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This video will show you step-by-step
how to calculate the amount of
the PLUS Loan that you should borrow.
Before we can get started,
we need to grab some information from
the Student Aid Summary.
Let's log in to eLion at
elion.psu.edu
Open the "Financial" menu on the left side of the page
and click on the link "Student Aid Summary."
Select the academic year
and click "Continue."
Then click on "View Aid"
to show the Student Aid Summary.
This is an example of a Student Aid Summary that
I made just for this presentation.
Yours may not look exactly the same
but it will be similar.
There are two things we need to write down from this page,
the Estimated Total Cost of Attendance and Total Aid.
Your student's financial aid will be listed at the top
of their Student Aid Summary
under the heading, Types of Aid.
If you are applying for a PLUS Loan
for the fall and spring semesters,
write down the "Total Aid" under the Total column.
Otherwise, write down
"Total Aid" under the fall or spring column.
If you request a loan
for both the fall and spring semesters,
you will receive two equal disbursements.
The first disbursement
will be credited on the fall tuition bill
and the second disbursement
will be credited on the spring tuition bill.
The lower half of the Student Aid Summary
lists your student's billable and non-billable expenses.
Write down the "Estimated Total Cost of Attendance"
under the fall, spring, or total column.
For the purpose of this demonstration,
I'm going to use $13,400 as the Total Aid
and $32,200 for the Estimated Total Cost of Attendance.
Now we need to open up
the Parent PLUS Worksheet -
there's a link on the same page as this video.
You'll need Adobe Reader to open the worksheet.
If you don't have it, you can download it
for free at get.adobe.com/reader
The first thing we want to figure out is
our Maximum Loan Eligibility.
The Maximum Loan Eligibility is simply
the maximum amount of the PLUS Loan
that you are eligible to borrow.
The important thing to remember though
is that you may not actually need to borrow the maximum amount.
Ok, let's open the worksheet
and figure out what our
Maximum Loan Eligibility is.
For the moment,
we're only going to work with Part One.
From the Student Aid Summary,
we wrote down that the
Estimated Total Cost of Attendance was $32,200.
I'm going to write in $32,200 in this first line
while you write in your number.
And let's do the same for the Total Aid.
Then, subtract the Total Aid from
the Estimated Total Cost of Attendance.
$18,800 is my Maximum Loan Eligibility.
Part 2 of the Parent PLUS Worksheet
may or may not be relevant to you,
depending on whether you plan to
contribute any out-of-pocket funds.
I'm going to carry over the $18,800 from Part 1
and write in the $2,000
I'm going to pay out-of-pocket.
So the amount I need to borrow is $16,800.
Part 3 of the worksheet is
accounting for the origination fee
in the amount to borrow.
To do that you
divide the Amount Needed to Borrow by .95796.
In rounding up to the nearest dollar,
the amount I need to request to borrow is $17,538.
To quickly recap,
we arrived at this figure by
subtracting the Total Aid from the Estimated Cost of Attendance
to determine the Maximum Loan Eligibility.
Then we subtracted any personal contributions from
the Max Loan Eligibility
to get the Amount Needed to Borrow.
Then we divided that by the origination fee percentage.
This final number is what you'll want to enter on
the PLUS Request Form in eLion.
For more information on the Parent PLUS Loan,
please visit the "Types of Aid" section of our website at
studentaid.psu.edu/types-of-aid/loans/about-parent-PLUS
To learn how to access the Parent PLUS Request Form on eLion
visit the tutorial section of our website and
watch the video "How to Apply for the Parent PLUS Loan"