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What is SSS Financial Aid?
For some students and their families, financial aid is key to helping them pay for private school. The School & Student Services (SSS) platform helps make the process of applying for financial aid easier. Read more about what SSS financial aid is and how it helps students access private school education!
What is SSS?
School & Student Services (SSS) is an organization that partners with private and independent K-12 schools to provide a financial aid platform. The SSS platform helps determine a family’s ability to pay private K-12 school costs. This service and process helps ensure that all schools use the same methods and objective procedures to evaluate the financial aid application.
What determines how much financial aid students receive?
K-12 schools use financial need to determine how much financial aid to provide to students. Therefore, to determine how much financial assistance is needed for a student, schools use the SSS computations to figure out how much a family can contribute.
The type of information a school needs to determine financial assistance may include:
- Income
- Family size
- Savings, investments, and other assess
- Children’s assets
- Medical, dental, and unusual health expenses
This information is collected on what is called the Parent’s Financial Statement (or PFS). The PFS is then shared with all of the schools the student wants to apply to. The PFS only needs to be filled out once and can be sent to multiple schools.
After calculating the difference between the resources that a family has and the cost of their tuition and fees, schools weigh the resulting financial need against their available financial aid funds.
What are some features of SSS?
Easy application monitoring
It is extremely easy to track an application’s progress on a personalized dashboard
Quick application delivery
Within one hour of submitting the PFS, the calculated family contribution will be available in a detailed student folder for viewing
Fast document verification
The average verification time for tax forms is 15 hours after the parent uploads
Steps to apply for financial assistance through the SSS platform
- Parents complete and submit a PFS
- SSS calculates a family contribution
- School of choice receives PFS and family contribution calculation
- Parents upload tax forms
- SSS verifies tax forms
- School of choice reviews student folders and makes award decisions
- School communicates award offers with parents
Related: Charter vs. private schools
Key Takeaways
Additional resources
Choosing which K-12 school to send your child to can be complicated. There are many choices involved, but we can help walk you through them. Those include choosing between private and public schools, and considering Montessori, charter, and parochial schools. You may also consider a boarding school or country day school. You’ll also want to help your child study for the SSAT and/or ISEE for admittance to private schools. Finally, be sure to check out our guide to private K-12 scholarships. Good luck!
