Archive for November 2012

Are you a returned Peace Corps volunteer?

Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) will waive the application fee for returned Peace Corps volunteers (RPCV) who apply for entry in fall 2013.

This trial arrangement will reinforce a long history of synergy between two longstanding institutions of international affairs: Over the years, many remarkable Americans who began careers of global service in the Peace Corps went on to pursue graduate education at SIPA.

As we have seen over the past decade, solving the world’s most difficult problems — public health, climate change, energy, development, global finance and economics, and sustainability — demands collective action in response to increasingly global challenges. It requires a new kind of education, one that combines traditional quantitative analysis and management training with a global perspective. SIPA, the world’s most global public policy school, is uniquely positioned to develop leaders who can solve these challenges.

SIPA embraces a vision of policy studies that crosses national boundaries. More than any peer institution, the School focuses on transnational policy areas, applying global best practices to local issues, and training leaders to engage multiple levels of governance to reach effective solutions.

After the initial admissions cycle, SIPA will explore whether there is support to continue a program of fee waivers for returned Peace Corps volunteers in future years.

If you have questions about the new arrangement and how it may impact your application, please contact SIPA’s admissions office at [email protected].

 

 

Office hours

The SIPA Office of Admissions & Financial Aid will be closed tomorrow (November 21) at 1pm.  We’ll be out celebrating Thanksgiving with our friends and family.  Our office will reopen on Monday, November 26th at 9am.

Financing your education at SIPA – Part 6

In our previous blog entry about student loan repayment, we discussed the initial decision to borrow, the types of loans available to SIPA students, and the resources to keep track of when your loan payments come due and to whom you will make payments.  Now let’s look at how to determine monthly payments and some of the flexible repayment options that can make managing student loan debt easier.

There are a number of repayment options once you get to that stage (for many loans, you don’t enter into full repayment until after you have graduated or ceased your enrollment).  Different repayment options include Standard Repayment, Extended Repayment, Graduated Repayment, Income Based Repayment and Income Contingent Repayment; the different options can provide you with flexibility, lower your monthly payments, or calculate monthly payments as a portion of your income.  But study these plans carefully…lower monthly payments can also mean a higher cost over the life of the loan, and not every borrower qualifies for every plan.  Other students choose to consolidate multiple loans into one payment and prefer that convenience.  Click here and check out the links under the “Borrower Info” menu for more information on the Federal Direct Consolidation Loan program.

Remember that these repayment plans and the consolidation option only apply to federal student loans.  If you borrow any private loans, they cannot be consolidated, and repayment options tend to be more limited, typically with less consumer protection (which is why the SIPA Financial Aid Office generally recommends that students investigate federal student loans first).

Any time you borrow, you’ll want to know what your monthly payments will be.  There are a number of online loan repayment calculators, and we recommend that you visit one to learn more about how much your monthly payment would be based on how much you borrow.  One calculator is available at https://studentloans.gov (click on the Repayment Plans and Calculators link); it offers a comparison in monthly and aggregate payment amounts, including how much interest a borrower will pay, under different repayment plans offered by the US Department of Education.  Another good set of loan repayment calculators can be found at www.finaid.org  (click on Calculators and then scroll down to Loans).  There you will see a number of links for specific repayment plans available to many borrowers.

In a future post, we plan to discuss options for temporarily stopping payments after you have begun making them, and a new exciting initiative that could save many SIPA graduates a lot of money based on their career choices – the Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program.

 

 

Financing your education at SIPA – Part 5

Student Loan Repayment

While SIPA does make funding available through various scholarships and assistantships, approximately 40 percent of our students also use student loans as part of their financing strategy.  If you borrowed student loans as an undergraduate, you may already be familiar with the obligation of repaying your loans.  Just like a mortgage, a car loan or any other type of debt, repaying your student loans can be stressful.  But be aware that there are a number of options available that can help you manage student loans, and even save you money.

Before you make any decisions about borrowing while attending SIPA, we’d like to familiarize you with some of the resources and information that can help you be an informed borrower.

First, plan carefully and borrow only what you need.  There are loan programs from government and private sources that can cover all of your costs…tuition, fees, books and supplies, room and board, travel expenses…but over a two year period that can add up to lots of debt.  Make sure that you apply for not only all of the funding that SIPA offers, but external sources as well, and also review financial resources you have on hand.  Using some savings now might save you interest-bearing debt later.

The types of loans most SIPA students qualify for include the Federal Direct Unsubsidized Loan (Congress eliminated the interest subsidy on Direct Loans for graduate students when they passed the Budget Control Act of 2011), the Federal Graduate PLUS loan, the Federal Perkins Loan and various loans from private lenders.  A good source of information for the federal loans is http://studentaid.ed.gov/types/loans, while a sampling of some private loans can be found here.

Be aware of when your repayment begins…it’s not the same for all loans.  Click here for information on when loans from the federal government (those are the majority of loans borrowed by SIPA students) go into repayment.  And once you have borrowed federal loans (or if you already have), log in to the National Student Loan Data System (NSLDS) at www.nslds.ed.gov to find out who will be servicing your loan (which is where your payments will be sent).  To log in to NSLDS, you will need your Social Security number and your FAFSA PIN.

In our next student loan repayment entry, we’ll discuss how to find out what your monthly payment will be, along with the different repayment plan options.

 

Virtual Information Session on Tuesday, November 13

We’re at it again.  Our last session was well attended and we received some great questions so we thought it may be helpful to host another virtual session for those who were unable to make the morning presentation.

Tomorrow we will be online at 3:00 pm EST (15:00) to speak with those of you who are not “morning” people (or in the middle of R.E.M. sleep).

If you are interested in learning more about SIPA, register to get the login information.  We hope to virtually meet you on Tuesday, November 13.

 

"The most global public policy school, where an international community of students and faculty address world challenges."

—Merit E. Janow, Dean, SIPA, Professor of Practice, International and Economic Law and International Affairs

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