Why Long Island families can struggle to qualify for enough college financial aid

Anthony Carter of West Islip can tell you: Having two children at private universities isn't easy.

The retired New York City police inspector, 52, and his wife, 53, a teaching assistant, dropped off their 18-year-old son, Dylan, at Sacred Heart University in Connecticut a few weeks ago. They have another child who is a junior at Quinnipiac University, also in Connecticut.

Both have received scholarships, including merit-based assistance, but not state or federal aid. Carter said he did not expect the federal financial aid formulas to account for the higher costs his family faces living on Long Island, where the cost of living is 32% higher than the national average. 

“Like many families, we’ve had to make adjustments and prioritize where our money goes,” said Carter, who currently works at autonomous vehicle company Waymo, in an email.

The family has “made several sacrifices along the way,” with heightened awareness of “discretionary spending, travel and other expenses,” he said. But he and his wife “view investing in our children’s education as extremely important and something we’re committed to doing.”

Tuition is only part of the bill for families paying for college. Housing, food, books, transportation and other expenses can push the total cost far higher. For the 2025-26 academic year, the average budget for full-time undergraduate students at private nonprofit four-year institutions was $65,470, according to the College Board.

For Long Island households already contending with high housing and other living costs, college can create an additional squeeze. Federal financial aid formulas do not adjust based on whether a family lives in a high-cost region such as Long Island, experts said — meaning otherwise similar households can be evaluated under the same formula regardless of where they live.

The high cost of living on Long Island often pushes families to request more financial aid, especially those who feel the FAFSA does not accurately reflect their ability to pay for college, said Nick Prewett, assistant provost and executive director at the Office of Financial Aid and Scholarship Services at Stony Brook University.

The federal student aid application measures financial resources, not actual local cost of living, and is used as a starting point for colleges calculating financial aid, he said in an email. The formula does not calculate each family’s disposable income, creating a “potential ‘high-income-high-cost’ problem.”

A family might “earn too much to qualify for substantial need-based grant aid, but not enough to comfortably absorb the full cost of attendance,” he said. Families caught in that gap are sometimes described as the “missing middle.” 

That does not mean the federal formula is the final word on every college’s aid offer. Individual institutions have some discretion in allocating their own financial aid, economist Peter Hinrichs of the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research said. Some colleges also use the CSS Profile, an application run through the College Board that collects more detailed information about a family’s finances.

Students who fall into that category “have a few choices,” said Robert Kelchen, professor and head of the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. They can attend a less expensive school, seek out colleges offering larger scholarships or borrow to cover the remaining costs, he said.

Finding a college that fits the budget

For Sara Serrano, 21, college costs ultimately meant changing schools. She spent one semester out of state studying political science and marketing at the University of Rhode Island, a public university, before transferring and eventually enrolling at Stony Brook University. 

At the University of Rhode Island, she received around $3,000 in merit scholarships plus local scholarships from essay writing. She also took out a $3,000 federal unsubsidized loan and her mother, a Suffolk County police officer, helped with tuition. But to continue at the university — where annual tuition and fees, at $43,258 for out of state students, are more than double the rate for in-state students — would have meant taking out private loans, which she wasn’t willing to do.

The Southold resident finished the year at Suffolk County Community College and started her sophomore year at Stony Brook, where tuition and fees, at $10,930 for in-state students for the year, was more affordable. She’s now a senior majoring in political science and journalism, set to graduate in May.

Some selective private colleges, such as Harvard College, have expanded institutional aid for families earning below $150,000 or $200,000. But those policies vary by school.

With regional living costs largely outside the aid formula, experts said families should focus early on the parts of the college decision they can control: what they can afford, where they apply and how much they’re willing to borrow.

“If somebody goes out and buys a Bentley, that's a choice,” said Vicki Vollweiler, a financial aid strategist and founder and CEO of College Financial Prep, a company that helps families plan college applications and navigate the financial aid process. “Similarly, if somebody chooses to live on Long Island and pay those real estate taxes, the colleges also consider that a choice that the parents made.”

Families still have other options. Start with planning ahead, experts said.

Families should come up with a strategy for applying to schools and financial aid ideally sometime between 10th grade and early 11th grade, said Hans Hanson, a national college advisor based in Connecticut and the owner of College Logic.

Stick to your budget, he said, and keep in mind that many students take longer than four years to graduate.

“If parents would treat buying a college education the same as they treat buying a house, they will have a much better fit. Better experience, better cost, better outcomes, because they will do their due diligence,” Hanson said.

Safety schools are more likely to offer merit scholarship opportunities, Vollweiler said. And, after getting an offer, it’s sometimes possible to request additional funding from a school.

