grants. It issunt discounted sticker pr. If there are differences less than a thousand dollars, most families go whichever school has thee greatest reputation or the best academic or social fit. If it is more than 5,000s, they often go with cheaper school. Gerri or best party school is what some kid wantri to do, rig, mark . A yes. Y gerri before you go, tell us a little bit about the best types of loans out there. What are the best loans . We talk about free money. Talk about money you have to repay. This is money you have to repay. Witelh loans you want to look at cost of the loan. What is Interest Rate and fees . Are those Interest Rates fixed or are they going to increase when the Federal Reserve stops easing and stops quantitative easing . So generally speaking federal loans are the best bet because they have low fixed rates and more available and better repayment terms. Gerri very good repayment terms. In fact sometimes you can get the debt forgiven. Mark, thanks for coming on the show. Great to see you. Really appreciate your time. Thank you. Thank you for having me. Gerri did you know many students who qualify for grants dont even apply . This story continues. Wellto gerri on to our users guide. Weve been talking about all week your loved ones College Education and best way to pay for it. Filing fafsa forms or decoding misleading offers. If you missed any of this, visit my website, gerriwillis. Com for all the cost cutting details. Lots of good information there we want to make sure you dont leave any money on the table for college. Here with advice finding free money is rob franic, Senior Vice President ofse publishing t Princeton Review and wrote a book, best values of college. A pretty nice read. Rob, nice to have you on the show. Good to be here. Gerri what are the sources of this kind of money . Where do you get this free money. There is a lot of free money, 180 billion this year and consistent with last year. There are four big forms. Fafsa, that unlocks federal scholarship dollars. Pell grants or subsidiesed stafford loans. There is lot of money from the bucket. Gerri what do you mean by institutional grants. They will also offer for the majority ofll students scholarsp dollars, merit based money you do not have to pay back. Gerri we learned most students dont pay a full freight. Might pay a third of cost, maybe more. Private employer grants, is there a lot of that money. There are some of those things, employer grants where parents are working. Research on local level. Private money where we get a big myth in there. We have less than 5 of money coming directly from private scholarship dollars. They get a lot of news but pay out very little. Gerri statel grants . Pretty big bucket. There are Tuition Assistance programs for new york state students. A lot of individual states will have different state programs fors those students. Staying instate to study. Gerri you have to be very proactive, do this on your own, look, High School Counselor will not help you. Why isl that. Numbers peek for themselves. High School Guidance counselors to students, 470 students to everyone guidance counselor nationally. In california, far worse. 1,000 kids to everyone guidance counselor. Gerri i want tools. I want to know where to go on the web to find information. We have over 800 different Financial Aid ratings on Princeton Review. Com. Scholarship. Com. State well. Fafsa website, doted, dotgovernor. Gerri you have to fill out the damn form. It is super long. I understand a real pain in the butt these days. You have pleasure of filling it out once not every year you apply to college. Gerri sorry you used the d word. There areso a couple scholarshis people should consider. What are they. One of our favorites is the georgia hope scholarship f youre Georgia State student, but the program, get b average, bpluso average or better, 85 percentile in s. A. T. Or act you will got scholarship dollars. Gerri in georgia . In georgia. Gerri there are other scholarships youh have to do research to find out. Gerri go to church. Local sources. Less come picks. Those will be pay off. Local connections that pay off forio students and families. Rob, thank you. Good to be here. Gerri appreciate it. Gerri up next, youre more than just a number. New moves to give you more power over your personal information. And important info to consider before you cosign a loan for your children. Or anybody else. [ male announcer ] this is the age of knowing what youre made of. Why let erectile dysfunction get in your way . Talk to your doctor about viagra. Ask if your heart is healthy enough for sex. Do not take viagra if you take nitrates for chest pain. It may cause an unsafe drop in blood pressure. Side effects include headache, flushing, upset stomach, and abnormal vision. To avoid long term injury, seek immediate medical help for an erection lasting more than four hours. Stop taking viagra and call your doctor right away if you experience a sudden decrease or loss in vision or hearing. This is the age of taking action. Viagra. Talk to your doctor. If your doctor decides viagra is right for you, you can fill your prescription at your pharmacy. Or, check out viagra home delivery, a convenient place to fill your prescription online and have it shipped at no additional cost straight to your door. Viagra home delivery. Get started at viagra. Com. If your denture moves, it can irritate your gums. Try fixodent plus gum care. It