Yup. It's definitely somewhere in your award agreement with the school and the school is required by federal law to include it as a resource to help you pay for your education and you are required to report it. Read your award letter and what you are certifying when you accept your package.
If it was a car loan, then it would not be... An educational loan is basically a different animal from other consumer loans in the fact that the credit criteria is a lot less (you don't have a job or an asset to pledge as collateral) and is traditionally not paid until you finish school, unlike your car which is due the next month. It is also referred to as a resouce to pay for your education and goes to meet your cost dollar for dollar.
FA folks and Congress are in the process of tightening the restictions for educational loans because a lot of kids with non-federally backed loans are getting burned by them. There is most likely going to be a more formal disclosure process between lenders and schools in this arena if the lender wants to participate in the Stafford loan program (which they all will give most anything to remain in the program). The feds have the rules in play to further assure you won't default on the fed loan they lent you-- it's to mitigate the risk and keep borrowing to a minimum since it costs the taxpayers money to lend you money in the fed programs.
As for a job... any income is treated as income and not a resource to pay for your education. On the FAFSA you report all your income etc and then by magic an EFC spits out which is essentially a percent of all the numbers-- it is not a dollar for dollar exchange so to say.
My best advice is to work out a 4 to 8 year plan as to how you will meet your actual expenses so you are not left high in dry halfway through your program. I know you all hate the "budget" word so I won't beat a dead horse for too long. Always play best case/worst case scenario. Maybe you can borrow the "secret" loan but if you are denied: have you set yourself up for failure? If your apartment can be paid for with the extra money, what happens if it dries up? Do you now have to move? If you can manage a part time job to help meet the extra expense above the dreaded budget, can you keep that income for 4 years? What happens when you have to go on rotations and can't commute back for the job? Are you screwed? If a parent says "I'll pay the extra" and they lose their job (or worse) again, are you screwed?
It is far better to be able to depend on what you know you can come up with while in school rather than depend on what you hope you can come up with and have it crash in year 2. I've seen it and it isn't pretty and frankly, I can't help you if you chose to spend more or have a car payment, credit cards, nice 1 bedroom in a swanky area etc... My worst horror story was a girl who always needed more, more, more. She couldn't get more from the FA office at her DMD school (undergrad either, I'm sure) so she started on the credit cards. By the time she enrolled in my dental school, she had already gotten her overpiced apartment with a healthclub. I told her to move and that she would hit a wall. She didn't because "it has a healthclub" and added more on the credit cards since all her loan money was only just covering her rent. She charged her food, bus pass, deodorant, flights to see the boyfriend for another year. Come year 2, she was denied her loan... I gave her a semester to figure it out and let her float the tuition to give her time to find a co-signer. She arrived in my office after months and told me she couldn't get approved even with a co-signer. I called the lender and asked "If Bill Gates co-signed, you wouldn't approve it?" And they said, "Nope, she'd be denied." I was shocked at that answer. When she asked what she should do, I said "Leave school, get a job and straighten it all out." I almost fell out of my chair when she said: "What will I do for work?" And I replied: "be a dentist-- you already have that degree." To which she replied: "I'm not licensed to practice anywhere." You could have knocked me off my chair at that moment. Here she was, $45,000 in credit card debt, $260,000 in educational debt. She would be in repayment on the $260,000 6 months out from leaving my school. The moral of the story is: enough was never enough for her; she deserved all these things because she would make a lot of money later; figure out what enough is for you and what your priority really is-- eyes on the prize. Fortunately for her her very elderly (and poor parents) mortgaged their house to save her sorry ass.
I give all my interviewees the same talk and they get it again before they matriculate and most of them listen. I have one who will hit a wall but there's not much I can do to save her, I just hope she doesn't start floating crapp on credit cards...