“Colleges are businesses. They need to fill their seats. If all their seats are filled, they’re less likely to offer more money. If they have lots of spots to fill, they may be more than willing to offer a discount, so to speak, to help entice families and students to go there,” she said.

New York has expanded aid, but gaps remain

There are federal and state aid programs to help mitigate college costs. But eligibility rules can limit assistance for some households with incomes around or above Long Island’s median, which was $131,000 in 2023, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

Federal need-based student aid considers income, assets, household size and marital status through the Student Aid Index, and there is no flat income cap.

New York’s Tuition Assistance Program — also known as TAP — considers income, the number of family members enrolled in college, whether the applicant is financially independent and the cost of tuition. For dependent undergraduates, TAP has a $125,000 net taxable income limit, while lower limits apply to some financially independent students. The state’s Excelsior Scholarship Program has a $125,000 household federal adjusted gross income limit.

The Excelsior Scholarship in particular is part of an effort from New York to address the challenge of the “missing middle,” said Eli Dvorkin, editorial and policy director at the Center for an Urban Future, a Manhattan-based public policy think tank.

But still, “in many parts of New York City and certainly on Long Island, even the increase in TAP eligibility in recent years still leaves a lot of families in the lurch,” he said, with lower- and middle-income families struggling to cover tuition and other costs associated with attending college, like books and transportation.

Some financially independent students are subject to lower TAP income limits depending on their marital and dependent status, said Kirsten Keefe, senior director of policy and advocacy in New York at The Institute for College Access & Success.

She encouraged students to take advantage of free resources, like the state-funded Education Debt Consumer Assistance Program, which provides one-on-one financial aid counseling for students.

“Whatever you do, make sure you exhaust every available source of federal and state funding before turning to private loans to finance your education,” Keefe said.

Even when students receive aid, costs beyond tuition can remain difficult to cover.

Joshua Chan, 24, of Brentwood, received state and federal aid while earning his bachelor’s degree at the University at Albany, but said he still struggled to cover expenses beyond tuition, particularly housing.

Now pursuing a master’s degree in social work part time at the University at Buffalo while working full time at a New York City nonprofit, Chan said his financial aid is more limited. He has borrowed about $12,000 in federal loans and expects he may need private loans next semester.

“I’m a little nervous,” he said.

While he’s confident he’ll figure it out, he worries about interest rates and falling into “a spiral of debt.”

New York has taken other steps to make college more affordable. The state raised the TAP income limit for many dependent students from $80,000 to $125,000 in 2024, and the state budget adopted this year froze tuition at SUNY and CUNY for the 2026-27 academic year.

But proposals to extend aid further into the middle class did not make it into the final state budget. The Assembly proposed raising income eligibility for TAP and the Excelsior Scholarship to $150,000 during budget negotiations.

A separate bill proposes raising the Excelsior income limit from $125,000 to $150,000, expanding eligibility to more than 230,000 New York students. Its sponsors specifically cited high living costs on Long Island, in New York City and in Westchester as a reason families earning above the current limit can still struggle to pay for college. The legislation remains in committee. 

Many middle-income families would benefit from raising the limit, said bill sponsor Patricia Fahy, whose State Senate district includes the state capital.

"We have to double down on keeping college accessible and affordable," she said, pointing out that New York state schools have seen boosted enrollment in recent years. 

The proposals would raise statewide income thresholds rather than create different eligibility limits for different regions of New York.

Building regional living costs into federal financial aid presents another challenge. There has been a push to simplify the FAFSA, and adjusting its formula based on regional cost of living would make the process more complicated, said Hinrichs, the Upjohn Institute economist. "There’s a question of whether it’s worth it,” he said.

A 2009 federal report that asked this question noted that some financial aid officials and higher education experts were concerned that adding a cost-of-living adjustment might shift the focus away from low-income families.

The report estimated that such an adjustment could increase federal aid for about 17% of applicants, particularly those in higher-cost areas in the Northeast and California, while reducing aid for about 37% of applicants living in lower-cost areas.

For students and families living with the existing system, the distinction between income and what is actually available to spend can still feel stark.

Quinn Bruer, 20, is a junior creative writing major at Stony Brook University. His parents can’t contribute much, so he’s relying on a combination of federal and state aid, savings from his summer job and private loans to cover his school expenses.

Bruer said a family’s income on paper doesn’t necessarily reflect how much money is available for college after paying Long Island housing costs.

“Most of it is going towards either a mortgage or rent in whatever ridiculously expensive town you live in,” he said. “How much is actually left over to spend on things like school and tuition?”