Need Access....what is it?

[TheNewGuy]

What is need access?

I am a poor person going to law school in the fall...(my school is one of the participating members of need access)...should I send an application to Need Access? I have already sent in my FAFSA.

[Alamo]

In short . . . a major headache.  I filled out the whole thing, it took forever, and asked for a lot of obscure, seemingly irrelevant information.  Do a search and you'll find a bunch of threads on it.  But if the school you're attending requires it, you'd better do it, or you're likely to get stuck with private loans at exorbitant interest rates, and you won't be eligible for any need-based grants if the school offers them.

[azdezza]

The thing about Need Access is that it wants ALL of your parents' info.  The even more annoying part is you can only view one page of questions at a time (and cannot move onto the next page until the current page is filled out entirely).  What this meant for me is that I would call up my parents, ask them all the info on the current page, move on to the next page, see that it's all info I already know, so I'd hang up with my parents.  Then the following page would ask for info I didn't know and I'd have to call them back.  This continued for another 4 or 5 phone calls.  It would have been much easier if I could have seen all of the questions up front; that way I could have just emailed it to my parents to answer and send back.