Cost of attendance is an estimate, not a bill
The offer starts with a cost of attendance: tuition and fees plus estimated housing, food, books, transportation, and personal expenses. Only the tuition-and-fees part is an actual charge from Porter. The rest is a budget the government requires so aid can cover living costs — your real spending is up to you.
Sort the aid into three buckets
Grants and scholarships are gifts — money you do not repay. Federal work-study is money you earn by working an eligible job, paid as a paycheck, not applied to the bill. Loans are borrowed and repaid with interest. Two offers with the same total can be very different depending on how much of each bucket they contain.
Find your net cost
Subtract only the grants and scholarships from tuition, fees, housing, and dining. That number — net cost — is what you and your family actually have to cover, through savings, income, a payment plan, or loans. Comparing schools on net cost instead of total aid is the single most useful thing you can do with an offer.
Understand the loans on the offer
A subsidized federal loan does not accrue interest while you are enrolled at least half-time; an unsubsidized one does, from the day it disburses. There is an annual and a lifetime federal borrowing limit. Parent and private loans are separate, credit-based, and usually costlier. You can accept part of a loan, all of it, or none.
Accept, decline, and adjust
You accept or decline each piece in MyPorter. Take all the grants, take work-study if you want a job, and borrow the least you can live on — you can request more later, but you cannot un-borrow easily. If your family situation changed (a job loss, medical costs, a death), ask Financial Aid about a professional-judgment review; offers are not always final.
What the offer leaves out
It does not show how aid changes if you drop below full-time, whether a scholarship renews and on what GPA, the origination fee subtracted from each loan, or how much a year of that loan actually costs to repay. Ask those questions before you sign, not after graduation.
Fictional information
UW–Porter Falls is a work of parody. Every office, person, building, phone number and statistic on this page is invented; nothing here describes a real institution or a service you can actually contact.