helps stop denture movement and prevents gum irritation. Fixodent. And forget it. Gerri it is a massive trove of data onf you. 3,000 pieces of information and you have no control over it. The Big Data Companies do. Your online life, what you buy, where you go, all kind of details. Now the feds want to give you more power over that personal information as well. For more on this, John Ulzheimer with credit sesame. Com. Great to have you on the show. Federal trade Commission Says consumers have more power. Should they . Im not so sure. Imwe not so sure if we gave thm more power over this data they would actually do anything about it. Weve given them wide latitude over credit reportt data heavily regulated and by and large they dont do anything about it, simply suggesting they will do something because they have control is little bit speculative. Gerri speculative but golly i would like i to know what the marketers think who i am and what my habits. My guess it is about inaccurate as other report about me whether history of my Financial Life or anything else . Well,. You know the interesting, the interesting issue that you just brought up is, we just dont know because we dont have access to the information there is no obligation for the industry to share that information to us, even if we asked for it. Now some otf the players in the industry are proactively saying look, if you want it, just ask us well give it to you but i imagine 99. 9 out of 100 viewers dont know hot players are and wouldnt even know where to go ask for theon information if thy knew it even existed. Gerri achessy yom, corelogic, idn analytics, list goes on. Tilly just. More Companies Getting into it every day because there is big money putting together information. Lots of details about each and everyone of us. Finally computers can crunch all thighs numbers. Thats right. Gerri what theyre doing now, theyre saying some of these companies, i believe, i cant remember experion is doing it, they say you come on our website. You enroll. If you dont like what you see and want to change it, change it, right . Thee problem is now youre givig them more personal details to track you down with. How is this information being used . I would argue that these companies no more about you and your patterns than you know about you andu your patterns these guys are storing thousands of data points about you. Everything from, what kind of like, what kind of websites you visit to what kind of potato chips you choose at the store and you simply dont remember all that stuff in a way you can crunch it, aggregate it, normalize it so a company can buy it to use it to market to you. Youre right, some of these guys, if you want to stop sharing information just ask us well proactively do it. By and large you have very little control over unregulated information. Gerri can you ask them to stop collecting your information . Didnt think you could. Sk you can ask them to stop distributing it. You cant ask them to stop collecting it. Frankly, not to blame anybody in particular guess where a o lot f information comes from they have . Comes from people like you and i, when we fill out things like surveys, warranty cards, when we byproducts that information gets aggragated. A lot of places ends up with blg data. They use the information to turn around and market products and services to us. Gerri one of my favorite stories about this is aor fellow who had a young teenage daughter and found out his daughter was pregnant because she started getting marketing baby diapers i believe. Oh, yeah. Gerri what a way to find out your kid is pregnant. Big data was sharing information with target but dad didnt know. That is theha kind of thing i think people is sort of frightening. It is r peering so deeply over your shoulder, so much into your life, not just the offers you get and mark connect you get. Itet is what might be withheld from you too. Let me ask you this question. Say visa finds out youre spending all your money at the bar saturday night and doing things you shouldnt maybe. Do they start withholding credit . Do they start cutting your credit lines . Will somebody make that kind of decision about your life because they have all these intimate details . Not only can they, but, they already have. It was widely reported several years ago, wtehen a company called, compucredit was sued. They disclosed that where consumers were using their cards, perfectly legal by the way, you can use your card anywhere you choose to use your card, but where they used their card told a story how risky you were, and they would use that as way to mitigate your risk. Using at places like marriage counseling, bars, was causing a problem for the card ish you app issue err. Again, how do i know. You tell me i can use my card wherever i want to. I follow your rules but unbeknownst to me the rules are keeping me on shorter leash. Gerri exactly. Gives me the heebiejeebies. Thanks for coming on tonight. T is out theremen trying to rein this in. Oh, yeah. That will make it all better. Thanks, gerri. Gerri thank you. Gerri all right, mom and dad, listen up you may put your own credit score at risk when you cosign a loan for your adult children. According to au new report, two in three millenials relied on mom and dad as cosigner for things like home loans. Should parents do this . Real estate expert kendra todd. Thanks for coming on. Is this a good idea . Should mom and dad be cosigning .